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Europe
7 migrants drown off Italy, hundreds hunger strike in Brussels
2021-07-01
Seven migrants drown as boat capsizes off Italy's Lampedusa

[AlAhram] At least seven migrants colonists, one of them pregnant, drowned after a boat carrying them capsized five miles off the Italian island of Lampedusa early on Wednesday, officials said.

About 10 other people were missing, Luigi Patronaggio, the chief prosecutor of a team leading investigations into the deaths, told Rooters.

The migrants colonists are believed to have started their journey in Tunisia, said Patronaggio, who is working with magistrates based in the Sicilian city of Agrigento.

"This latest tragedy in the Mediterranean is heartbreaking, I wonder what else has to happen to make Italia and Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
understand that we cannot go on like this," Lampedusa's mayor, Toto Martello, said.

Coastguard units managed to rescue about 46 other migrants colonists from the 8 metre-long boat after it overturned, and bring them back to Lampedusa, officials said.

More than 250 more migrants colonists landed on the tiny island overnight on four other ships, local media reported.

Arrivals in Italia - one of the main migrant routes into Europe had been falling in recent years, but numbers picked up again in 2021. Almost 19,800 migrants colonists have arrived since the beginning of the year ,many of them fleeing conflict and poverty in Africa and the Middle East against just over 6,700 in the same period last year, Interior Ministry figures show.

Migrants hunger strike puts pressure on Belgian government

[AlAhram] A hunger strike by hundreds of migrants colonists living in Belgium without legal permission is putting increasing pressure on a government coalition weighing the wellbeing of those involved against the need to stick to immigration and asylum rules.

The hunger strike started over a month ago in two universities and a Brussels church, by migrants colonists desperate to obtain legal residency papers to continue and improve their lives in a nation where some say they have been working and living for a decade.

To highlight their desperation, some hunger strikers stitched their lips together this week, and are only accepting small amounts of liquids through a straw. Estimates of the number participating range as high as 400 but Migration and Asylum State Secretary Sammy Mahdi has used a figure of about 200.

Mahdi has insisted he is seeking to quicken up and improve the whole application system for people seeking to stay in Belgium but refuses to budge when facing demands by the hunger strikers for their cases to be handled now.

``They say that there are 150,000 living here illegally, and the 200 people that decide to stop eating should be regularized individually? What would be the result? A week later you get 200, 2,000, 20,000 people who would do exactly the same.''

``That's not the way to go about it,'' he told VRT network.
Related:
Lampedusa: 2021-05-25 Tunisia 'rescues' 100 Europe-bound migrants at sea
Lampedusa: 2021-05-10 Boats Carrying Hundreds of Migrants Arrive in Italy’s Lampedusa
Lampedusa: 2021-05-02 Over 800 migrants rescued at sea head to Italy
Related:
Brussels: 2021-06-29 Will Saif Al-Islam Run For President?
Brussels: 2021-06-24 Italy says troop pull out could spark Afghan immigrant wave
Brussels: 2021-06-24 Brussels eyes extra 5.7 bn euros for Syrian refugees
Posted by:trailing wife

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