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Italy’s coast guard, navy, bring hundreds of migrants ashore

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(Last Updated On: March 12, 2023)

Italian coast guard and navy vessels on Saturday ferried hundreds of rescued migrants toward shore, while elsewhere in the Mediterranean Sea thousands of migrants overflowed from a shelter on a tiny tourist island.

The influx of sea arrivals came in the face of a crackdown by Italy’s right-wing government on people smugglers announced only two days earlier, Associated Press reported.

The coast guard said in a statement that overcrowding on two vessels and adverse sea and weather conditions had complicated rescue operations that began Friday in the Ionian Sea off Calabria.

A 94-meter-long coast guard vessel took 584 migrants aboard, while two smaller coast guard motorboats took on 379 and then transferred them to an Italian naval vessel, which was headed to Augusta, a port in eastern Sicily, as migrant shelters in Calabria quickly filled up.

Separately, a boat carrying 487 people, intercepted by Italian vessels some 112 kilometers off Crotone in Calabria on Friday, was aided by two coast guard motorboats and a border police boat. The migrants disembarked in Crotone’s port before dawn on Saturday.

A beach in Cutro, a town south of Crotone, is where survivors and bodies were found on Feb. 26 after a wooden boat, crowded with migrants who had set out from Turkey days earlier, broke apart on a sandbank.

The known death toll from the shipwreck climbed to 76 on Saturday after the bodies of two children and an adult were recovered, Italian news agency ANSA reported. Eighty passengers survived, but others were reported missing and presumed dead.

Italian prosecutors are investigating whether authorities should have swiftly launched a rescue operation after a patrol plane operated by Frontex, the European Union’s border protection agency, spotted the wooden boat, hours before it broke apart dozens of meters from the beach.

Some 5,000 people, walking behind a bearer of a cross fashioned from the boat’s wreckage, joined a procession to the beach in Cutro on Saturday, demanding increased efforts to save migrants at sea.

The U.N. migration agency estimates that some 300 people have died this year, or were missing and presumed dead, after attempting to cross the perilous central Mediterranean route.

The Turkish coast guard reported Saturday that its personnel rescued 11 migrants off the coast of Turkey’s Aydin province after their rubber dinghy burst and started to take water. The bodies of five people were recovered, while a search for other possible survivors and victims continued, the coast guard said in a statement.

Meanwhile, on Italy’s tiny Lampedusa island, an Italian fishing and tourist location south of Sicily, some 3,000 newly arrived migrants overflowed from a shelter meant to hold less than 350. Hundreds of migrants spent the night sleeping on mattresses on the fenced-off grounds of the shelter.

Plans to ease some of the overcrowding on Lampedusa by transferring hundreds of migrants aboard a ferry were complicated by high winds whipping the island, making it impossible for the ship to dock on Saturday morning. Italian media reported that some 140 migrants were then transferred from the island by air.

Authorities on Lampedusa said many of the migrants arriving on the island, which is closer to northern Africa than to the Italian mainland, had sailed from the port of Sfax, in Tunisia, a route increasingly used by smugglers, AP reported.

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Malaysian navy helicopters collide in mid-air, 10 killed

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(Last Updated On: April 23, 2024)

Two Malaysian navy helicopters collided in mid-air during a rehearsal for a naval parade on Tuesday, killing all 10 crew members aboard, the navy said in a statement.

The incident occurred at the Lumut naval base in the western state of Perak at 9.32 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the navy said.

“All victims were confirmed dead at the scene and sent to the Lumut naval base military hospital for identification,” Reuters reported the navy as saying.

A video circulating on local media showed several helicopters flying in formation, when one of the choppers’ rotor clipped another before both aircraft crashed into the ground.

Local police confirmed the footage was genuine.

The navy said it would carry out an investigation into the cause of the accident, Reuters reported.

Defence Minister Mohamed Khaled Nordin said the aircraft – a maritime operations helicopter and a Fennec military chopper – were rehearsing for a parade celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Royal Malaysian Navy, due to be held on Saturday.

Efforts were underway to verify the identities of the crew members killed, all of whom were below the age of 40, Mohamed Khaled told reporters.

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Russia says West is teetering on brink of conflict between nuclear powers

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(Last Updated On: April 22, 2024)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that the support of the United States, Britain and France for Ukraine was stoking serious strategic risks that had raised the risk of a direct confrontation between the world’s biggest nuclear powers.

Lavrov said the United States and NATO were obsessed with the idea of inflicting “strategic defeat” on Russia and there were risks in such confrontation that could lead to an increased level of nuclear danger, Reuters reported.

“The Westerners are teetering dangerously on the brink of a direct military clash between nuclear powers, which is fraught with catastrophic consequences,” Lavrov said.

The United States and its allies say they are helping Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression and that it is Russia that is aggravating East-West tensions, including by issuing repeated warnings about the danger of a nuclear conflict.

Lavrov said: “Of particular concern is the fact that it is the ‘troika’ of Western nuclear states that are among the key sponsors of the criminal Kyiv regime, the main initiators of various provocative steps. We see serious strategic risks in this, leading to an increase in the level of nuclear danger.”

The three Western countries with nuclear weapons are the United States, Britain and France.

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Two Japan navy helicopters crash, one body found, 7 missing

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(Last Updated On: April 21, 2024)

Two Japanese navy helicopters crashed into the sea during a training exercise, killing at least one of the eight crew members on board, the defence minister said on Sunday.

The two SH-60 patrol helicopters were conducting anti-submarine exercises on Saturday night near Torishima in the remote Izu island group, off the southern coast of central Japan, Reuters reported.

Defense Minister Minoru Kihara told a press conference the cause of the crash is under investigation. The two flight recorders had been discovered in close proximity to each other and the probability was high that the two helicopters had collided, he added.

Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) and Coast Guard are searching for the remaining seven crew members.

Earlier on Saturday, MSDF Chief of Staff Yoshitaka Sakai indicated he did not believe there involvement from another country in the crash.

In a post on X, U.S. ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel offered his country’s assistance in search and rescue efforts.

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