Malta

Dacic thanks Order of Malta for charity efforts

BELGRADE -- Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic on Thursday received the Ambassador of the Sovereign Order of Malta, Alberto di Luca, to discuss bilateral affairs.

The doubling of aid to Mediterranean countries to help with the rise in the number of undocumented migrants is one of the main things Greece can take away from Thursday?s European Union leaders? summit on the migration crisis, according to Alternate Minister for Migration Policy Tasia Christodoulopoulou.

The International Organization for Migration received a distress call from a sinking boat carrying 300 migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.

A spokesman of the organisation said that some twently people are believed to have drowned, the BBC reports.

The caller stated that at least three boats needed help in international waters.

French President Francois Hollande has called on European interior and foreign ministers to gather for an urgent meeting after a boat with up to 700 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean.

Hundreds are now feared dead after another boat, said to be carrying out between 500 and 700 migrants, overturned off Libya.

The incident occurred some 200 km south of the Italian island of Lampedusa, according to Italian coastguard officials quoted by the BBC.  

BRUSSELS ? An unprecedented wave of migrants has headed for the European Union's promised shores over the past week, with 10,000 people making the trip. Hundreds ? nobody knows how many ? have disappeared into the warming waters of the Mediterranean, including 41 migrants reported dead Thursday after a shipwreck.

EU Commissioner of Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos arrived in Malta on Thursday, where he expressed the Union’s solidarity to the island nation in its efforts to deal with a growing tide of illegal migrants attempting to reach its territory.

The latest figures of Eurostat, which were released on Tuesday, reveal that Bulgaria had the second lowest inflation rate in the EU in January - minus 2.3 %.

The data show that only Greece had a lower inflation rate than Bulgaria, which stood at minus 2.8 %.

The EU average stood at minus 0.5 %, which is a further decrease from December 2014, when it amounted to minus 0.1 %.

Bulgaria's retail sales increased by 6.4% year-on-year in December 2014, one of the highest growth rates in EU-28, according to new data published on Wednesday.

Eurostat has published statistics on the share of non-nationals of the total population of EU cities.

According to Eurostat data, the share of non-national population in Sofia stands at 1% of the total population.