Howard Hollem Assembly and Repairs Department Naval Air Base, Corpus Christi 1942
Mark-to-Myth.
• ‘I Defy Any Analyst To Tell Me What Deutsche’s Derivatives Are Worth’ (Price)
This is getting to be a habit. Previous late summer holidays by this correspondent coincided with the run on Northern Rock, and subsequently with the failure of Lehman Brothers. So the final crawl towards the probable nationalisation of Deutsche Bank came as no particular surprise this year, but it is tiresome to relate nevertheless. The 2015 annual report for Deutsche Bank runs to some 448 pages, so one rather doubts if even its CEO, John Cryan, has read it all, or has a complete grasp of, for example, its €42 trillion in total notional derivatives exposure.
Is Deutsche Bank technically insolvent? We’d suggest that it probably is, but we have no dog in the fight, having never either owned banks, or shorted them. And like everybody else we assume that some kind of fix will soon be in – probably one that will further vindicate exposure to gold, both as money substitute and currency substitute. Professor Kevin Dowd, asking whether Deutsche Bank ist kaputt, suggests that the bank’s derivatives exposure is difficult to assess rationally; the value of its derivatives book:
“is unreliable because many of its derivatives are valued using unreliable methods. Like many banks, Deutsche uses a three-level hierarchy to report the fair values of its assets. The most reliable, Level 1, applies to traded assets and fair-values them at their market prices. Level 2 assets (such as mortgage-backed securities) are not traded on open markets and are fair-valued using models calibrated to observable inputs such as other market prices. The murkiest, Level 3, applies to the most esoteric instruments (such as the more complex/illiquid Credit Default Swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations) that are fair-valued using models not calibrated to market data – in practice, mark-to-myth. The scope for error and abuse is too obvious to need spelling out.”
[As Compass Point’s Charles Peabody exclaims “I defy any analyst to tell me what that {derivative} portfolio is worth.”]
Michael Hudson reviews Galbraith’s latest book. Europe’s Economic Hit Men.
• IMF and ECB Don’t Even See Their Destruction of Greece as a Failure (M. Hudson)
[..] instead of an emerging “European superstate” run by elected representatives empowered to promote economic recovery and growth by writing down debts in order to revive employment, the Eurozone is being run by the troika on behalf of bondholders and banks. ECB and EU technocrats are serving these creditor interests, not those of the increasingly indebted population, business and governments. The only real integration has been financial, empowering the ECB to override national sovereignty to dictate public spending and tax policy. And what they dictate is austerity and economic shrinkage. In addition to a writeoff of bad debts, an expansionary fiscal policy is needed to save the eurozone from becoming a dead zone.
But the EU has no unified tax policy, and money creation to finance deficit spending is blocked by lack of a central bank to monetize government deficits under control of elected officials. Europe’s central bank does not finance deficit spending to revive employment and economic growth. “Europe has devoted enormous effort to create a ‘single market’ without enlarging any state, and while pretending that the Central Bank cannot provide new money to the system.” Without monetizing deficits, budgets must be cut and the public domain sold off, with banks and bondholders in charge of resource allocation. As long as “the market” means keeping the high debt overhead in place, the economy will be sacrificed to creditors. Their debt claims will dominate the market and, under EU and ECB rules, will also dominate the state instead of the state controlling the financial system or even tax policy.
Galbraith calls this financial warfare totalitarian, and writes that while its philosophical father is Frederick Hayek, the political forbear of this market Bolshevism is Stalin. The result is a crisis that “will continue, until Europe changes its mind. It will continue until the forces that built the welfare state in the first place rise up to defend it.” To prevent such a progressive policy revival, the troika promotes regime change in recalcitrant economies, such as it deemed Syriza to be for trying to resist creditor commitments to austerity. Crushing Greece’s Syriza coalition was openly discussed throughout Europe as a dress rehearsal for blocking the Left from supporting its arguments. “Governments from the Left, no matter how free from corruption, no matter how pro-European,” Galbraith concludes, “are not acceptable to the community of creditors and institutions that make up the European system.”
“..it is not an American empire, it’s not helping Americans. It’s exploiting us in the same way that we used to exploit all these other countries around the world.”
• The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Yes!)
Sarah van Gelder : What’s changed in our world since you wrote the first Confessions of an Economic Hit Man?
John Perkins : Things have just gotten so much worse in the last 12 years since the first Confessions was written. Economic hit men and jackals have expanded tremendously, including the United States and Europe. Back in my day we were pretty much limited to what we called the third world, or economically developing countries, but now it’s everywhere. And in fact, the cancer of the corporate empire has metastasized into what I would call a failed global death economy. This is an economy that’s based on destroying the very resources upon which it depends, and upon the military. It’s become totally global, and it’s a failure.
van Gelder : So how has this switched from us being the beneficiaries of this hit-man economy, perhaps in the past, to us now being more of the victims of it?
Perkins : It’s been interesting because, in the past, the economic hit man economy was being propagated in order to make America wealthier and presumably to make people here better off, but as this whole process has expanded in the U.S. and Europe, what we’ve seen is a tremendous growth in the very wealthy at the expense of everybody else. On a global basis we now know that 62 individuals have as many assets as half the world’s population. We of course in the U.S. have seen how our government is frozen, it’s just not working. It’s controlled by the big corporations and they’ve really taken over. They’ve understood that the new market, the new resource, is the U.S. and Europe, and the incredibly awful things that have happened to Greece and Ireland and Iceland, are now happening here in the U.S. We’re seeing this situation where we can have what statistically shows economic growth, and at the same time increased foreclosures on homes and unemployment.
van Gelder : Is this the same kind of dynamic about debt that leads to emergency managers who then turn over the reins of the economy to private enterprises? The same thing that you are seeing in third-world countries?
Perkins : Yes, when I was an economic hit man, one of the things that we did, we raised these huge loans for these countries, but the money never actually went to the countries, it went to our own corporations to build infrastructure in those countries. And when the countries could not pay off their debt, we insisted that they privatize their water systems, their sewage systems, their electric systems. Now we’re seeing that same thing happen in the United States. Flint, Michigan, is a very good example of that. This is not a U.S. empire, it’s a corporate empire protected and supported by the U.S. military and the CIA. But it is not an American empire, it’s not helping Americans. It’s exploiting us in the same way that we used to exploit all these other countries around the world.
“..easily exceeding the overvaluation observed at the 2000 and 2007 pre-crash extremes.”
• Median S&P 500 Stock Is More Overvalued Than At Any Point In History (Hussman)
“In the ruin of all collapsed booms is to be found the work of men who bought property at prices they knew perfectly well were fictitious, but who were willing to pay such prices simply because they knew that some still greater fool could be depended on to take the property off their hands and leave them with a profit.” – Chicago Tribune, April 1890
[..] I’ve noted before that while the bubble peak in 2000 was the most extreme level of valuation in history on a capitalization-weighted basis, the recent speculative episode has actually exceeded that bubble from the standpoint of speculation in individual stocks. The most reliable measures of individual stock valuation we’ve found are based on formal discounted cash flow considerations, but among publicly-available measures we’ve evaluated, price/revenue ratios are better correlated with actual subsequent returns than price/earnings ratios (though normalized profit margins and other factors are obviously necessary to make cross-sectional comparisons).
The chart below shows the median price/revenue ratio across all S&P 500 components, in data since 1986. I should note that from a long-term perspective, the valuation levels we observed in 1986 are actually close to very long-term historical norms over the past century, as the pre-bubble norm for the market price/revenue ratio is just 0.8 in data since 1940. With the exception of 1986, and the 1987, 1990 and 2009 lows, which were moderately but not severely below longer-term historical norms, every point in this chart is “above average” from the standpoint the longer historical record. Presently, the median stock in the S&P 500 is more overvalued than at any point in U.S. history, easily exceeding the overvaluation observed at the 2000 and 2007 pre-crash extremes.
Unstoppable. There’s not enough fingers for al the holes in the dikes.
• TARGET2 Shows Europe’s Banking Crisis Is Escalating Again – Fast (Gerifa)
Problems of Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, Monte dei Paschi and other German, Italian and Spanish banks are not the only concern of the European Banking System. Trouble is much deeper than it is thought because there is a systemic imbalance that has been increasing for almost ten years. Politicians do not want to tell us the truth, but soon we will experience the same crisis in the Monetary Union as we did in 2012. The extent of the problems in the European Banking System is TARGET2 and its balances of the National Central Banks of the Eurosystem. These balances, or rather imbalances, reflect the direction of the capital flight. And there is only one way: from Southern Europe into Germany. After Draghi’s famous words “I do whatever it takes to save the euro”, things seemed to improve; however, since January 2015 problems have been escalating again.
TARGET2, (i.e. Trans-European Automated Real-Time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System), is a clearing system which allows commercial banks in Europe to conduct payment transactions in the euro through National Central Banks (NCB) and the European Central Bank (ECB).
The excess money flow from banks in one country to banks in another country has to be compensated for. It can be done with loans or so called interbank lending. If there is no compensation from the interbank market (because banks do not trust each other any more) then country A has a liability and country B has a claim and compensation comes from the ECB. Therefore TARGET2 balances are net claims and liabilities of the euro area NCBs vis-a-vis the ECB. As long as the interbank money market in Europe functioned correctly, balances were relatively stable. Excess money that flows from Greece to Germany was compensated for with the purchase of Greek bonds or by interbank lending. However, after the crisis in the Euro Area, banks have stopped lending each other money and the compensation has to be provided by the central bank.
As the Euro Crisis Monitor shows, on the basis of the ECB data, the money is going now to Germany and also to Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Finland, while all other national banks have increasing liabilities! The worst situation is in Spain and Italy who are now close to the 2012 negative records. The current imbalance, or the excessive flow of money from Southern Europe to Northern Europe is not related to the trade balance deficit. Spain and Italy have managed to reduce their trade balance deficits. We hope clients from Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena have not moved their money to Deutsche Bank. The Greek balance seems to be improving, but it is due to capital control: banks in Greece are limited in using the system.
The only game is leaving town.
• US Stock Buyback Plans Drop To 5 Year Low (ZH)
The value of stock buyback announcements from U.S. companies slowed to its lowest level in nearly five years, dropping to a fresh nine quarter low, TrimTabs Investment Research said on Monday, potentially jeopardizing one of the main drivers of the rising stock market. TrimTabs calculated that buybacks rebounded to $59.9 billion in September from a 3.5 year low of $21.5 billion in August, but two-thirds of last month’s volume was due to a single buyback by Microsoft. The 39 buybacks rolled out last month was the lowest number in a month since January 2011. “Buybacks have been trending lower for the past two years, which is a cautionary longer-term signal for U.S. equities,” said Winston Chua, analyst at TrimTabs. “Along with central bank asset purchases, buybacks have been a key pillar of support for the bull market.”
Somewhat surprisingly, the decline in buybacks takes place even as corporations issue record amounts of debt which in previous years was largely put toward stock repurchases but is increasingly going to fund maturing debt due to a rising rollover cliff in the coming year. “The U.S. stock market isn’t likely to get as much of a boost from buybacks as it did in recent years,” noted Chua. “Apart from big tech firms and the too-big-to-fails, fewer companies seem willing to use lots of cash to support share prices. One month ago, David Santschi, CEO of TrimTabs, warned that “buyback activity has been disappointing in earnings season”, a trend that has persisted in the coming weeks. “The reluctance to pull the trigger on share repurchases suggests corporate leaders are becoming less enthusiastic about what they see ahead.”
As car sales are already under threat.
• Subprime Auto-Loan Backed Securities Turn Toxic (WS)
In the subprime auto loan market, things are turning ugly as delinquencies and losses have begun soaring. Specialized lenders – a couple of big ones, and a whole slew of small ones that service the lower end of the subprime market – slice and dice these loans, repackage them into auto-loan backed securities (auto ABS), and sell them to investors, such as yield-hungry pension funds. Delinquencies of 60 days and higher among subprime auto ABS increased by 22% year-over-year in August, Fitch Ratings reported on Friday – now amounting to 4.9% of the outstanding balances that Fitch tracks and rates. And subprime annualized losses increased by 27% year-over-year, reaching 8.9% of the outstanding balances of auto ABS.
Even delinquencies among prime borrowers are rising, with delinquencies of 60 days or more increasing by 17% from a year ago, and annualized losses by 11%, though they’re still relatively tame at 0.4% and 0.6% respectively of the balances outstanding. And according to Fitch, the toxicity level in the subprime auto ABS space isgoing to rise, with “subprime auto losses to pierce 10% by year-end.” Total auto loan balances, both subprime and prime – given the soaring prices of cars, the stretched terms of the loans, and the ballooning loan-to-value ratios – have been skyrocketing, up 46% from the first quarter in 2011 through the second quarter in 2016, when they hit $1.07 trillion:
“..taking into account this tension (in relations) in general … the Russian side considers it impossible for the current state of things to last any longer.”
• Putin Suspends Plutonium Cleanup Accord With US Citing ‘Unfriendly’ Acts (R.)
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday suspended an agreement with the United States for disposal of weapons-grade plutonium because of “unfriendly” acts by Washington, the Kremlin said. A Kremlin spokesman said Putin had signed a decree suspending the 2010 agreement under which each side committed to destroy tonnes of weapons-grade material because Washington had not been implementing it and because of current tensions in relations. The two former Cold War adversaries are at loggerheads over a raft of issues including Ukraine, where Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and supports pro-Moscow separatists, and the conflict in Syria.
The deal, signed in 2000 but which did not come into force until 2010, was being suspended due to “the emergence of a threat to strategic stability and as a result of unfriendly actions by the United States of America towards the Russian Federation”, the preamble to the decree said. It also said that Washington had failed “to ensure the implementation of its obligations to utilize surplus weapons-grade plutonium”. The 2010 agreement, signed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called on each side to dispose of 34 tonnes of plutonium by burning in nuclear reactors. Clinton said at the time that that was enough material to make almost 17,000 nuclear weapons.
Both sides then viewed the deal as a sign of increased cooperation between the two former adversaries toward a joint goal of nuclear non-proliferation. “For quite a long time, Russia had been implementing it (the agreement) unilaterally,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with journalists on Monday. “Now, taking into account this tension (in relations) in general … the Russian side considers it impossible for the current state of things to last any longer.”
Dilbert creator Scott Adams was apparently “shadowbanned” by Twitter in the aftermath of this post for asking his followers for examples of Clinton supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supports in public.
• Predictable Presidential Temperament (Scott Adams)
Do you remember the time someone insulted Donald Trump and then Trump punched him in the nose? Neither do I. Because nothing like that has ever happened. Instead, people attack Donald Trump with words (often) and he attacks them back with words. See if the following pattern looks familiar: 1. Person A insults Trump with words. Trump insults back with words. 2. Person B mentions some sort of scandal about Trump. Trump mentions some sort of scandal about Person B. 3. Person C endorses Trump (even if they publicly feuded before) and Trump immediately says something nice about Person C. The feud is instantly over. See the pattern? Consider how many times you have seen the pattern repeat with Trump. It seems endless. And consistent.
Trump replies to critics with proportional force. His reaction is as predictable as night following day. The exceptions are his jokey comments about roughing up protesters at his rallies. The rally-goers recognize it as entertainment. I won’t defend his jokes at rallies except to say that it isn’t a temperament problem when you say something as a joke and people recognize it as such. (We see his rally joke-comments out of context on news coverage so they look worse.) What we have in Trump is the world’s most consistent pattern of behavior. For starters, he only responds to the professional critics, such as the media and other politicians. When Trump responded to the Khan family and to Miss Universe’s attacks, they had entered the political arena.
As far as I know, private citizens – even those critical of Trump – have never experienced a personal counter-attack. Trump limits his attacks to the folks in the cage fight with him. And when Trump counter-attacks, he always responds with equal measure. Words are met with words and scandal mentions are met with scandal mentions. (And maybe a few words.) But always proportionate and immediate. Does any of that sound dangerous? What if Trump acted this way to our allies and our adversaries? What then? Answer: Nothing Our allies won’t insult Trump, and they won’t publicly mention any his alleged scandals. They will respect the office of the President of the United States no matter what they think of Trump.
“Avoidance” is already a leading, and therefore unfortunate, term.
• When It Comes to Tax Avoidance, Donald Trump’s Just a Small Fry (NYT)
Not paying taxes “makes me smart,” Donald J. Trump said last week. His surrogates called him “a genius” for his recently revealed tax avoidance strategies. Well, if they are right, the executives running corporate America are absolute virtuosos. An exhaustive study being released on Tuesday by a group of researchers shows in detail how Fortune 500 companies have managed to shelter trillions of dollars in profits offshore from being taxed. Mr. Trump’s efforts pale by comparison. Worse, the companies have managed to hide many of their tax havens completely, in many cases reporting different numbers to different government agencies to obfuscate exactly how they’ve avoided Uncle Sam. And, yes, it is all legal.
The immediate response from many readers may be ire for the companies avoiding taxes — or for Mr. Trump. But that’s not the goal of this particular column. In this case, that kind of thinking may even be counterproductive. Instead, the study — which notes that 58 Fortune 500 companies would owe $212 billion in additional federal taxes, “equal to the entire state budgets of California, Virginia and Indiana combined,” if they were taxed properly — should be a five-alarm call to voters and lawmakers to finally fix the tax system. If all the attention on Mr. Trump’s tax bill (or lack of one) isn’t enough to inspire a complete rewrite of the tax code, this study may be. The authors of the report, which include the U.S. PIRG Education Fund and Citizens for Tax Justice, combed through the filings of the Fortune 500 for 2015 and found an astonishing 73% “maintained subsidiaries in offshore tax havens.”
Maybe it is to be expected. Companies and individuals complain bitterly that taxes are too high and the rules too complicated, but many corporations and the wealthiest members of our society have found ways to make the tax code work for them. If all the Fortune 500 companies paid taxes on their sheltered profits, the researchers tallied, the government would receive a whopping $717.8 billion windfall. To put that number in context, the 2015 federal budget deficit was $438 billion. However, fixing our corporate tax system alone isn’t the answer to reducing our red ink; it might only be a drop in the bucket given that our total federal debt is nearing $20 trillion.
Government bails out bank with taxpayers money, which then goes and fires taxpayers. What’s wrong with this picture?
• ING Announces 7,000 Job Cuts As Unions Condemn ‘Horror Show’ (G.)
ING’s plans to shed 7,000 jobs and invest in its digital platforms to make annual savings of €900m by 2021 has drawn swift criticism of the Netherlands’ largest financial services company from unions. The layoffs represent slightly less than 12% of ING’s 52,000 workforce, because nearly 1,000 are expected to come at suppliers rather than at the bank itself. But they are the heaviest since 2009, when ING was forced to restructure and spin off its insurance activities after receiving a state bailout during the financial crisis. Unions were highly critical.
“I don’t think this was the intention of the [government] when it kept ING afloat with bailout money,” Ike Wiersinga of the Dutch union CNV said. In Belgium, where the number of jobs lost will be highest, labour leader Herman Vanderhaegen called the decision a “horror show” and said workers would strike on Friday 7 October. Although other large banks have announced mass layoffs at branch offices in the past year to boost profitability, ING said the job cuts were partly to combine technology platforms and risk-control centres, as well to help it to contend with regulatory burdens and low interest rates.
Race is an invention to justify terrorizing groups of people.
• Why Biologists Don’t Believe In Race (BBG)
Race is perhaps the worst idea ever to come out of science. Scientists were responsible for officially dividing human beings into Europeans, Africans, Asians and Native Americans and promoting these groups as sub-species or separate species altogether. That happened back in the 18th century, but the division lends the feel of scientific legitimacy to the prejudice that haunts the 21st. Racial tension proved a major point of contention in the first 2016 presidential debate, and yet just days before, scientists announced they’d used wide-ranging samples of DNA to add new detail to the consensus story that we all share a relatively recent common origin in Africa.
While many human species and sub-species once roamed the planet, there’s abundant evidence that beyond a small genetic contribution from Neanderthals and a couple of other sub-species, only one branch of humanity survived to the present day. Up for grabs was whether modern non-Africans stemmed from one or more migrations out of Africa. The newest data suggests there was a single journey – that sometime between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago, a single population of humans left Africa and went on to settle in Asia, Europe, the Americas, the South Pacific, and everywhere else. But this finding amounts to just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on a scientific view that long ago rendered notion of human races obsolete.
“We never use the term ‘race,’ ” said Harvard geneticist Swapan Mallick, an author on one of the papers revealing the latest DNA-based human story. “We’re all part of the tapestry of humanity, and it’s interesting to see how we got where we are.” That’s not to deny that people vary in skin color and other visible traits. Whether you’re dark or light, lanky or stocky depends in part on the sunlight intensity and climate in the regions where your ancestors lived. Nor is it to deny that racism exists – but in large part, it reflects a misinterpretation of those superficial characteristics. “There is a profound misunderstanding of what race really is,” Harvard anthropology professor Daniel Lieberman said at an event the night after the presidential debate. “Race is a scientifically indefensible concept with no biological basis as applied to humans.”
Titanic and the Deckchairs. Nice name for a band. But with this I’m more convinced than ever that we will need to put the death penalty on killing elephants and lions and many other species. And we have to put our armies to good use, ours, not that of the military-industrial complex. Mankind will not survive with the natural world that gave birth to it, thoroughly decimated. And if you doubt that, ask yourself why on earth we should take the chance. And have our children know the most iconic animals on earth only from photos from the past.
• Bid For Strongest Protection For All African Elephants Defeated At Summit (G.)
A bid to give the highest level of international legal protection to all African elephants was defeated on Monday at a global wildlife summit. The EU played a pivotal role in blocking the proposal, which was fought over by rival groups of African nations. But the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), meeting this week in Johannesburg, passed other new measures for elephants that conservationists say will add vital protection. All 182 nations agreed for the first time that legal ivory markets within nations must be closed. Separately, a process that could allow one-off sales of ivory stockpiles was killed and tougher measures to deal with nations failing to control poached ivory were agreed.
More than 140,000 of Africa’s savannah elephants were killed for their ivory between 2007 and 2014, wiping out almost a third of their population, and one elephant is still being killed by poachers every 15 minutes on average. The price of ivory has soared threefold since 2009, leading conservationists to fear the survival of the species is at risk. The acrimonious debate over elephant poaching has split African countries. Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, which host about a third of all remaining elephants, have stable or increasing populations. They argue passionately that elephant numbers are also suffering from loss of habitat and killings by farmers and that they can only be protected by making money from ivory sales and trophy hunting.
[..] Kelvin Alie, at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said the failure to put all elephants on appendix one was a disaster: “This is a tragedy for elephants. At a time when we are seeing such a dramatic increase in the slaughter of elephants for ivory, now was the time for the global community to step up and say no more.”
FIghting rages across Afghanistan as we speak. It has ever since ‘western interests’ invaded.
• EU Signs Deal To Deport Unlimited Numbers Of Afghan Asylum Seekers (G.)
The EU has signed an agreement with the Afghan government allowing its member states to deport an unlimited number of the country’s asylum seekers, and obliging the Afghan government to receive them. The deal has been in the pipeline for months, leading up to a large EU-hosted donor conference in Brussels this week. According to a previously leaked memo, the EU suggested stripping Afghanistan of aid if its government did not cooperate. The deal, signed on Sunday, has not been made public but a copy seen by the Guardian states that Afghanistan commits to readmitting any Afghan citizen who has not been granted asylum in Europe, and who refuses to return to Afghanistan voluntarily. It is the latest EU measure to alleviate the weight of the many asylum seekers who have arrived since early 2015. Afghans constituted the second-largest group of asylum seekers in Europe, with 196,170 applying last year.
While the text stipulates a maximum of 50 non-voluntary deportees per chartered flight in the first six months after the agreement, there is no limit to the number of daily deportation flights European governments can charter to Kabul. With tens of thousands set to be deported, both sides will also consider building a terminal dedicated to deportation flights at Kabul international airport. The agreement, Joint Way Forward, also opens up the deportation of women and children, which at the moment almost exclusively happens from Norway: “Special measures will ensure that such vulnerable groups receive adequate protection, assistance and care throughout the whole process.” If family members in Afghanistan cannot be located, unaccompanied children can be returned only with “adequate reception and care-taking arrangement having been put in place in Afghanistan”, the text says.
On and on and on and on.
• Over 6,000 Migrants Rescued From Mediterranean In A Single Day, 22 Dead (R.)
About 6,055 migrants were rescued and 22 found dead on the perilous sea route to Europe on Monday, one of the highest numbers in a single day, Italian and Libyan officials said. Italy’s coastguard said at least nine migrants had died and a pregnant woman and a child had been taken by helicopter to a hospital on the Italian island of Lampedusa, halfway between Sicily and the Libyan coast. Libyan officials said 11 migrant bodies had washed up on a beach east of the capital, Tripoli, and another two migrants had died when a boat sank off the western city of Sabratha. One Italian coast guard ship rescued about 725 migrants on a single rubber boat, one of some 20 rescue operations during the day.
About 10 ships from the coast guard, the navy and humanitarian organisations were involved in the rescues, most of which took place some 30 miles off the coast of Libya. Libyan naval and coastguard patrols intercepted three separate boats carrying more than 450 migrants, officials said. Monday was the third anniversary of the sinking of a migrant boat off the Italian island of Lampedusa in which 386 people died. According to the International Organisation for Migration, around 132,000 migrants have arrived in Italy since the start of the year and 3,054 have died.
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