Refugee Camp

DADAAB, Kenya - Hundreds of thousands of Somali children could die in East Africa's famine unless more help arrives, a top US official warned yesterday in the starkest death toll prediction yet. President Obama approved $105 million yesterday for humanitarian efforts in the Horn of Africa to combat the worsening drought and famine. White House press secretary Jay Carney said the money will help provide food, shelter, water, and sanitation and health services to those in need. To highlight the crisis, Jill Biden visited a refugee camp filled with hungry Somalis.

First they ate leaves. Then they ate roots, soaked for five days and boiled until they were just edible. Now many have eaten the planting seed — and their future with it. There is no food left in the Nuba Mountains, so the stream of tens of thousands of hungry refugees pouring across the militarized Sudan-South Sudan border has almost doubled in the past two months. The Yida camp now holds 31,000 refugees and is bracing for thousands more, as desperate families rush to make the five-day trek south from Sudan on foot before seasonal rains arrive, turning the rough dirt road...

INDIA GAUHATI — A fire tore through a refugee camp in northeastern India yesterday, killing 21 people and injuring about 100. A police superintendent said winds whipped the fire into a massive blaze that swept across the Nifingpara camp in Tripura state for three hours before firefighters brought it under control. Most of the thatched huts were destroyed in the remote camp, about 100 miles northeast of Tripura’s capital, Agartala. The camp was home to some 5,000 families from the minority Bru ethnic group, which in 1997 fled alleged persecution in neighboring Mizoram state.

BEIRUT - President Bashar Assad's grip on Syria is getting weaker by the day and "victory is close," Turkey's prime minister said Sunday in an address to thousands of cheering Syrians who fled a brutal crackdown on an antiregime uprising. Recep Tayyip Erdogan's cross-border taunt during a rare visit to a refugee camp, delivered while standing atop a bus and protected by snipers on rooftops, came a day before Syria was set to hold parliamentary elections. The regime has portrayed the vote for a 250-member Parliament as a sign of its willingness to carry out democratic reforms.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon -- Seven Al Qaeda-inspired guerrillas surrendered yesterday to a secular Palestinian faction at a besieged refugee camp in northern Lebanon, offering the first tangible sign that moderate Palestinians might be moving against the militants. But others in the extremist group Fatah Islam continued to fight, and Lebanese government troops battered their hideouts in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp for a fifth straight day. Clouds of smoke billowed over the camp as artillery shells exploded on militant positions.

GAZA CITY -- Israeli tanks moved into the Mughazi refugee camp in central Gaza early today under cover of machine-gun fire from troops. It was the latest incursion in its three-week military push in Gaza. The Israeli military confirmed that an operation was in progress. Palestinians said a Hamas gunman had been killed by Israeli machine-gun fire as he tried to fire a rocket at Israeli tanks. Earlier, another Hamas militant was seriously wounded. The camp, with 22,000 residents, is near the Gaza-Israel fence, and is across from the...

LONDON - Tents, sacks of food, and a replica of a burnt-out village hut appeared in Trafalgar Square yestrday as a tourist hotspot became a refugee camp to highlight the plight of millions of people displaced in Darfur and elsewhere. The display, set up to mark World Refugee Day this week, came as the UN refugee agency reported a record 11.4 million people were driven from their home countries last year. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said numbers were rising again after several years of decline in which refugees returned to countries including...

GATUMBA, Burundi -- Attackers armed with machetes and automatic weapons raided a UN refugee camp in western Burundi, shooting and hacking to death at least 180 men, women, and children, UN officials said. Burundian Hutu rebels claimed responsibility, insisting the camp for Congolese Tutsi refugees fleeing tribal fighting was a hideout for Burundi Army soldiers and Congolese tribal militiamen. But most of the victims appeared to be women and children. Their charred remains lay among the cooking utensils and the smoldering remnants of their former...

DADAAB, Kenya - The bloody conflict in Somalia has created the world’s largest refugee camp, with 500 hungry and exhausted refugees pouring into this wind-swept camp in neighboring Kenya every day, the UN refugee agency said yesterday. Dadaab, 50 miles from the Somali border, is home to more than 280,000 refugees in an area meant to hold just 90,000. So far this year, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has registered nearly 38,000 new arrivals, agency spokesman William Spindler said yesterday.

BEIRUT -- A mortar shell fired from inside a besieged Palestinian refugee camp struck a Red Cross vehicle yesterday, killing two of the aid agency's workers and critically injuring a third, Lebanon's state-run news agency and security officials said. The National News Agency said the two local aid workers were killed near the northern edge of Nahr el-Bared camp by shelling from Fatah Islam militants holed up inside. A security official said later in the day that troops had destroyed the residence and headquarters of the militant group's leader.

President Bashar Assad's grip on Syria is getting weaker by the day and "victory is close," Turkey's prime minister said Sunday in an address to thousands of cheering Syrians who fled a brutal crackdown on an anti-regime uprising. Recep Tayyip Erdogan's cross-border taunt during a rare visit to a refugee camp, delivered while standing atop a bus and protected by snipers on rooftops, came a day before Syria was to hold parliament elections. The regime has portrayed the vote for a 250-member parliament as a sign of its willingness to carry out democratic reforms.

Treated to a hero's welcome, Turkey's prime minister met Syrian refugees Sunday for the first time since his country opened its doors to tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing their government's crackdown on a popular uprising. Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to defend the rights of the Syrian people, saying they were close to achieving success. He was greeted by joyous Syrians at the largest refugee camp near the border. Erdogan has urged Syrian President Bashar Assad to quit and has encouraged the Syrian opposition to unify and present...

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian forces opened fire across two tense borders Monday, killing a TV journalist in Lebanon and wounding at least six people in a refugee camp in Turkey on the eve of a deadline for a cease-fire that seems all but certain to fail. A witness at the Turkish camp said he saw two refugees killed, although that account could not be independently confirmed. Across Syria, activists reported particularly heavy violence with more than 125 people killed in the past two days.

WHO  Michael Forhan  WHAT  Forhan, who lives outside Worcester, returned from the Thai-Burma border, where he was visiting his nonprofit, Burma Border Projects. He started the organization in 1999, after living in Burma for three years. While living in Burma, he founded and ran the first western-managed tour operator in a country run by a military junta that for decades has been isolated from the outside world.  Q. Why did you start Burma Border Projects? I mean, you're a boy from Worcester.

In 2000, my husband and I did a trip in the Air mountains and the Sahara in Niger, Africa. As we traveled around, we just kept seeing people materialize, usually on foot, but there was never any place in sight where they were going, no roads. Everything LOOKED SO BLEAK. The guide took us to the school he had attended, and it was in very bad physical shape and no longer getting government support. He said he was grateful he'd had this education, but now Tuareg children didn't have this opportunity and could we DO SOMETHING TO HELP?

The Rev. Tim Kutzmark, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading, traveled last week to war-torn Afghanistan as part of a three-person delegation studying how women are working to bring about social, educational, and economic change in that conflicted country. The mission of the Afghanistan: Women Making Change delegation is to learn more about the efforts of Afghan women who are trying to rebuild and strengthen their country. After three decades of warfare, Afghanistan continues to strive toward reconstruction, despite the Taliban insurgency and waning support for the NATO-backed government.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip -- Food and water are running low, there's no milk for the nine babies and toddlers, and the older children are terrified. For Khalil Shagfa's extended family of 55, as for thousands of others in this besieged refugee camp, the Israeli incursion has brought fear and deprivation. Shagfa says Red Cross supplies have reached a mosque across the street, but he can't collect them because of heavy Israeli fire. "The milk is almost finished, the Pampers are out, we're tearing up old clothes and using them as diapers.

State Police are investigating hundreds of people who converted Arizona driver's licenses to Massachusetts licenses, according to a police spokesman, and since October the state has suspended the driving rights of 124 of them. Authorities said they have not found national security or identity fraud cases, but immigrants whose language barrier kept them from getting a Massachusetts license, so they traveled to Arizona to take advantage of more flexible options. The people whose licenses have been suspended have been called to hearings, said police spokesman David Procopio.

Witnesses say a surveillance drone has crashed into a refugee camp in the Somali capital. Drones have been used by the U.S. to attack or observe al-Qaida-linked militants in the Horn of Africa nation. Refugees and soldiers in Mogadishu's Badbado camp say they watched the drone crash Friday into a hut made of sticks, corrugated cans and plastic bags. Sacdiyo Sheikh Madar, a refugee at the camp, says African Union peacekeepers came to remove it. Police officer Ali Hussein says the drone was shaped like a small plane.