Italy rescues around 1,100 migrants in Mediterranean

Reuters, Milan :About 1,100 migrants were rescued from boats in the Strait of Sicily on Sunday as they tried to reach Europe, Italy’s coastguard said.The migrants were picked up from eight rubber dinghies, one large boat and two punts through 11 rescue operations in the Mediterranean, the coastguard said in a statement. It did not mention the migrants’ country of origin.Latest data from the International Organization for Migration, released on Friday, said some 105,342 migrants have reached Italy by boat this year, many of them setting sail from Libya. An estimated 2,726 men, women and children have died over the same period trying to make the journey, often dangerously packed into small vessels unsuitable for the voyage.Italy has been on the front line of Europe’s migrant crisis for three years, and more than 400,000 have successfully made the voyage to Italy from North Africa since the beginning of 2014, fleeing violence and poverty.Another report adds: The refusal of some EU countries to accept Muslim refugees is “unacceptable”, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday as Germany called for quotas to divide the influx throughout the bloc.”That’s not right at all that some countries say: ‘generally speaking, we don’t want to have Muslims in our countries’,” Merkel told German public television channel ARD.Backing the idea of a quota system for taking in migrants, the German leader stressed that “everyone must do their part,” and that “a common solution must be found.”A common European migration policy is a highly controversial issue, which will be on the agenda of an EU summit next month, with eastern members the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia refusing to take in refugees under an EU-wide quota system championed by Berlin.Slovak President Robert Fico has vowed he would “never bring even a single Muslim” into his country.