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Friday, September 11, 2015

Migrant flows to Greek mainland unabated as island bottleneck eases

By Michele Kambas ATHENS (Reuters) - A refugee bottleneck on Greece's easternmost islands has eased after recent dangerous overcrowding, rescue agencies said on Friday, as thousands of migrants per day continue to arrive on the mainland. The debt-strapped country is struggling to cope with a wave of mostly Syrian refugees using Greece, Macedonia and Hungary as transit routes to wealthier northern European nations, in one of the biggest migratory shifts in Europe in a century. Greek authorities this week began fast-tracking refugees off its worst-hit island, Lesbos, laying on extra ferries after a sharp increase in arrivals and slow processing threatened to overwhelm the 80,000-strong local population.


READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT uk.news.yahoo.com