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Green cards, or Lawful Permanent Residency, puts immigrants on the path to citizenship and allows for lifetime residency, federal benefits, and work authorization. Included in the totals are refugees, who are required to apply for a green card after one year of residency in the U.S. Unlike other types of immigrants, refugees are immediately eligible for welfare benefits including Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and Medicaid Green Card Totals, FY09-FY14: Pakistan (102K), Iraq (102K), Bangladesh (90K), Iran (85K), Egypt (56K), Somalia (37K), Uzbekistan (30K), Turkey (26K), Morocco (25K), Jordan (25K), Albania (24K), Afghanistan (21K), Lebanon (20K), Yemen...

Kosovo is Clinton Country: a 10-foot-high statue of Bill overlooks “Bill Clinton Boulevard” in the capital city of Pristina. Hillary is also memorialized in what has become the crime capital of Europe: right off the street named for her husband is a store named “Hillary,” featuring women’s clothing modeled after the putative Democratic party nominee for President. Pantsuits figure prominently. As Vice puts it: “While former President Bill Clinton has had a boulevard named after him, it’s without a doubt that his wife’s the real star out here.” Why is that? As Gail Sheehy pointed out in her biography of...

<p>As China continues to posture in the South China Sea, tensions rise between China, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and other regional powers such as Japan and India.</p> <p>At the defense blog War is Boring, US Naval War College Professor James Holmes discusses recent developments in the South China Sea and the risk of regional conflict.</p>

The seat of government in the capital, Pristina, briefly caught fire after it came under a hail of petrol bombs. Firefighters quickly doused the flames and police used tear gas to drive back several thousand opposition demonstrators. They were protesting against a European Union-brokered deal to give Kosovo's ethnic Serb minority greater local government powers and the possibility of financing from Belgrade. Opposition leaders say the government should resign over the accord and call an early election. ... Kosovo's government has accused opposition party leaders of organizing the violence and attempting to drag the country into "crime and anarchy." "The...

Police say they have stopped a "highly dangerous" group who planned to kill the Pope and praised the Paris terror attacks Four people have been arrested over alleged threats made by jihadists to kill Pope Franics. The arrests, made in Italy and Kosovo, were conducted by anti-terror police who had been monitory a "highly dangerous group" on social media. All four were Kosovan nationals said to have links to Syria. Police said threats had been made warning Pope Francis "would be the last Pope".

Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who served under President Bill Clinton, has died at the age of 70. "V sad start to day; just learned Sandy Berger passed away during the night," Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted Wednesday morning. "Good man & friend who served nation well as bill clinton's NSA." Antony Blinken, the current deputy secretary of state and a Berger acolyte, tweeted, "Mourn the passing of Sandy Berger --- father, husband, mentor, friend, leader and great patriot. RIP SRB." Berger, a longtime lawyer who founded Stonebridge International, a Washington-based advisory group,...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called on opposition lawmakers in Kosovo on Wednesday to stop setting off tear gas in parliament, and on the young country to combat corruption, Islamic radicalism and ethnic division. In the Balkans for the first time as secretary of state, Kerry's brief stop in Kosovo underscored Western concern over the slow pace of progress 16 years after a U.S.-led NATO air war set the former Serbian province on the road to independence.

Tuesday at a news conference in Kosovo’s capital city Priština, King Abdullah of Jordan declared the planet was in the midst of a Third World War.

An Instagram account run by Serbian activists who were posting pictures of Christian places of worship in Kosovo which had been demolished by the region's Albanian Muslim majority population has been removed; the site's administration explained that the group had been posting "disturbing images." Hoping to foil Kosovo's attempt to become a member of UNESCO, ethnically Serbian student activists in the self-proclaimed state created a page on Instagram called “No to Kosovo's Membership in UNESCO.” There they posted photos of numerous Orthodox Christian places of worship and significance, including monasteries, churches and cemeteries, which were demolished in the years after...

Top diplomats are gathering in Paris for a UNESCO conference where they will decide whether to grant Kosovo membership and how much sway the United States will have in the organization. The Obama administration is lobbying to keep the U.S. seat on the scientific and cultural agency's influential executive board, though the United States stopped paying its dues after UNESCO admitted Palestine as a member in 2011. ...

Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic was in the Vatican on Friday [Sept. 11, 2015] where he met with the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis.The Roman Catholic Church "is not rushing to declare Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac a saint," Francis said during his meeting, according to Nikolic. Nikolic told Tanjug late on Friday that he "had a very open discussion with the pope about Stepinac" during which he told him that the Croatian Catholic cardinal had played "a very bad role" in the Second World War. "He (Stepinac) should at least not have remained silent as someone was killing more...

Germany expects to receive up to 800,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, a new record, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said on Wednesday, as he urged action from the European level on the crisis. "This development is a challenge for us all," de Maiziere told reporters as he announced the new official estimate. Berlin had previously expected 500,000 asylum-seekers to arrive this year. Germany, the EU's most populous country and top economy, has struggled to accommodate a flood of asylum-seekers from war zones such as Syria but also from countries without military conflict in southeastern Europe, including Albania, Serbia and Kosovo. ......

A 14-year-old New Jersey boy eager to express his patriotism has been standing on a street corner in front of his house with an American flag and a sign reading "Honk if you love the USA," and he says he'll continue to stand there until the fireworks go off on the Fourth of July. Shpejtim Zenelej has been standing on the corner of Harold Avenue and Franklin Street in Rahway all day every day since Sunday, inspired to show his love for America after he saw reports of flag burning last week. "It's the best country in the world," he...

Battle of Kosovo icon. ...The heart of Serbia, her soul, which was Kosovo, lay here. Lazar’s territory began to feel the threat for real in 1381 when the first Turkish raids in northern Serbia began. The pivotal invasion would come on a Tuesday, eight years later. That Tuesday, June 28, 1389, would become probably the single most important date in all of Serbian history, and the impact of the events of that single day would not only effect the Serbians and their lands, but all of the Balkans and the future of Europe as well. It is impossible to quantify...

An armed group battling Macedonian police over the weekend left 22 people dead and aimed to destabilize the country with terror attacks, the country's president declared Sunday in a nationwide television address. ... "Police have prevented coordinated terrorist attacks at different locations in the country that would cause serious destabilization, chaos and fear," Ivanov said. "The members of the group are extremists and criminals with remarkable military training and skills. That's why we have paid such a high price with the loss of lives." The attacks left at least 22 people dead, including eight police and 14 attackers Interior Ministry...

BROD, Kosovo (RNS) The Catholic priest followed the village elders up a narrow road that curved between the green hills in the tiny hamlet of Gjonaj in southern Kosovo. As the priest, Don Albert Jakaj, 36, emerged from the wooded path, he saw the light gray stone church, believed by locals to be a thousand years old, surrounded by tall pine trees. Jakaj had traveled to Gjonaj at the request of Avni Ademi, 35, a local who contacted the priest to get his opinion on the origin of the church and to validate his belief that the church belongs to...

Tuesday, Sep. 23, 2003. Page 1 Bike Boffins Pedal With General Clark By Kevin O'Flynn Staff Writer One was a doctor from Siberia, the other an American general now running for president, and best known in Russia for his brinkmanship in Kosovo. But now the fortunes of Alexander Pyntikov and former NATO commander General Wesley Clark -- who last week created a political sensation by declaring his candidacy for U.S. president -- are entwined in a company that makes push bikes. But these are no ordinary push bikes: The U.S. Special Forces Command currently freewheels on them, as do police...

(Reuters) - The unification of Albania and Serbia's majority-Albanian former province of Kosovo is "inevitable", whether it happens through membership of the European Union or not, Albania's prime minister said on Tuesday. The suggestion was denounced in Belgrade, where a senior official accused Tirana's Prime Minister Edi Rama of "banging the war drums" over Kosovo, which many Serbs regard as the cradle of their nation and Orthodox Christian faith. Serbia and the West are sensitive to any talk of unification of Albania and Kosovo, something Western powers ruled out when they backed Kosovo's secession from Serbia in 2008. Kosovo and...

Leaving Kosovo: Exodus of young people as frustration soars By Guy De Launey BBC News, Kosovo 22 March 2015 From the section Europe "We are like two million birds in one cage, but we are hoping for a better life" The scene in Mitrovica's 7 Arte Cafe seems convivial enough. Fairy lights twinkle, a mixture of Albanian and English-language hits play over the sound system and the 20-somethings gathered around the tables regularly break into laughter. But the joviality papers over a grim reality for these young people. Kosovo may have unilaterally declared independence from Serbia seven years ago, but...

STANOVC, Kosovo — The extended Cakaj family has built a few dozen homes here, along Tony Blair Street, between the Dubai supermarket and the French peacekeepers base, in a clannish faith that closeness would bring security. But recently the family of Kosovo Albanians has begun to splinter, as a disastrous economy, static politics and a newly created opening in the border with Serbia have enticed tens of thousands of Kosovars to leave their troubled land in search of opportunity and work. “My son had no choice,” said Xhevat Cakaj, but to leave their enclave for Germany with his wife and...