The Latest: Health experts inspect docked ship with migrants

ROME – The Latest on Europe's response to mass migration (all times local):

1:30 p.m.

Health officials and Red Cross personnel are inspecting an Italian coast guard ship that has been docked in Sicily for days with 150 migrants on board.

Italian news channel Sky TG24 TV said on Saturday that health experts wanted to check hygiene conditions on the Diciotti, whose crew rescued the migrants on Aug. 16. The ship docked in Catania's harbor earlier in the week.

On Saturday, an ambulance delivered health supplies to be taken aboard.

Some 600,000 asylum-seekers were brought to Italy after being rescued at sea over the last few years. Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has insisted the migrants on the coast guard ship won't be allowed into the country until other European Union nations agree to take them.

So far, none has offered.

A large majority of migrants aboard the Diciotti are Eritrean men. Minors and ailing passengers were allowed off the ship in recent days.

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11:00 a.m.

A top member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party is suggesting Germany could introduce a one-year national service of some kind for refugees and asylum-seekers, which she says would help integration and increase Germans' acceptance.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the general secretary of Merkel's Christian Democrats, made the suggestion in an interview Saturday with the Funke newspaper group.

It's an extension of a discussion she launched this month on introducing a vaguely defined "general service obligation" for Germans, civilian or military, as a possible future policy. Germany scrapped military conscription in 2011.

Kramp-Karrenbauer said it's worth discussing whether refugees also should spend a year performing some kind of service to the state. She said that "if refugees do such a year, voluntary or compulsory, that serves their integration into the state and society."

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10:45 a.m.

The United Nations' refugee agency is imploring European Union countries to take responsibility for 150 migrants stranded aboard an Italian coast guard ship and urging Italy to let the migrants off the ship immediately.

The Diciotti rescued the migrants from a trafficker's boat on Aug. 16. The ship has been docked in Sicily for days, and Italy's government is refusing to let it disembark passengers unless other EU nations pledge to take them.

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi urged European countries in a statement Saturday "to do the right thing and offer places of asylum for people rescued from the Mediterranean Sea in their time of need."

Grandi said from Geneva that it's time to end "a race to the bottom on who can take the least responsibility for people rescued at sea."