Almost two weeks after the Kenyan government was supposed to open a new refugee camp on the border with Somalia, the UN has admitted that it has no idea when it will be made available to victims of the famine.

The head of the UN refugee agency said yesterday that drought-ridden Somalia was the world's "worst humanitarian disaster" after meeting refugees who had endured unspeakable hardship to reach the world's largest refugee camp.

Ministers have softened their policy on expelling unaccompanied children who enter Australia to seek asylum, after an outcry from UN agencies and activists.

In a grim echo of the hardline refugee policies of the right-wing former prime minister John Howard, Australia's Labor government yesterday pledged to send unaccompanied children to Malaysia under an already controversial asylum-seeker deal.

The bodies of 150 African refugees fleeing turmoil in Libya have been recovered off the Tunisian coast after vessels carrying them to Europe got into difficulty.

The Norwegian photographer Espen Rasmussen has spent the past seven years documenting refugees and displaced people in different parts of the globe, from Congo to Colombia.

There is always something almost-recognisable and yet at once unnervingly imprecise about the world of a Philippe Claudel novel; something that makes a reader feel as though he is somewhere real, but not in place with particularity. We don't know its name, we don't know the language spoken, we don't know which precisely is the war that has been ravaging the country across the sea, but it's no great challenge to map it on to any number of potential realities.

This second book and first novel from David Bezmozgis lifts off as the Krasnansky family arrive in Rome, preparing for new lives in the West along with thousands of Soviet Jewish refugees after fleeing Communism. Sadly, they are let down by their American sponsor, and bickering, bewildered family members are left in a state of seemingly perpetual limbo.

Australia's latest initiative to deter asylum-seekers by sending them to Malaysia was roundly condemned yesterday, with critics noting that Kuala Lumpur has refused to sign the United Nations Refugee Convention and has a record of mistreating refugees.

The most most reviled policy of Australia's former right-wing prime minister, John Howard was detaining asylum-seekers on remote Pacific islands to deter a threatened flood of them.

Two-thirds of Britons are sympathetic to refugees coming to the country, a survey has found.

Thai authorities have sparked an outcry by revealing that they are in talks with Burma over proposals to send more than 140,000 refugees back across the border. The head of the national security council, Tawin Pleansri, said the government planned to close camps established along the border with Burma over the past two decades and make residents return.

Up to one million Ivory Coast citizens have fled fighting in the main city of Abidjan with others uprooted across the country, the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR said.