Protesters wall off access to French migrant shelter

Migrants protest a pending eviction from a former housing estate in Athis-Mons, France, on July 20. (AFP)

TOULOUSE, France: Protesters have built a nearly-two-meter-high wall around the entrance to a disused hotel in a French town to try to prevent it being turned into a migrant shelter.
Working under cover of darkness, a few dozen residents of Semeac in the Pyrenees mountains erected a wall, 18 meters long and 1.8 meters high, barring access to the Formule 1 hotel, a spokesman for the group confirmed.
“We are not against taking in migrants,” Laurent Teixeira told AFP. “But you have to take account of the citizens.”
Teixeira accused the authorities of failing to consult residents about the project to turn the former budget hotel into a shelter for up to 85 migrants.
“Nothing is planned for the migrants’ daily life,” he said, arguing that schools and other public services in the town of 5,000 people would be unable to cope with the newcomers.
Protester Hugo Lacoue, a tobacconist, said he was opposed to migrants being hosted in a suburban neighborhood.
The hotel in Semeac is one of 62 budget hostelries bought by the state in order to house some of the asylum-seekers currently sleeping rough on the streets of Paris or the northern port of Calais.
With the pace of migrant arrivals expected to accelerate this summer, the government has come under pressure to create more shelters.
More than 2,800 people were evacuated earlier this month from a makeshift camp that sprung up around a packed migrant center in northern Paris, but a new camp is already forming in the area.
Last year, several French towns saw protests over the establishment of migrant shelters but in most places the protests died down after the migrants moved in.
More than 140 refugees reach Cyprus by boat
Cypriot authorities said a boat carrying over 140 migrants believed to be Syrians, more than half of them women and children, was escorted to shore by the coast guard Monday near the resort of Paphos.
Police said the 143 migrants, including 31 women and 50 children, said they had set off from the Turkish port of Mersin and paid up to $2000 each for the crossing.
One person was arrested as a suspected people smuggler, while arrangements were being made to take the migrants to a reception center outside the capital Nicosia.
Cyprus, an EU member state located 100 miles from Syria’s Mediterranean coast, has not seen the massive inflow of migrants experienced by Turkey and Greece.
Since September 2014, however, over a dozen migrant boats have reached the island, bringing in more than 1,100 migrants including the latest arrivals.
The Paphos coastline has become a target for traffickers from Turkey.