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Thursday, March 3, 2016

The Latest: EU mulls ID check extension over Greek borders

The European Union is considering plans to let some countries in Europe's passport-free travel area tighten border controls until November if Greece can't get migrant flows under control soon. A draft document seen by The Associated Press on Thursday said the European Commission will make the move on May 12 "if the serious deficiencies in external border control were to persist." Others at the center in Sid said that they were turned back from the Croatian border because some data in the migrant documents issued on the Macedonian border with Greece did not match the data in their passports, such as misspelled or incomplete names or wrong birth dates. Austria's foreign minister says it is "absurd" for migrants at Greece's northern border to demonstrate to be let into Macedonia, a non-European Union nation. Greece's prime minister has called for sanctions to be imposed on European Union states that refuse to take in their share of the hundreds of thousands of refugees flowing into the continent through his country. Speaking Thursday after a meeting with European Council President Donald Tusk in Athens, Tsipras promised to provide "dignified" living conditions for the more than 25,000 migrants trapped in Greece after other countries further north along the migration route to Western Europe imposed sweeping entry restrictions. Tusk says people who are looking for a better life but are not fleeing war should not risk their lives or their money paying smugglers to bring them to Europe. A group of migrants at Greece's border with Macedonia have blocked a rail line in protest at Macedonia's refusal to let them in to continue their route toward Western Europe.


READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.sfgate.com