The Hellenic Coast Guard yesterday rescued dozens of refugees and migrants whose boat ran aground on a deserted islet off the coast of southwestern Greece, hundreds of kilometers from the usual entry point of migrants into the EU nation.
The boat carrying about 70 people ran aground overnight on the tiny islet of Sapientza, off the southwestern tip of the Peloponnese, the coast guard said.
The vast majority of refugees and migrants reach Greece’s eastern Aegean islands a few kilometers from the Turkish coast.
Coast guard vessels picked up the migrants yesterday morning, ferrying them to the mainland where they were to be registered. It was not immediately clear what type of boat they had been on, where they had set sail from or where they had been sailing to.
Government figures showed 261 migrants and refugees arrived on Greek islands in the 24 hours from Thursday morning to yesterday morning — a jump compared with recent figures, which had ranged from a few dozen to about 150 per day.
Of those who arrived in the past 24 hours, the vast majority — 139 people — reached the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos. The rest arrived on Chios, Samos, Leros and Karpathos.
The new arrivals brought the official count of refugees and migrants stranded in Greece to more than 58,000.
Last year, Greece was the main point of entry into the EU for hundreds of thousands seeking better lives in northern and central European countries.
A deal between the EU and Turkey reached in March, combined with Balkan border closures to migrants, has led to a dramatic drop in the number of arrivals.
Those now arriving on Greek islands from Turkey face deportation back to Turkey unless they successfully apply for asylum in Greece.
While the deal has limited the flow, people still arrive and about 11,000 are stranded on a handful of eastern Aegean islands, most housed in overcrowded detention camps.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS