News in Brief (2023-05-12)

Republicans allege Biden family earned millions from shady deals

WASHINGTON, May 11: Republicans charged Wednesday that President Joe Biden's family has earned more than $10 million from shady business deals crafted while he was vice president. With Biden ramping up his bid for a second term as president in the 2024 election, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee alleged that the family took in $1 million tied to a business deal with a Romanian tycoon when the then vice-president oversaw relations with the country in 2014-2015. — AFP

71 million internally displaced in 2022

LONDON, May 11:The war in Ukraine helped push the global total of people left internally displaced by conflict or natural disasters to a record high of 71.1 million last year, according to a report released Thursday by the Norwegian Refugee Council's Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. By the end of 2022, 5.9 million people had been forced to move inside Ukraine because of Russia's invasion, bringing the global total of people internally displaced by conflict and violence to more than 62 million, an increase of 17% since 2021. — Reuters

Germany okays tougher migration steps

BERLIN, May 11: Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the heads of Germany's 16 states on Wednesday agreed on new measures to tackle soaring migration after crunch talks. In the first four months of 2023, some 101,981 asylum applications were filed in Germany. — AFP