More than 70 million people last year were counted as displaced from their homes, a record that underestimates the real number of refugees and asylum seekers, the UN said yesterday.
In its annual global trends report, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) agency described the figure of 70.8 million at the end of last year as “conservative,” particularly because the number of people who fled Venezuela’s devastating crisis is undercounted.
At the end of 2017, by comparison, 68.5 million people were counted as being forcibly displaced by violence or persecution.
The UNHCR attributed the increase partly to surging displacement in Ethiopia caused by inter-ethnic conflict and in Venezuela, where thousands are fleeing every day amid an economic collapse that has triggered shortages of basic food and medicine.
An estimated 3.3 million people have left Venezuela since the start of 2016, according to the UN.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees head Filippo Grandi told reporters in Geneva, Switzerland, that the figure of 70.8 million only includes Venezuelans who had officially applied for asylum — about half a million people.
Overall, the number of displaced people in the world has doubled over the past 20 years and now exceeds the population of Thailand.
The trend continues to go in “the wrong direction,” Grandi said
According to Amnesty International, a refugee is a person who flees their home nation and cannot or will not return due to conflict or fear of persecution.
The report lists 41.3 million internally displaced people, 25.9 million refugees and 3.5 million asylum seekers — those awaiting a decision on their bid for official refugee protection.
The nations with the most internally displaced people — fleeing within their own nations — are Syria, wracked by conflict since 2011, and Colombia, plagued by decades of violence, the UNHCR said.
The group of refugees, it added, included 5.5 million Palestinians scattered across several nations, notably Lebanon and Jordan.
The best solution for a refugee is to be able to return home once their nation stabilizes, but Grandi said that 20 percent have been in exile for more than two decades.
“We have become almost unable to make peace,” Grandi said.
“It is true there are new conflicts, new situations producing refugees ... [but] the old ones never get resolved,” he added. “When is the last conflict that you remember was resolved?”
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS