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Sicily

Danish cargoship with 100 migrants

A Danish cargo ship carrying a hundred rescued African migrants waits five miles off shore near Pozzallo for orders as to what to do. The migrants were rescued off the Libyan shore by a non-profit rescue boat and transferred to the Danish cargo ship.
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saved, they sing



The African immigrants broke into song aboard a rubber dinghy that rescued them from their unsafe craft in the strait of Sicily and brought them to the NGO immigrant rescue ship Open Arms on Jan 29, 2018
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Italian Coast Guard films harrowing rescue. 8 died.

From The Guardian 7 Jan. 2018
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320 rescued immigrants arrived Pozzallo today aboard NGO SS Aquarius

From today's La Repubblica Palermo edition;
The NGO ship Aquarius pulled into Pozzallo, Sicily's port today with 320 migrants aboard, among them many women and numerous children. They had all been rescued from the Mediterranean in the previous days. Weather conditions at sea were harsh, the newspaper reported.
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Man fom mali

Amadou Sumaila was one of 118 people rescued from an inflatable boat drifting 20 miles off the Libyan coast on a clear, calm morning in August last year. The kind of day for which people smugglers hope and their passengers pray.

The young Malian and more than 363,000 other migrants and refugees crossed the Mediterranean to reachEurope in 2016. Like many of them, Sumaila had never seen the sea, never imagined that so many people could be crammed into a small boat and never thought it would be so hard to breathe.

They were starting to think about death when dawn came, followed by a boat from the German NGO Jugend Rettet. The crew of the Iuventa had come to save lives, but one of its passengers, the Spanish-Iranian photographer CĂ©sar Dezfuli, had come determined to preserve faces.

Once the 118 were safely aboard, Dezfuli asked if he could take their pictures.  Read More 
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Rescue ship Aquarius lands 606 shipwrecked immigrants at palermo, "city of welcome."

From Palermo Today:
Of the 606 migrants, 241 were children, 120 of those children came unaccompanied.
The shipwrecked migrants were rescued in seven operations in less than 36 hours. On board the Franco-Italian-German rescue ship were 11 pregnant women, two of whom were in their ninth month. There was also a week-old infant.
"The extremely high numbers of minors," said Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando, "is the confirmation of a human drama without pause and without Europe feeling shame. Today we found ourselves before a dramatic choice made by members of the families of these minors put in the hands of the merchants of death with the hope of getting them to Europe, which, however, continues to ignore this drama, staining themselves with criminal behavior that produces and feeds criminal organizations. We here in Palermo are quite different from all that and the city with its organization and its institutions make it the "Capital of Welcome." Read More 
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Ship Aquarius rescues 339 people in 24 hours



Translation:
🔴 rescue
339 people rescued at sea in the last 24 hours are now safe on the Aquarius.
The teams from SOS MEDITERRANEE France intervened on 3 operations Tuesday (2 rescues and a transfer to another ship in the night) and on a first rescue this Wednesday morning.
All rescue operations on Tuesday and Wednesday were coordinated by the MRCC of Rome, which asked the Aquarius to move to other vessels in difficulty identified in international waters off Libya.
The Humanitarian Emergency continues in the Mediterranean!
#TogetherForRescue Read More 
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Prudence being taken out of action

As a consequence of a drop in the number of boats reaching international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, MSF has decided to reduce its activities at sea and to end search and rescue operations of its boat Prudence. MSF will continue its presence in the Central Mediterranean with the ship Aquarius, run in coordination  Read More 
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Italy-libya pact unraveling, immigrant numbers soar

From The Guardian
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

Tuesday 3 October 2017 00.00 EDT

A key pillar of the Italian government’s effort to stem the politically toxic issue of people crossing the Mediterranean from Libya to southern Italy is in danger of collapse as a result of a bloody power struggle in the key Libyan port of < Read More 
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Hundreds of migrants from three rescue operations disembark at Trapani yesterday

Yesterday 371 rescued migrants arrived at Trapani aboard the rescue ship Aquarius, according to the online newspaper, Trapani Oggi. They were picked up in international waters in three different operations off the coast of Libya. A portion of them had been transferred from another rescue ship, the Vos Hestia, run by the NGO Save the Children.
Arriving migrants included 304 men, 67 women, of whom 40 were single and and five were pregnant.German ship "SOS Mediterranee", on which Doctors Without Borders are present, were 54 unaccompanied minors and a disabled person.

The migrants came from Cameroon, the Gambia, Ivory Coast, Guinea Conakri, Senegal, Nigeria and other subsaharan countries, but also from Egypt, Morocco, Libya and Syria. They were taken to the immigration "hotspot" of Milo to be identified and photographed before being transferred to "welcome centers" for asylum seekers. Read More 
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