More than 160 migrants who tried to reach England on flimsy boats were rescued from freezing waters in the Channel overnight Friday, just days after a fatal shipwreck, French officials said Saturday.
Around 50 people on board a boat "in difficulty" off the northern French coast were rescued by a Navy vessel and taken to the port of Calais, regional maritime officials said.
Another Navy vessel rescued 31 other shipwrecked migrants in the same area and took them to the port of Boulogne.
Coastguards brought 45 more people onshore in Calais after they issued a distress call, while a lifeboat went to the aid of a further 40 people nearby.
All were attended to by rescue services.
More than 40,000 migrants -- a record -- have reached England by boat from northern France this year, risking their lives to cross one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, often under dangerous weather conditions.
On Wednesday, at least four people died in a shipwreck off the southern English port of Dover.
That tragedy came just over a year after at least 27 people died in the Channel in another incident.
The UK government is trying to pass new laws to prevent the record numbers of migrants from attempting the Channel crossing, including making any such arrivals inadmissible for asylum claims.
Another report adds from Lesbos Island, Greece: A two-month-old baby was recovered dead from a migrant wreckage off Lesbos in the early hours of Friday, a coroner told AFP on Saturday.
The baby boy was taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead, coroner Theodoros Nousias said.
The wreckage occurred when the plastic dinghy carrying migrants of mostly African origin hit rocks on the shore in the Fara area, sources at the Lesbos migrant reception centre told AFP.
The migrants managed to reach shore and inform the local authorities.
The Greek coastguard service said on Saturday it had been called to the area at noon on Friday. It found 30 migrants alive and the dead baby.
Two migrants were slightly injured.
Humanitarian organisation MSF Sea tweeted on Saturday evening that it had received an alert about people in need.
Its team "provided medical and psychological support to 34 survivors", it said, giving a higher tally than the coastguards. "Tragically, a two-month-old baby was found dead."
The NGO complained that police blocked its team from reaching the migrants for two hours and coastguards did the same with another team.
"We will never know if these two hours would have allowed us to save the life of the baby," it said.
MSF Sea said it believed 16 other people from the boat had reached Lesbos and were now missing, including the baby's mother.
The Greek coastguard service says it rescued about 1,500 people in the first eight months of 2023, compared to fewer than 600 over the same period last year.
Many people fleeing Africa and the Middle East seek to enter Greece, Italy and Spain in hope of better lives in the European Union.
The International Organization for Migration has recorded nearly 2,000 migrants as dead or missing in the Mediterranean Sea this year.