US Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration Anne Richard says the United States will dramatically increase the number of Syrian refugees allowed to resettle permanently in the United States from about 350 this year to close to 10,000 annually as the crisis grinds on into its fifth year.

While the number is minuscule given a total Syrian refugee population of 3.3 million, it reflects US recognition that the civil war in Syria is not about to end anytime soon and that, even when it does, Syria will need years for reconstruction and reconciliation.

So this sounds like a hamburger commercial, but it's true. Using our new Custom Reporting tool, you can easily generate reports the way you want them by following the simple report wizard.

Step 1: Name your report

Step 2: Pick your data groups.(in production there will be more groups than this to choose from).

Step 3: Pick your columns in the order that you want them. You can also so actions like sum, count or average.

Step 4: Filter your data. In this version each filter is using an AND operator. 

Step 5: Group your data. 

Step 6: Order your data.

That's it. Now you have a report that you can run anytime you need it. You can easily edit it to update any values and run it as often as you would like. You can output your report to a PDF or to Excel.

For many communities, it might have been a proud but fairly routine assembly, with pupils coming forward to receive certificates and handshakes from grownups for school achievements, but the recent Education Day, which the Somali Bantu Community Association of Pittsburgh conducted, was a poignant event for people who were largely excluded from educational opportunities in their homeland for generations before being terrorized into exile.

Only in refugee camps in Africa and after resettling to America did they have more opportunities for schooling.

Read more here By Peter Smith / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

UN agency praises pledges to resettle over 100,000 refugees, but urges more help to curb rampant displacement crisis.

Twenty-eight countries have agreed to take in more than 100,000 refugees from Syria, doubling the number of migrants to whom they were initially offering asylum, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, has said.

Antonio Guterres, the head of the UN agency, said on Tuesday that he was pleased with the new pledges but that much more help was needed to curb the rampant displacement crisis in Syria.

"We estimate [there] will be more than 100,000 opportunities for resettlement and humanitarian admission," Guterres told reporters on Tuesday after a high-level pledging conference in Geneva.

He said 28 countries had expressed solidarity with Syrians who fled their war-ravaged country, and with neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt, which are struggling to cope with a bulk of the refugees totalling in the millions.

The world has a debt of gratitude to the neighbouring countries that probably we will never be able to fully pay or to fully express," Guterres old delegates.

There was no clear overview over which countries had pledged what, but Guterres hailed the roles played by Germany, Sweden and the United States in the resettlement programme.

However, the total pledges to help refugees still fall short of a UNHCR's target and the numbers experts say are necessary.

Read more here