Philip Pullella News

Pope Francis said on Wednesday he hoped the people of Lebanon can be comforted by justice over the Beirut port blast that killed at least 215 people two years ago, saying "the truth can never be hidden".Speaking at his weekly general audience, Francis noted that Thursday would be the second anniversary of the blast, which also wounded thousands of people and damaged large swathes of the capital."My thoughts go to the families of the victims of that disastrous event and to the dear Lebanese people.

Ester Percossi can still hear the screams, feel the cold and see the terror in people's eyes.She is one of the survivors of the shipwreck of the Costa Concordia, the luxury cruise liner that capsized after hitting rocks just off the coast of the small Italian island of Giglio on Jan. 13, 2012, killing 32 people in one of Europe's worst maritime disasters.Percossi and other survivors have returned to the island to pay tribute to the dead and again thank the islanders who, in the dark and dead of winter…

Thousands of Lebanese gathered near the port of Beirut on Wednesday to mark the first anniversary of a catastrophic explosion that devastated the city, demanding justice for the victims.One year since the disaster, caused by a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate stored unsafely at the port for years, no senior official has been held to account, infuriating many Lebanese as their country also endures financial collapse.One of the biggest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded, the explosion wounded thousands and was felt in Cyprus…

Italy on Sunday ordered migrants aboard a rescue ship off its coast to be quarantined on another vessel to test them for the coronavirus instead of allowing them to disembark.The Alan Kurdi, run by the German non-governmental group Sea-Eye, is sailing in international waters off the western coast of Sicily.The transport ministry said in a statement those on board will be transferred to another ship, screened by health authorities and quarantined on that ship.This week the government closed ports to charity boats for the entire duration of the national health emergency over the coronavirus…

Venice should be put on the United Nations' list of endangered cities and cruise ships should be banned from its fragile lagoon to prevent an ecological disaster, Italy's main conservation group said on Monday.The call came less than a month after a towering cruise ship collided with a dock and a tourist boat in Venice, injuring four people and rekindling a heated debate in Italy about how to protect the historic city, which draws some 30 million tourists a year."Venice is unique and we cannot allow it to be destroyed even more than it has been already…

More than 250 migrants were rescued in the central Mediterranean during the night between Monday and Tuesday, Italy’s Coast Guard said. A statement said the migrants, in one large rubber dinghy and two small boats, were rescued in three missions by two ships, one from a non-governmental organization. Migrant arrivals to Italy have fallen by two-thirds year on year since July after officials working for the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli put pressure on people smugglers in the Libyan city of Sabratha to stop boats leaving.

More than 1,300 migrants were rescued in 13 separate missions in the Mediterranean on Friday, bringing the total helped over the last three days to more than 2,600, the coast guard said. The migrants, who were aboard 13 vessels, were saved in the central Mediterranean by ships from the Italian coast guard, the Italian and British navies, merchant ships and vessels operated by non-government organisations, a statement said. Another 1,300 were rescued on Wednesday. The voyage from Libya across the Mediterranean to Italy is currently the main route to Europe for migrants. A record 181,000 made the journey last year, most on flimsy boats run by people-smugglers. More than 5,000 are believed to have died attempting the crossing in 2016.

An Italian merchant ship rescued 26 migrants off the coast of Libya in rough seas and others were feared missing, the Coast Guard said on Saturday. The Coast Guard received a call from a satellite telephone on Friday but no voice was heard. It tracked the signal to a location about seven miles off the Libyan coast, a spokesman said. An Italian merchant vessel in the area was diverted and on Friday night rescued the 26 from a rubber boat that had taken on water. The spokesman said such boats used by human traffickers can hold between 100-120 people and are usually full but no information was available on the number that might be missing.

Hopes faded of finding more survivors on Thursday from a shipwreck in which 200 migrants are feared drowned, as rescue ships were called to the aid of more migrant boats in the same area of the Mediterranean. "We are witnessing a genocide caused by European selfishness," said Palermo mayor Leoluca Orlando as the Irish navy ship LE Niamh docked in the port carrying some 370 survivors of Wednesday's disaster and 25 corpses, including three children. Orlando, speaking on Italian television as hearses arrived to take the bodies away, called on European leaders to do more to prevent such disasters and to allow more refugees to re-settle in their countries. After the survivors disembarked, some were escorted back on board to see if they could identify the dead children.

A boat packed with up to 700 African migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya on Wednesday and many were feared dead, officials and aid agencies said. The humanitarian group Medecins sans Frontieres, whose rescue ship Dignity 1 was in the area, said in a tweet that the boat was believed to have been carrying about 700 people. "The team on the Dignity 1 can confirm that there have tragically been many deaths but does not have figures at this stage," one of its tweets said. In another tweet, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said about 600 people were on board, that about 250 had been rescued and 16 bodies recovered so far.

Ships carrying rescued migrants arrive in Italian ports; Eight more suspected of human trafficking detained in Sicily. As many as 5,000 migrants a week could arrive in Italy by sea from North African ports in the next five months unless something is done about the issue, according to an interior ministry projection. The figures, published on Thursday by the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero and confirmed by a ministry source, estimated that as many as 200,000 could arrive by the end of this year. Arrivals of migrants usually spike in the spring and summer months because of better weather in the Mediterranean but the situation is expected to worsen because of growing lawlessness and anarchy in Libya, from where most of the migrants depart.

Italian navy and coast guard ships rescued around 1,500 migrants aboard five boats in the southern Mediterranean in less than 24 hours, officials said on Sunday. All of the migrants were rescued on Saturday by two coast guard ships and one navy ship in five separate operations, the coast guard said in a statement. Three of the migrants' boats were in difficulty and sent rescue requests via satellite phones while they were off the coast of Libya. The Italian vessels spotted the other two while heading for the others. The migrants were all transboarded onto the Italian ships and were being taken to either the island of Lampedusa or ports in Sicily, the statement said.

At least 10 North African migrants died when their rubber boat overturned in the southern Mediterranean while almost a thousand more from a total of seven vessels were rescued in a single day this week, Italian and Tunisian authorities said on Wednesday. The Italian coast guard said in a statement that one of its ships in the area had rescued 121 people after their boat capsized on Tuesday some 50 miles north of Libya. Ten bodies were recovered. Tunisian naval forces rescued all 81 migrants onboard another boat that had started taking on water off near the Tunisian island of Djerba on Tuesday night, the country's defence ministry said.

The wreck of the luxury liner Costa Concordia was refloated on Monday and will soon be towed away and broken up for scrap, more than two years after it capsized off the Italian coast, killing 32 people. The 290-metre Costa Concordia ran aground on rocks near the Tuscan holiday island of Giglio in January 2012. The rusting hulk of the once gleaming-white ship had been resting on a temporary platform since being righted a year ago. In what has become one of the largest salvage operations in history, air was pumped into 30 large metal boxes, or sponsons, attached around the hull of the 114,500 tonne ship. The air forced out the water in the sponsons, lifting the vessel more than 2 metres off the underwater platform.

The bulk of the Costa Concordia cruise liner that capsised off the Tuscany coast in 2012, killing 32 people, will be demolished and scrapped in the port of Genoa, the Italian government decided on Monday. The decision for the work to be done in Genoa, in northern Italy, followed a choice last month by Costa Cruises for a consortium including oil services company Saipem and Genoa-based companies Mariotti and San Giorgio. A number of other ports in Italy and abroad had expressed interest in the contract.

Pope Francisco called for more respect for nature on Saturday, calling the destruction of tropical forests in South America and other forms of environmental exploitation as sins of modern times. In a speech at the University of Molise, an agricultural and industrial region in southern Italy, Francisco said he should be allowed to offer off the Earth without being exploited. "This is one of the greatest challenges of our time: go to a type of development that respects creation," he told the students, farmers and workers in the lobby of the university. "When I look at America, also my homeland (South America), many are now cleared forest land ... that they can not give life.