‘Live like a worm, or risk your life’: Desperate Albanians plot escape to the UK
In the backstreets of Albania’s capital city, Tirana, there is little light and even less hope.
The warren of alleyways we are being guided along is home to some of Albania‘s poorest people.
It is here Enkileta Ferra lives with her children and extended family.
The house is made up of two small rooms where they cook, eat and sleep.
She points to an outside tap where they get their water and explains it often doesn’t work.
Enkileta’s husband is in prison for stealing metal to earn money on the black market and her children pick through the city’s bins every day looking for cans they can sell.
The deprivation the family lives in is clear, the desperation is overwhelming.
“I want to see my children sheltered,” Ms Ferra sobs. “I don’t want to see them on the streets.
“I want to live well, just like everybody else. I don’t want them to hang around the bins and beg.”
Read more from Albania:
‘We are worthy’ say Albanians smuggled into UK
Man undeterred despite being deported home
The border region where gun-runners and people smugglers enter EU
The outside tap often doesn’t work
Dreams of a tattoo artist
Her 16-year-old son, Kledji, shows me around.
It doesn’t take long – there’s one bedroom for seven people, he says.
On the table is a homemade tattoo pen that he’s put together from rubbish he has collected.
He dreams of being a tattoo artist, but mostly he dreams of escaping abroad to countries including the UK, like thousands of others already have.
“Why do you want to go to the UK?” I ask.
“It is different from here. There are jobs there. Everything is better there. The life is different. It’s not like here. Here is very poor. There are no jobs,” he says.
Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe.
Six percent of people are under-nourished and one in 10 Albanians live in poverty, according to data from the German government.
That poverty is fuelling migration – both legal and illegal.
More than 12,000 came to UK in small boats
More than 12,000 Albanians have crossed the Channel in small boats to England this year, around 10,000 of them men.
“Every day we hear that people are trying to move outside the country,” Arber Hajdari, executive director of the Fundjave Ndryshe charity, says.
“One family needs to go for a better life. One needs to go for a better school. One for a better health centre, one for better work. They pay three or four times more than in Albania.”
The charity supports around 17,000 families across Albania with food boxes, supplies and accommodation.
Its staff regularly hear stories of people paying traffickers to help them get to the UK.
“In my opinion, the youth is the problem. They have a very big community outside Albania, also in England, and they are trying to work together,” Mr Hajdari says.
“The guys who are living in England, for example, are inviting their friends to go there because of the salaries. They [earn] a lot of money there compared to here.
“It’s a very big risk and I think the risk is taken because they can’t get the working visa to go like normal people.”
Arbër Hajdari
£20,000 to send her son to England
In a café in Tirana, we meet Maria, who negotiated with smugglers to send her son to the UK.
It is not her real name – she has changed it to avoid being identified by the authorities or the traffickers.
She looked for legal routes first, she says, but they were all blocked.
“I chose another path dealing with some people that used to smuggle people in dinghies,” Maria says.
Some asked me for an amount of £14,000, then the amount increased to £16,000 and recently it has gone to £20,000…. to send my son’s family to England I would have to sell the house, so I would be homeless.”
In the end, she couldn’t afford the fee and on this occasion, the trip was called off.
Others we met who have made it to the UK said that some smugglers offer deals where people can work off their debt illegally once they get to England.
The ‘Fundjave Ndryshe’ charity supports 17,000 families
Debt bondage agreements
Debt bondage agreements are hugely risky, opening people up to exploitation and extortion and all that after a perilous journey in a flimsy dinghy or hidden in the back of a truck.
But many say it’s worth it for the chance of a different future.
“You only live once,” Maria says. “Live like a worm or drown, because there is no other option, this is the way. Live like a worm, or risk your life. You have to put yourself in danger.”
On Monday, the UK and France signed a new deal to try to stop people crossing the Channel.
It included a 40% increase in officers on French beaches, £8m in extra funding and a new task force focused on reversing the recent rise in Albanian nationals and organised crime groups controlling the routes.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Why are Albanians coming to the UK?
It sounds promising but from our conversations in Albania, it may not be enough.
While a crackdown on smugglers could disrupt the boats crossing the Channel, without hope and opportunities at home, Albania’s illegal migrants are likely to keep on coming.
World
Donald Trump says Vladimir Putin wants to meet – and that he and Barack Obama ‘probably’ like each other
Donald Trump says a meeting is being set up between himself and Vladimir Putin – and that he and Barack Obama “probably” like each other.
Republican US president-elect Mr Trump spoke to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday, saying Russian president Mr Putin “wants to meet, and we are setting it up”.
“He has said that even publicly and we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess,” Mr Trump said.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Friday there was a “mutual desire” to set up a meeting – but added no details had been confirmed yet and that there may be progress once Mr Trump is inaugurated on 20 January.
“Moscow has repeatedly declared its openness to contacts with international leaders, including the US president, including Donald Trump,” Mr Peskov added.
“What is required is a mutual desire and political will to conduct dialogue and resolve existing problems through dialogue. We see that Mr Trump also declares his readiness to resolve problems through dialogue. We welcome this. There are still no specifics, we proceed from the mutual readiness for the meeting.”
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in July 2017. Pic: AP
Trump on Obama: ‘We just got along’
Mr Trump also made some lighter remarks regarding a viral exchange between himself and former Democrat President Barack Obama at Jimmy Carter’s funeral on Thursday.
The pair sat together for the late president’s service in Washington DC on Thursday, and could be seen speaking for several minutes as the remaining mourners filed in before it began.
Mr Obama was seen nodding as his successor spoke before breaking into a grin.
Asked about the exchange, Mr Trump said: “I didn’t realise how friendly it looked.
“I said, ‘boy, they look like two people that like each other’. And we probably do.
“We have a little different philosophies, right? But we probably do. I don’t know. We just got along. But I got along with just about everybody.”
The amicable exchange comes after years of criticising each other in the public eye; it was Mr Trump who spread the so-called “birther” conspiracy theory about Mr Obama in 2011, falsely asserting that he was not born in the United States.
Read more:
Trump to be sentenced today over porn star hush money
The Hollywood celebrities who have lost homes to wildfires
Insults continued for years, with Mr Obama famously dedicating much of his final White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech in 2016 to jokes at his political rival’s expense.
Mr Trump has repeatedly attacked the Obamas, saying the former president was “ineffective” and “terrible” and calling former first lady Michelle Obama “nasty” as recently as October last year.
On Kamala Harris’s campaign trail last year, Mr Obama said Mr Trump was a “78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago”, while the former first lady said that “the consequences of him ever being president again are brutally serious.”
World
‘The future is in our hands’ scientists say, as 2024 becomes first year to pass 1.5C global warming threshold
Last year was the warmest on record, the first to breach a symbolic threshold, and brought with it deadly impacts like flooding and drought, scientists have said.
Two new datasets found 2024 was the first calendar year when average global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – before humans started burning fossil fuels at scale.
The record heat has not only has real-world implications, as it contributed to deadly flooding in Spain and vicious drought in places like Zambia in southern Africa.
It is also highly symbolic.
Countries agreed in the landmark Paris Agreement to limit warming ideally to 1.5C, because after that the impacts would be much more dangerous.
The news arrives as California battles “hell on earth” wildfires, suspected to have been exacerbated by climate change.
And it comes as experts warn support for the Paris goals is “more fragile than ever” – with Donald Trump and the Argentinian president poised to row back on climate action.
What caused 2024 record heat – and is it here to stay?
Friends of the Earth called today’s findings from both the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change service and the Met Office “deeply disturbing”.
The “primary driver” of heat in the last two years was climate change from human activity, but the temporary El Nino weather phenomenon also contributed, they said.
The breach in 2024 does not mean the world has forever passed 1.5C of warming – as that would only be declared after several years of doing so, and warming may slightly ease this year as El Nino has faded.
But the world is “teetering on the edge” of doing so, Copernicus said.
Prof Piers Forster, chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, called it a “foretaste of life at 1.5C”.
Dr Gabriel Pollen, Zambia’s national coordinator for disasters, said “no area of life and the economy is untouched” by the country’s worst drought in more than 100 years.
Six million people face starvation, critical hydropower has plummeted, blackouts are frequent, industry is “decimated”, and growth has halved, he said.
Paris goal ‘not obsolete’
Scientists were at pains to point out it is not too late to curb worse climate change, urging leaders to maintain and step up climate action.
Professor Forster said temporarily breaching 1.5C “does not mean the goal is obsolete”, but that we should “double down” on slashing greenhouse gas emissions and on adapting to a hotter world.
The Met Office said “every fraction of a degree” still makes a difference to the severity of extreme weather.
The California fires were whipped up by strong, dry winds and likely worsened by climate change. Pic: Reuters
Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo added: “The future is in our hands: swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate”.
Climate action is ‘economic opportunity’
Copernicus found that global temperatures in 2024 averaged 15.10°C, the hottest in records going back to 1850, making it 1.60°C above the pre-industrial level during 1850-1900.
The Met Office’s data found 2024 was 1.53C above pre-industrial levels.
The figures are global averages, which smooth out extremes from around the world into one number. That is why it still might have felt cold in some parts of the world last year.
Greenpeace campaigner Philip Evans said as “the world’s most powerful climate denier” Donald Trump returns to the White House, others must “take up the mantle of global climate leadership”.
The UK’s climate minister Kerry McCarthy said the UK has been working with other countries to cut global emissions, as well as greening the economy at home.
“Not only is this crucial for our planet, it is the economic opportunity of the 21st century… tackling the climate crisis while creating new jobs, delivering energy security and attracting new investment into the UK.”
World
Picture shows baby girl moments after birth on packed migrant dinghy heading for Canary Islands
Photographs have captured the moments after a baby girl was born on a packed migrant dinghy heading for the Canary Islands.
The small boat was carrying 60 people and had embarked from Tan-Tan – a Moroccan province 135 nautical miles (250km) away.
One image shows the baby lying on her mother’s lap as other passengers help the pair.
The boat’s passengers – a total of 60 people, including 14 women and four children – were rescued by a Spanish coastguard ship.
Coastguard captain Domingo Trujillo said: “The baby was crying, which indicated to us that it was alive and there were no problems, and we asked the woman’s permission to undress her and clean her.
“The umbilical cord had already been cut by one of her fellow passengers. The only thing we did was to check the child, give her to her mother and wrap them up for the trip.”
Coastguards rescued all 60 people aboard the boat. Pic: Salvmento Maritimo/Reuters
The mother and baby were taken for medical checks and treated with antibiotics, medical authorities said.
Dr Maria Sabalich, an emergency coordinator of the Molina Orosa University Hospital in Lanzarote, said: “They are still in the hospital, but they are doing well.”
When they are discharged from hospital, the pair will be moved to a humanitarian centre for migrants, a government official said.
They will then most likely be relocated to a reception centre for mothers and children on another of the Canary Islands, they added.
Thousands of migrants board boats attempting to make the perilous journey from the African coast to the Spanish Canaries each year.
Read more from Sky News:
Why have California fires spread so quickly?
Ryanair sues passenger
US presidents gather at Carter funeral
In 2024, a total of 9,757 people died on the route, according to Spanish migration charity Walking Borders.
Mr Trujillo said: “Almost every night we leave at dawn and arrive back late.
“This case is very positive, because it was with a newborn, but in all the services we do, even if we are tired, we know we are helping people in distress.”
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports9 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway