Antonio Guterres: Global Trends Report

United Nations High Commissioner Dept: Among the newly displaced were 800,000 refugees who were forced to flee their own countries and cross borders for safety and security, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2011 Global Trends report, to be released Monday, according to The Star. 2011 saw suffering on an epic scale, Antonio Guterres, head of the UNHCR, said in a prepared statement. For so many lives to have been thrown into turmoil over so short a space of time means enormous personal cost for all who were affected. . . These are testing times. More than 4.3 million people joined the world s growing refugee population last year, setting a new record for cross-border displacement since 2000, says a UN report. The exodus of people triple the number of 224,000 tallied the year before began in late 2010 in the Ivory Coast, followed by other humanitarian crises in Libya, Somalia, Sudan and other places. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.