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Dozens feared drowned crossing Mediterranean from Libya, aid group says
Survivors rescued from a deflating rubber dinghy in the central Mediterranean Sea have reported that some 60 people who departed Libya with them a week ago perished during the journey, the humanitarian rescue group SOS Mediterranee said Thursday.
The European charity’s ship Ocean Viking spotted the dinghy with 25 people on board Wednesday. Two were unconscious, and were evacuated by the Italian military for treatment. The other 23 were in serious condition, exhausted, dehydrated and with burns from fuel on board the boat.
“After yesterday’s rescue of 25 people in very weak health condition, a medical evacuation took place in cooperation with the Italian Coast Guards,” said SOS Mediterranee in an update shared Thursday on social media. The two unconscious people could not be roused by members of the rescue team and were flown by helicopter to Sicily, the group said.
SOS Mediterranee spokesperson Francesco Creazzo said that the survivors were all male, 12 of them minors with two of those not yet teenagers. They were from Senegal, Mali and The Gambia.
Creazzo said the survivors were traumatized and unable to give full accounts of what had transpired during the voyage. Humanitarian organizations often rely on accounts of survivors when pulling together the numbers of dead and missing at sea, presumed to have died.
The survivors’ boat departed from Zawiya, Libya, seven days before the rescue, SOS Mediterranee said.
“Their engine broke after 3 days, leaving their boat lost adrift without water and food for days,” the group shared in another social media post. Citing survivors, that update noted that “at least 60 people perished on the way, including women and at least one child.”
The U.N. International Organization for Migration says 227 people have died along the perilous central Mediterranean route this year through March 11, not counting the new reported missing and presumed dead. That’s out of a total 279 deaths in the Mediterranean since Jan. 1. A total of 19,562 people arrived in Italy using that route in the period.
Last year, about 100 migrants were rescued after a dangerously overcrowded fishing boat sunk in the Mediterranean near the coast of Greece. At least 82 people were killed and hundreds more were never found, according to officials. The tragedy shined a light on the notorious, risky journey across the Mediterranean that thousands of migrants undertake every month in hopes of reaching Europe. Tunisia and Libya are two main departure points.
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Shaky Israel-Hezbollah truce holds, but Israeli strikes continue in Gaza
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Trudeau to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago
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Report: Trudeau to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after speaking against tariffs
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will meet with President-elect Donald Trump Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Canada’s CBC News reported. The meeting comes in the wake of Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on goods coming from Canada.
Trudeau will dine with Trump at Mar-a-largo Friday night, according to senior sources who spoke to CBC News on condition they not be named due to the sensitivity of the trip. The sources said the meeting was pushed for by Canadian officials, the Canadian broadcaster said.
Trudeau’s plane landed at Palm Beach International Airport at about 5:30 p.m. local time.
The meeting comes after Trudeau earlier Friday cautioned that if Trump follows through on this threat to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian products, he would be raising prices for Americans and hurting American businesses.
Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico if the countries don’t stop what he called the flow of drugs and migrants across southern and northern borders. He said he would impose a 25% tax on all products entering the U.S. from Canada and Mexico as one of his first executive orders.
“It is important to understand that Donald Trump, when he makes statements like that, he plans on carrying them out. There’s no question about it,” Trudeau said to reporters in Prince Edward Island in Atlantic Canada.
“Our responsibility is to point out that he would not just be harming Canadians, who work so well with the United States, but he would actually be raising prices for American citizens as well and hurting American industry and business,” he added.
Trudeau said Trump got elected because he promised to bring down the cost of groceries but now he’s talking about adding 25% to the cost of all kinds of products, including potatoes from Prince Edward Island.
Those tariffs could essentially blow up the North American trade pact that Trump’s team negotiated during his first term. Trudeau noted they were able to successfully re-negotiate the deal, which he calls a “win-win” for both countries.
“We can work together as we did previously,” Trudeau said.
Trump made the tariff threat Monday while railing against an influx of illegal migrants, even though the numbers at the Canadian border pale in comparison to the southern border.
The U.S. Border Patrol made 56,530 arrests at the Mexican border in October alone — and 23,721 arrests at the Canadian one between October 2023 and September 2024.
Trump also railed about fentanyl from Mexico and Canada, even though seizures from the Canadian border are few in comparison to the Mexican border. U.S. customs agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border last fiscal year, compared with 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border.
Canadian officials say lumping Canada in with Mexico is unfair but they are ready to make new investments in border security.
“We’re going to work together to meet some of the concerns,” Trudeau said. “But ultimately it is through lots of real constructive conversations with President Trump that I am going to have, that will keep us moving forward on the right track for all Canadians.”
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Thursday she is confident that a tariff war with the United States will be averted. Trump posted on social media that he had spoken with her and she had agreed to stop unauthorized migration across the border into the United States.
When Trump imposed higher tariffs during his first term in office, other countries responded with retaliatory tariffs of their own. Canada, for instance, announced billions of new duties in 2018 against the U.S. in a tit-for-tat response to new taxes on Canadian steel and aluminum.
Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states. Nearly $2.7 billion worth of goods and services cross the border each day.
Canada is also the largest foreign supplier of steel, aluminum and uranium to the U.S. and has 34 critical minerals and metals that the Pentagon is eager for and investing in for national security.