More than 100 rescued migrants from private cargo ship Alexander Maersk, picked up off the coast of southern Italy on Friday, yesterday arrived in the southern port of Pozzallo in Sicily.
The new Italian government has closed its ports to ships operated by charities in the Mediterranean, saying that the EU must share the burden of disembarking migrants rescued at sea, mostly off the Libyan coast.
Italy’s populist interior minister on Monday returned from a quick trip to Libya, expressing confidence in his decision to close Italian ports to migrants while pressuring the rest of Europe to help the North African country secure its borders.
Photo: AP
Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini chose the Libyan capital of Tripoli for his first official visit abroad to hammer home his commitment to suppressing the mass migration that has fueled anti-migrant sentiment across Europe and brought his xenophobic League party to power.
Salvini called for UN-backed and EU-funded centers to screen asylum applicants in nations that border Libya — primarily Chad, Niger and Sudan — but not in Libya itself or Italy.
He also vowed to help Libyan authorities assert control of their territorial waters to prevent Europe-bound migrants from departing and to keep migrant aid groups based in Europe out of the way.
Photo: AP
“This is the point of absolute convergence with Libya: Block the business of clandestine migration,” Salvini told reporters in Rome after he returned home.
The Alexander Maersk is a container ship owned by Maersk Line, part of Danish transport and logistics A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, and is not operated by a non-governmental organization.
The ship had been floating off the coast of Sicily since Friday as it waited to be assigned a port, the ship owner had said.
Pozzallo Mayor Roberto Ammatuna, who supervised the arrival, said he was happy that Salvini had allowed the Maersk to dock after he had made specific requests.
Italy has taken in 650,000 boat migrants since 2014, but its new, tough approach of turning away ships has aggravated EU tensions over immigration policy.
Ammatuna denied that Italy and Europe were living a “migrant emergency.”
“It’s a perceived alarm not a real one, numbers speak for themselves. In this city alone, we welcomed 22,000 migrants in 2016, 11,000 last year, and this year, so far, about 3,000 people,” Ammatuna told the Sky TG24 news channel.
An Italian doctor at the port, Vincenzo Morello, said that the migrants were mainly exhausted, but that there were a few cases of dermatitis, someone had been operated on for spine problems and another was missing an arm due to “previous problems.”
“They have eaten, and more than anything they have been calm, so even if they are psychologically tired, they are happy to have arrived,” he said.
EU leaders on Sunday failed to come up with a joint position to tackle migration, and are to try again at a summit this week.
A second rescue ship, the Lifeline, stuck in international waters with more than 230 migrants aboard, would be allowed to enter one of Malta’s ports after Italy refused, a French government spokesman said yesterday.
Earlier this month, a ship carrying more than 600 migrants, turned away by both Italy and Malta, the Aquarius, was stranded before it was accepted by Spain.
Additional reporting by AP
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
It began as a satirical online project. Now millions of young people in India are flocking to it as an outlet for their frustration. A parody political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, with the insect as its symbol, has exploded across India’s social media by turning absurdist humor into protest. Memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction have flooded social media sites, where millions of users are embracing the cockroach — known for its ability to survive harsh conditions — as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of endurance. The online movement’s rise has been unusually rapid. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)
HOTTER: While Indians are accustomed to summer heat, climate change has caused northwestern India to warm faster than other parts of the country, an academic said Roads and markets have emptied during afternoons and some farmers have switched to nighttime work to avoid scorching temperatures as a heat wave grips large parts of India. The India Meteorological Department forecast maximum temperatures for yesterday of about 45°C in the capital, New Delhi, where authorities have opened temporary “cooling zones” to help people cope. The weather department warned that conditions would likely persist across several northern regions in the coming days, with temperatures staying well above seasonal averages. Authorities urged people to stay indoors during the hottest hours and take precautions against heat-related illnesses. India declares a heat wave whenever maximum temperatures
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
RSS