At least three die, including two children, in Libya-Italy crossing, NGO says
ROME - At least three people have died, including two children aged 3 and 4, in a Mediterranean sea crossing from Libya to Italy, a German sea rescue charity said on Sunday, adding that it had rescued 59 survivors.
The migrants were intercepted on Saturday on a rubber boat floating adrift south of the Italian island of Lampedusa that had been spotted by a surveillance aircraft of the EU border agency Frontex.
"By the time (we) reached the rubber boat at around 4.30pm (1430 GMT), it was too late to help some of the people," the RESQSHIP charity said in a statement.
"Two bodies of infants aged 3 and 4 were handed over to us," the charity quoted one of its paramedics identified only as Rania as saying. "They had died the day before, probably of thirst."
A man was found unconscious and declared dead after attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful, RESQSHIP said, adding that it was told by survivors that another migrant had drowned on Friday after going overboard.
Many of the survivors, who were taken to Lampedusa, suffered chemical burns from salt water and fuel, the group said. Two children and four adults in critical condition were handed over to the Italian coast guard to be brought ashore more quickly.
The rubber boat had set off from the port of Zawiya in western Libya on Wednesday, but its engine failed after one day of navigation, leaving the migrants on board exposed to wind and weather, the NGO said.
Lampedusa lies between Tunisia, Malta and the larger Italian island of Sicily and is the first port of call for many migrants seeking to reach the EU from North Africa, in what has become one of the world's deadliest sea crossings.
Almost 25,000 migrants have died or gone missing on this central Mediterranean route since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration, including around 1,700 last year and 378 so far this year. REUTERS
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He won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1963 and the National Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale the subsequent year. The Marlborough Gallery hosted two major solo exhibitions at its venues in Rome and New York in 1965, and he was featured in Time magazine. The Museum of Modern Art was one of the first museums to recognise the significance of his work. In 1964, MoMA acquired Sphere 1, a year after it was made. Pomodoro won the International Prize for Sculpture from the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1967, and he was invited to teach at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, institutions where he maintained a teaching relationship throughout the years. By the early 1970s, American art critic Sam Hunter wrote that Pomodoro had become, 'in the world's eyes, Italy's leading artistic figure', producing sculptures that were both 'marketable as well as being serious aesthetic objects'. 'His most persistent metaphor has been to cut away the facade, or skin of things, to get at the vulnerable and fragile inner core,' Mr Hunter added. Arnaldo Armando Pomodoro was born on June 23, 1926, in Morciano di Romagna, a small town near Rimini, on Italy's eastern coast. He was the eldest of three children of Antonio and Beatrice (Luzzi) Pomodoro. His mother was a talented dressmaker, and his father was a sometime poet. When Arnaldo was just a few months old, the family moved to nearby Orciano di Pesaro, in the Marche region, where his brother, Gio, was born in 1930, and his sister, Teresa, in 1941. After high school, Pomodoro earned a diploma as a surveyor, graduating at the end of World War II, when there was a great demand for engineers. His first job was as a consultant in the Pesaro civil engineering department, advising on the reconstruction of buildings damaged in the war. At the same time, he developed his artistic side, attending the local Mengaroni Art Institute, where he focused on stage design. He also worked as a goldsmith. In 1953, at age 27, Pomodoro travelled to Milan to see a Pablo Picasso exhibition at the Royal Palace. Picasso's monumental canvas Guernica, which depicts the horrors of war, was on display in the palace's Sala delle Cariatidi, which had yet to be restored after it was bombed in 1943. Profoundly moved by the experience, Pomodoro decided to move to Milan, where he encountered some of the emerging masters of the postwar Italian art scene, including Enrico Baj, Sergio Dangelo and Lucio Fontana. These artists were pushing the boundaries of art into more expressionistic realms, and he followed their lead. He began creating high-relief works and exhibiting them; by 1956, he had work in the Venice Biennale. Pomodoro became increasingly curious about American abstract expressionists, whose work he had seen at art collector Peggy Guggenheim's home in Venice and at the Paris Biennale. He applied for and received a study grant from the Italian Foreign Ministry, and in 1959, he traveled to California and New York to exhibit the work of Italian contemporary artists and to meet American artists. It proved to be a life-altering trip. In California, he met Mark Rothko; and in New York, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He got to know sculptors Louise Nevelson, David Smith and Mark di Suvero, who were creating outsize outdoor artworks using heavy materials, such as castoff wood scraps and steel beams. He also visited the Museum of Modern Art, where he saw for the first time sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian modernist artist. Later, in an interview with Italian art historian Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Pomodoro said, 'I was born as a sculptor in the Brancusi room at MoMA.' Working from sleek, polished forms like Brancusi's, he sliced through them – just as Lucio Fontana had slashed through canvases – to reveal a complex inner core. At first, these interiors appear chaotic, but they suggest some kind of indecipherable organisational system, like the innards of a machine. Most of Pomodoro's work continued in this vein: He started with a glossy geometric form, such as a column, block or disk, then cut away at its perfection, adding erosions, tears and fissures. He explained that when faced by the 'perfect purity of Brancusi's works', he began to consider the 'outdatedness of that perfection'. 'This was the early '60s,' he said in an interview for his 90th birthday with Italian journalist Ada Masoera. 'We were living in tense and changing times, seeking out new values.' 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