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.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS