Theresa Maggio

Among the 628 refugees who arrived Pozzuolo, Sicily this morning was Miriam, a 17-year-old orphan girl escaping her native Gambia, who crossed the desert and the sea on her own. She told the Doctors Without Borders her story.
Her mother died when she was a small child and her father was taken to prison and never heard from again. He is presumed dead ecause he opposed the current regime in Gambia Miriam had no choice but to take what the call the Hell Road between AgDez in Nigeria and Libya. At Baransate she was the only girl. "They brought me to stay in an abandoned house with 17 other men.  Read More 

The NGO rescue ship Aquarius was headed to Trapani, Sicily to change crews when at 10 a.m. local time today they received a call from the Italian Navy to return to the Libyan coast to aid two rubber rafts in trouble. Five hours later they arrived and this is what they found.
"As our crew approached the first raft they saw the cadavers floating in a sea of diesel fuel," declared Jens Pagotto, chief of the Doctors Without Borders in charge of the search and rescue missions.. "The survivors remained on the raft with the bodies are too traumatized to be able to tell what happened. It is still difficult to know how these women died."
This 20th rescue operation for the German-French volunteer ship saved 209 people from two sinking rafts, of which 177 were men and 32 were women, including 50 minors. Of the 22 corpses, 21 were women. For original article in French, go to:
http://www.sosmediterranee.fr/journal-de-bord/sauvetage-tragique-en-mer-mediterranee Read More 

Palermo city officials are pleading for help from the Italian national government. All alone they are expected to take care of all the refugees who are brought by rescue ships to the city which can't even afford desks for its schools. Today the largest part of the 1,146 migrants saved in 19 marine operations in the Strait of  Read More 

Here is the YouTube link in case the embed code did not work.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDlIKr3qiKY

Due to favorable weather conditions, the sea was full of migrants on unseaworthy boats and rafts headed to Europe. La Repubblica reports that 2500 of them were saved at sea yesterday and one cadaver recovered from a raft: the man did not make the crossing alive.

Their raft deflated and at least twenty of them drowned while help was on the way in the form of the rescue ship Siem Pilot, according to the Giornale di Sicilia today.
The 366 survivors ( imagine 366 people crowded on a single rubber raft!) were from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Nigeria. 259 of them were men, 82 were women and 25 minors. Read More 

More than 2,000 migrants arrived on Sicily since yesterday, according to La Repubblica. This morning the ship Siem Pilot brought 1,040 of them to Palermo, mostly men from sub Saharan African nations. Among them were 120 unaccompanied minors. At Trapani 656 migrants arrived including a baby born aboard the rescue ship. Meanwhile 496 migrants arrived yesterday at Pozzallo, Sicily,with four presumed traffickers among them.  Read More 

Click on the caption to see the brief video if the embedded video does not appear here.
Baby Manuela was the second baby born aboard the Italian Navy ship Bettica. She was born July 5. Can you imagine taking the dangerous raft ride across the ocean about to give birth?! A baby boy named Francois Manuel was born aboard the Bettica on June 27 2016. Read More 

From La Repubblica:
The desperate crossings continue without letup. Today 4,500 migrants were saved at sea and along with one corpse were brought to Sicily. THe Italian Navy and Coast Guard, with an assist from a Frontex Euro border guards) ship and a non-governmental organization ship saved 4500 hundred lives in 35 rescue operations in the Straitof Sicily today.  Read More 

From La Repubblica:
PALERMO - Noureddin Atta, a confessed human trafficker from Eritrea arrested in Italy in 2015, said that sometimes the migrants don't have the money for the trip across the desert, or they make it across the Sahara but cannot find the money to cross the Mediterranean. These people are consigned to Egyptians who pay around $15,000 per migrant. They come prepared to harvest organs and transport them in thermal bags. Read More 

From The Guardian:
Italy has begun to salvage the bodies of people killed in the Mediterranean’s deadliest
modern shipwreck, in an operation that experts say is of historic scale.

The Italian navy has pulled the boat to the surface, more than 14 months after it sank in April 2015, killing about 800 people who were sailing  Read More