Hundreds of people were feared dead on Tuesday after high winds and heavy seas capsized boats carrying African migrants heading for Europe off the coast of Libya.
“A tragedy has happened off the Libyan coast with at least two boats going down … with obviously hundreds of people going down at sea,” Jean-Philippe Chauzy with the International Organization for Migration in Geneva, Switzerland, said Tuesday, citing diplomatic officials in Tripoli and Libyan officials.
The U.N. refugee agency, aware of the reports, said they came at the “beginning of the smuggling season in the Mediterranean.”
Former Washington Huskies coach Rick Neuheisel, now in his second year as UCLA’s head coach, doesn’t remember Marquis Cooper’s hobby: Fishing.
What he remembers is hard-working kid with a loving family.
Today, Neuheisel is wishing his former linebacker had been with his family in Arizona this weekend instead of on board a 21-foot fishing vessel in Tampa Bay. Cooper and two other passengers remain missing this afternoon after Coast Guard found the boat — overturned — with Nick Schuyler clinging to the hull this morning.
SAN DIEGO—A Holland American cruise ship returned to San Diego from Mexico after more than 100 passengers contracted the norovirus and became sick.
Broadcast reports said about 2,600 passengers were on the MS Oosterdam when the crew declared a “code red” after the first night of the cruise. Events were canceled and the boat returned to San Diego on Saturday after some passengers and several crew members got the norovirus, a stomach flu that made them sick with diarrhea, vomiting and other symptoms.
A Canadian Coast Guard ship rescued all 22 people from a burning Spanish fishing trawler in the North Atlantic on Sunday, just as the fisherman were leaping into the water.
“It was pretty dramatic when you see a ship sinking and people being launched in a life raft, people jumping off the side,” Coast Guard Capt. Derek LeRiche said by telephone.
Some didn’t have life jackets on, and some jumped into the freezing water wearing regular clothes, he said.
The Coast Guard was in the area on a routine fisheries patrol about 250 miles (400 kilometers) southeast of Newfoundland when it received a distress call from the Monte Galineiro trawler.
A British couple was rescued from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean by an Italian tanker after spending 40 days lost at sea.
Stuart Armstrong, 51, and his partner Andrea Davison, 48, are heading back to Britain on board the supertanker Indian Point.
Although unhurt, they were tired, exhausted and grateful to be returning home after their six-week ordeal in which they “stared death in the face.”
The drama began on Jan. 9, six days after the couple left the Cape Verde Islands off the West Coast of Africa on board their yacht Sara.
HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant are understood to have both been severely damaged in the underwater accident earlier this month.
Both are fitted with state-of-the-art technology aimed at detecting other submarines, but it apparently failed completely.
Although both France and Britain insist that security was not compromised during the collision and there was no danger of a nuclear incident, inquiries are now under way in both countries.
Some 150 fishermen were rescued from an ice floe in wind-whipped Lake Erie on Saturday after it broke loose from the shore due to warmer weather, officials said.
One fisherman fell through the ice during the four-hour rescue effort and died on the way to a hospital, a Coast Guard spokesman said.
Another man who fell through the ice was not injured.
Police say a small ferry sank in central Vietnam Sunday, killing at least 39 people, and leaving about five missing.
Most of the victims are women and children.
Officials said the boat sank on the Gianh river in central Quang Binh province.
At least six people have been killed after an Indonesian ferry carrying hundreds of people sank off Sulawesi island.
“Eighteen of the more than 260 aboard the Teratai Prima were rescued, but bad weather and nightfall have complicated search efforts for the remaining passengers,” Bambang Ervan, a spokesman for the transport ministry, said on Sunday.
“We still don’t know the fate of the missing people, whether they had lifejackets on when the ship was hit and, [as] it happened at dawn, most people were probably asleep,” Ervan said.
NEW DELHI (AP) — The Indian Coast Guard rescued two people off India’s east coast during a search for more than 300 illegal immigrants missing for the past four days and feared dead, police said Tuesday.
At least 10 bodies have washed ashore near the Andaman Islands, said S.P. Sharma, the Coast Guard inspector-general on the islands.
Survivors told Indian authorities that more than 300 people from Bangladesh and Myanmar had jumped from a rickety boat that had been drifting for 13 days in the Indian Ocean and tried to swim to shore. Authorities rescued 105 others after pulling in the boat.
