By The Associated Press
The latest on the European migrant crisis (all times GMT):1000 GMT
Prime Minister Viktor Orban says he plans to deploy the military as part of a crackdown on migrants and human traffickers in coming weeks and blames Germany for the influx through his country.
Arriving in Brussels for talks about the crisis, Orban said the Hungarian parliament is pushing through new measures “that will create a new legal situation at the borders, even more strict than it was.”
Asked by The Associated Press whether the military will be deployed to defend Hungary’s borders, he said: “Yes.”
Orban said in Brussels that the migrant “problem is not a European problem, the problem is a German problem, nobody would like to stay in Hungary.”
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0900 GMT
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has tweeted the photo of the dead 3-year-old on the beach, writing: “He had a name: Aylan Kurdi. Urgent to act. Urgent to have a European mobilization.”
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0850 GMT
Czech police say they have stopped marking the arms of migrants with numbers — a practice reminiscent of the Holocaust.
Police on Tuesday marked arms after they detained more than 200 people, mostly Syrians, in Breclav who arrived on trains from Hungary and Austria in Germany-bound trains.
Spokeswoman Katerina Rendlova defended the practice, saying it was used in a chaotic situation to prevent children from being separated from mothers. Rendlova says police initially gave them the numbers on a piece of paper but the migrants threw them away.
Rendlova said Thursday police will use wristbands instead.
Klara Holikova from the Association for Integration and Migration commended the change but said the major problem is that migrants are detained at all.
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0833 GMT
Greece’s coast guard says it has rescued hundreds of migrants or refugees at sea as they attempted to reach Greek islands clandestinely from the nearby Turkish coast.
The coast guard says it had picked up 751 people in 19 incidents between Wednesday morning and Thursday morning off the coasts of the islands of Lesbos, Samos, Agathonissi, Farmakonissi, Kalymnos and Symi. The figures do not include the hundreds more who reach the islands’ shores each day.
With its massive coastline and proximity of its islands to the Turkish coast, Greece is the main point of entry into the European Union for a stream of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia. More than 200,000 people have reached Greece so far this year.
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0737 GMT
Migrants poured into Budapest’s Keleti rail station on Thursday as police stopped blocking its main entrance, piling into trains despite announcements that there was no service to Western Europe.
Hungary’s railway company said it had suspended all direct trains from the Hungarian capital to western destinations. There was no immediate explanation from the government for the change in its policy.
