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. But he has also committed to reestablishing international US leadership, with "humility and confidence"

As IRC's 2021 Watchlist reveals, this toxic mix is driving unprecedented humanitarian need and reversing decades of hard-won progress worldwide. As our report notes, the 20 countries in crisis on the list represent just 10% of the global population, but account for 85% of those in humanitarian need.

The Covid-19 pandemic has increased global humanitarian needs by 40% over the last year alone -- increasing the pressure on already fragile societies

More than five months after the fall of Kabul, the Afghan economy is on the brink of collapse, leaving millions of people at risk of extreme poverty or starvation. One major culprit: the US decision to halt aid to the country and freeze billions in Afghan government funds.

“virtually every man, woman and child in Afghanistan could face acute poverty”

The organization is requesting more than $5 billion in aid to help the Afghan people, both inside the country and in refugee camps in bordering nations like Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

World Humanitarian Summit attacks 'broken' system Participants in UN summit in Istanbul call for better aid system and new focus on preventing trouble before it begins.

The way world powers respond to humanitarian crises has been labelled "broken" at a gathering of world leaders in Istanbul.

"It is shameful that rich countries are moaning, complaining, sending refugees back, cutting deals behind their backs ... We want to see rich countries step up to the plate, absorb refugees and give them opportunities in their countries," Winnie Byanyima, executive director of the aid group Oxfam International, told Al Jazeera.

In one of its final foreign policy acts before leaving office, the Trump administration is considering designating Yemen's Houthi movement as a foreign terrorist organization.

The move is part of President Donald Trump's and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's campaign to impose more sanctions on Iran and its allies in the Middle East—and to create new hurdles that would make it difficult for the incoming Joe Biden administration to resume negotiations with Tehran.

this designation could prolong Yemen's brutal civil war and drive millions of Yemenis into starvation

Until Monday evening, the Al-Rimal health clinic in central Gaza City was a key cog in the Palestinian health system. Its eight doctors and 200 nurses administered hundreds of vaccinations, prescriptions, and screenings a day.

But then, on Monday night, an Israeli airstrike hit the street outside, sending shrapnel into the clinic, shattering windows, shredding doors, furniture and computers — and wrecking Gaza’s only coronavirus test laboratory.

Sewage systems have been destroyed, sending fetid wastewater into the streets of Gaza City. A critical desalination plant that helped provide fresh water to 250,000 people is offline, and water pipes serving at least 800,000 people have been damaged. Landfills are closed, with trash piling up.

The Biden administration on Monday granted humanitarian protection for Venezuelans, allowing an estimated 300,000 people to apply and remain lawfully in the United States, according to senior administration officials.

Venezuelans in the United States will have the opportunity to apply for Temporary Protected Status, or TPS -- a form of humanitarian relief, which can be granted when it is deemed unsafe to return to one's home country.

This marks a shift from the Trump administration, which had sharply criticized TPS and moved to terminate protections the program had provided for immigrants from other countries, arguing that years of extensions were prolonging immigrants' stays in the United States long after crises abroad had abated.

Armenia and Azerbaijan accused each other on Tuesday of violating a humanitarian ceasefire agreed three days ago to quell fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh,

internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but governed and populated by ethnic Armenians

The Russian-brokered ceasefire, aimed at allowing the sides to swap prisoners and bodies of those killed, is buckling, dimming peace prospects after deadly clashes broke out on Sept. 27..

The United Nations suspended all aid convoys in Syria on Tuesday, the day after a deadly airstrike on trucks loaded with crucial supplies of food and medicine.

seeking to confirm the number of people killed and wounded in the attack on Monday nigh

the attack would amount to a war crime if it were found to have targeted humanitarian aid workers.

The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.

Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.

Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.

he number of people displaced by fighting between Muslim and Christian militias and vigilantes in the Central African Republic has more than doubled in the past month, and increasing violence is making it harder to deliver humanitarian relief, the United Nations warned on Frida

More than 935,000 people have been driven from their homes in the clashes between Christian militias and the mainly Muslim Seleka rebel group that overthrew President François Bozizé in March, up from around 400,000 at the start of December, said Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency.

relief supplies have reached about 23,000 people

A three-day humanitarian cease-fire in the Syrian city of Homs was supposed to be a small breakthrough, a moment of relief for civilians trapped in a grim civil war.

Though few expect the international peace talks that resume in Geneva on Monday to end the war, many hope they will make life less brutal for ordinary Syrians by creating local cease-fires and opening up access to aid.But what took place in Homs highlights the tremendous difficulties plaguing even modest humanitarian efforts, making it unlikely that the episode will emerge as a model to be repeated elsewhere.

The United Nations estimates that almost a third of the nine million Syrians in need are in hard-to-reach areas and that access to many of them has been deliberately obstructed. While human rights groups say the government is responsible for most of the sieges, rebels, too, have tried to starve out their enemies.

President Obama’s campaign in Libya may be the most deceptively sold U.S. military policy since Franklin Roosevelt’s “all aid short of war” policy in 1941. In his speech to the nation Tuesday night, the president described a military action in Libya where the main U.S. military commitment had already ended, where NATO was relieving the U.S. of operational responsibility, where the U.S. mission was limited to protecting civilian populations, where the U.S. goal is strictly humanitarian, and where the U.S. took no view about Libya’s future government beyond a vague preference that Muammar Qaddafi move on. As described, this is a preposterous policy. Fortunately, the president is giving every sign of not believing a word of it.

In fact, the U.S. mission is aimed at the overthrow of Qaddafi. The U.S. is engaged in sophisticated propaganda operations urging Qaddafi’s troops to turn on him. And it’s reported that the U.S. is negotiating with Qaddafi about a secure exit from Libya. In fact, the U.S. mission is as deeply concerned with European energy security as with the humanitarian crisis. Critics correctly point out that the US has managed to ignore many other humanitarian crises – and is in fact ignoring one right now in the Ivory Coast. This particular crisis is occurring in a country from which NATO ally Italy buys more than one-fifth of all its net oil imports and in which Britain has a very large investment. We are not going to war for oil. But we very rarely go to war without oil.

Henry Kissinger used to contrast the Bush 43 and Clinton administrations: “Under Clinton, the explanations were much better than the policies; under Bush, the policies were always much better than the explanations.” The Libyan war takes the Bush frailty to extremes: the explanations are laughable on their face – but the policy seems astute and promising.

uggesting that Italy has continued its long-running policy of paying ransoms for captives.

The two young women were taken hostage in July while working on humanitarian projects in the embattled northern city of Aleppo.

Dressed in black hijabs, Ms Ramelli, 20, and Ms Marzullo, 21, appealed for help in the video, saying they were “in great danger” and could be killed.

"despite the difficulty of the challenge, the danger posed by North Korea is sufficiently severe, and the costs of inaction and acquiescence so high, that the United States and its partners must continue to press for denuclearization." The United States cannot risk "the potential spread of nuclear weapons to rogue states, terrorist groups or others--especially in the Middle East."

spillover effects of possible North Korean instability while insisting that North Korea give up its destabilizing course of action

"any hope of resolving the North Korean standoff will depend on all parties cooperating with one another and being firm with North Korea." The report emphasizes that "Chinese cooperation is essential to the success of denuclearization on the Korean peninsula and to ensuring regional stability."

Russian officials said Thursday that the Syrian Army had stopped combat operations in the divided city of Aleppo in order to evacuate civilians, but residents of the rebel-held enclave reported that after a day of intense bombardment, fighting was continuing

150 airstrikes had killed at least 50 people and in which residents said they were unable to flee because of the intense combat

At the United Nations, the agency’s envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told reporters he could not verify whether the fighting had stopped or whether civilians were being allowed to evacuate

As Spinoza points out, it is “impossible” for a person’s mind to be under another’s control, and this is a necessary reality that any government must accept. The more difficult case, the true test of a regime’s commitment to toleration, concerns the liberty of citizens to express those beliefs, either in speech or in writing.

No matter what laws are enacted against speech and other means of expression, citizens will continue to say what they believe (because they can), only now they will do so in secret. The result of the suppression of freedom is, once again, resentment and a weakening of the bonds that unite subjects to their government. In Spinoza’s view, intolerant laws lead ultimately to anger, revenge and sedition

Spinoza also argues for freedom of expression on utilitarian grounds — that it is necessary for the discovery of truth, economic progress and the growth of creativity.

With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin   c

Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.

The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.

Some 9.3 million people in Syria - or about 40% of the population - now need outside assistance, UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos has said.

This figure has risen by 2.5m from the 6.8m total the UN gave in September.

More than half of those in need are people living in Syria displaced by conflict, a total of 6.5m, up from 4.25m internally displaced people in June.

when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians.

Bogin added courses like antimanipulation, which was intended to give children tools to decipher commercial or political messages.

He taught a required class called myshleniye, which means “thinking,” as in critical thinking. It was based in part on the work of a dissident Soviet educational philosopher named Georgy Shchedrovitsky, who argued that there were three ways of thinking: abstract, verbal and representational. To comprehend the meaning of something, you had to use all three. When I asked Bogin to explain Shchedrovitsky, he asked a question. “Does 2 + 2 = 4? No! Because two cats plus two sausages is what? Two cats. Two drops of water plus two drops of water? One drop of water.”