Australia

Asylum Seekers Dept: Fearing that the illegal migrants were headed their way, the Australians tracked the MV Ocean Lady and the MV Sun Sea almost from the moment those on board left Sri Lanka and alerted Canadian authorities to their existence and progress, according to people here familiar with the file, according to Vancouver Sun. On one hand there has been anguish over their fate, as when several dozen asylum seekers from the Middle East drowned when their weather-beaten Indonesian vessel crashed 14 months ago into rocks on Australia's Christmas Island - an incident that received an extraordinary amount of attention, because the horrific drama was captured on video and there were great sighs of relief in Australia when two ships carrying 568 Tamil asylum seekers sailed north of the island continent before crossing the Pacific Ocean to make landfall in Canada in 2009 and 2010. Canada has got off easy so far. Hundreds of such vessels having already reached Australia since 2008 carrying thousands of "boat people" from South Asia and the Middle East on board rickety fishing vessels. What to do with these uninvited migrants is a politically toxic issue here. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.