LESBOS ISLAND: A two-month-old baby was recovered dead from a migrant wreckage off Lesbos in the early hours of Friday, a coroner told AFP on Saturday.
The baby boy was taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead, coroner Theodoros Nousias said.
The wreckage occurred when the plastic dinghy carrying migrants of mostly African origin hit rocks on the shore in the Fara area, sources at the Lesbos migrant reception center told AFP.
The migrants managed to reach shore and inform the local authorities.
The Greek coast guard service said on Saturday it had been called to the area at noon on Friday. It found 30 migrants alive and the dead baby.
Two migrants were slightly injured.
Humanitarian organization MSF Sea tweeted on Saturday evening that it had received an alert about people in need.
Its team “provided medical and psychological support to 34 survivors,” it said, giving a higher tally than the coast guards. “Tragically, a two-month-old baby was found dead.”
The NGO complained that police blocked its team from reaching the migrants for two hours and coast guards did the same with another team.
“We will never know if these two hours would have allowed us to save the life of the baby,” it said.
MSF Sea said it believed 16 other people from the boat had reached Lesbos and were now missing, including the baby’s mother.
The Greek coast guard service says it rescued about 1,500 people in the first eight months of 2023, compared to fewer than 600 over the same period last year.
Many people fleeing Africa and the Middle East seek to enter Greece, Italy and Spain in hope of better lives in the European Union.
The International Organization for Migration has recorded nearly 2,000 migrants as dead or missing in the Mediterranean Sea this year.
Two-month-old baby dies in migrant shipwreck off Lesbos
https://arab.news/48385
Two-month-old baby dies in migrant shipwreck off Lesbos
Germany’s Merz vows to keep out far-right as he warns of a changed world
- “We will not allow these people from the so-called Alternative for Germany to ruin our country,” Merz told party delegates
- He avoided critising his coalition partners in the center-left Social Democrats
STUTTGART, Germany: Chancellor Friedrich Merz vowed on Friday not to let the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “ruin” Germany and told his fellow conservatives to prepare for a raw new climate of great-power competition.
Merz’s message to the Christian Democrat (CDU) party’s conference in Stuttgart reiterated points he made at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, saying the “rules based order we knew no longer exists.” He also made calls for economic reform, and a rejection of antisemitism and the AfD, which is aiming to win its first state election this year.
“We will not allow these people from the so-called Alternative for Germany to ruin our country,” he told party delegates, who welcomed former chancellor Angela Merkel with a storm of applause on her first visit to the conference since stepping down in 2021.
Merz, trailing badly in the polls ahead of a string of state elections this year, said he accepted criticism that the reforms he announced during last year’s election campaign had been slower than initially communicated.
“I will freely admit that perhaps, after the change of government, we did not make it clear quickly enough that we would not be able to achieve this enormous reform effort overnight,” he said.
He avoided critising his coalition partners in the center-left Social Democrats and promised to push ahead with efforts to cut bureaucracy, bring down energy costs and foster investment, saying that economic prosperity was vital to Germany’s security.
He also pledged further reforms of the welfare state and said new proposals for a reform of the pension system would be presented, following a revolt by younger members of his own party in a bruising parliamentary battle last year.
Merz’s speech was greeted with around 10 minutes of applause as delegates put on a show of unity and he was re-elected as party chairman with 91 percent of the vote, avoiding any potentially embarrassing display of internal dissatisfaction.
Among other business, the party conference is due to discuss a motion to block access to social media platforms for children under the age of 16. However any legislation would take time because under the German system, state governments have the main responsibility for regulating media.
The elections begin next month with the western states of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate before a further round later in the year, one of them in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD hopes to win its first state ballot.
