Refugees

Bryan Buckley is known as "King of the Super Bowl" - he's a prolific commercial director who frequently helms many of the big game's highest-profile spots for companies including Coca-Cola and Best Buy. But this year he'll be at the Oscars, hopefully with some unusual companions. Buckley directed the Oscar-nominated short fiction film "Asad," a coming-of-age fable about a young Somali boy living in a war-torn fishing village. The project originated as Buckley's tribute to Somalis he met at the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya in 2010, when he was filming a documentary for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

BEIRUT - Intense fighting between Syrian government forces and opposition fighters continued Friday around Damascus, the capital, and U.N. officials said about 5,000 people were now fleeing the country daily. Activists reported heavy shelling by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad on opposition-held Ghouta to the east of the city and in neighborhoods to the south in response to an offensive this week by rebel groups trying to remove government checkpoints and seize strategic areas on the capital's outskirts.

Balthazar Korab, an architect-turned-photographer with a wide-ranging eye whose moody, polished images captured the spirit of midcentury modern architecture and celebrated its masters, including Eero Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe, died Jan. 15 in Royal Oak, Mich. He was 86. Korab, who lived in Troy, Mich., died after a long period of decline caused by Parkinson's disease and a stroke, said his son, Christian Korab. A refugee from Communist-controlled Hungary, Korab came to the United States in 1955 and found work as a designer in Saarinen's Bloomfield, Mich., office.

ZAATARI, Jordan - This sprawling tent city, by far the largest refugee camp for Syrians fleeing their war-ravaged nation, is becoming more crowded by the day, even as operating funds are running low. Winter storms, the most recent of which collapsed tents, turned roads into muddy quagmires and helped spark a riot during food distribution, have compounded the misery for more than 60,000 residents, a number that grows by an average of 1,200 daily....

RAMTHA, Jordan - As a child and young adult, the woman now known as Umm Riaan kept the worn photo carefully tucked away. Maybe the fading snapshot of her as a newborn, cradled in her mother's arms, would help unravel her life's central mystery: What had become of her mother? She never quite believed her father's account, that her mother was a "bad" person, had abandoned the family in Syria when Umm Riaan was an infant and later died in a car crash. Umm Riaan had no memory of her mother, but her resolve to find her deepened last spring as clashes raged outside her home in a suburb of Damascus, the Syrian capital, and she faced a defining personal moment: At 22, she was pregnant with her first child.

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details. Rape is one of the primary reasons that Syrian refugees say they fled their country, “a significant and disturbing feature” of the war raging between rebels and Syrian government forces, the International Rescue Committee said Monday. In a new report based on hundreds of interviews in Jordan and Lebanon, the assistance group said refugees recounted Syrian women and girls being gang-raped in front of their families or assaulted by armed men in public.

Catherine O'Neill, a social worker turned political activist and advocate for refugee women who co-founded the watchdog group now called the Women's Refugee Commission, died of cancer Wednesday at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. She was 70. Her death was confirmed by her husband, author Richard Reeves. O'Neill started the organization originally called the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children with actress Liv Ullmann and others in 1989, after observing conditions in refugee camps in Pakistan and other hot spots as a board member of the humanitarian International Rescue Committee.

ZAATARI CAMP, Jordan - Rumors that four infants perished from the cold prompted an outcry last month at this sprawling site, by far the largest camp for Syrian refugees. Some residents even tossed stones at the military field hospital said to be where the children died, although officials say all four succumbed to medical conditions that had nothing to do with the weather. "These were incorrect rumors," said Ahmad Maaytah, a doctor from the hospital, as his colleagues nodded in agreement at a camp clinic.

The United Nations and its partners are seeking donations of more than $1.5 billion to aid Syrians inside and outside the battered country over the next six months as the chill of winter descends, the biggest appeal it has ever launched for such a crisis. The U.N. has sought more aid for Syria as the fighting between government and opposition forces has continued. Four million people are estimated to need help in Syria, four times as many as in March. At least 525,000 Syrians have registered or are being assisted as refugees, seven times as many as in May, according to the U.N. refugee agency.

BEIRUT - Battles raged Sunday in a sprawling Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus as Syrian government troops pressed an offensive against rebels on the outskirts of the capital. Opposition activists reported at least eight killed when rockets from Syrian fighter jets struck near the Abdul Qader Husseini mosque in the Yarmouk camp, on the southern fringes of Damascus. Video said to be from the scene shows blood-streaked pavement and wounded people lying amid the rubble. The reported airstrike on Yarmouk would mark the first time that the government had used warplanes to target the camp, a densely populated urban zone that is home to tens of thousands, both Palestinians and non-Palestinians.