yacht sink mediterranean

Experts puzzle over why Bayesian yacht sank. Was it a 'black swan event'?

The Bayesian set off on a leisurely cruise around Italy's southern coast on a sunny day in late July.

The luxurious super yacht − which boasted one of the largest masts in the world and carried a crew of business moguls, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his family and a chair of Morgan Stanley − set sail from the Amalfi Coast, bound for Sicily.

Less than a month later, the ship had sunk 160 feet under the water , leaving its cook dead and six of its passengers, including at least two Americans, missing and prompting a massive search that has drawn international attention.

Now, experts are trying to piece together why in the early hours Monday the Bayesian was quickly pulled under the waves amid a storm that saw at least one tornado spin up over the water.

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A perfect storm led to Bayesian sinking, experts say

The combination of unlikely factors that could have contributed to the ship's fate constituted a "black swan event," Matthew Schanck, chairman of the Maritime Search and Rescue Council, told USA TODAY.

The Bayesian was well-built: A 2008 product of Italian ship maker Perini, it was constructed in accordance with international maritime standards and commercially certified by the U.K.'s Maritime and Coastguard Agency, according to Schanck.

The bout of bad weather that swept the area when the ship went down was also out of the ordinary in the northern Mediterranean, "which isn't renowned for prolonged, significant stormy weather," he said.

"The fact that those two elements have then resulted in the foundering of a super yacht is pretty extraordinary," Schanck said. "These things don't happen every day."

After the ship sank just before 5 a.m. local time, 15 people, including a 1-year-old, were pulled from the water. Some were rescued from a life raft by the crew of a ship docked nearby.

Ricardo Thomas, the ship's cook and a native of Antigua, was found dead, according to authorities.

As of Tuesday, six people were missing, including Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter. Several missing passengers were involved in Lynch's trial on fraud charges, including Jonathan Bloomer, a Morgan Stanley chair who served as his character witness, and one of Lynch's attorneys. Lynch, accused of fraud after he sold his company to electronics giant Hewlett-Packard, was acquitted of all charges weeks ago.

Who is Mike Lynch? UK entrepreneur among those missing after superyacht sinks off Sicily

Tornado formed over unusually hot water

Storms in the area that night may have whipped up a water spout, a tornado over the water , according to local meteorologists.

It was likely triggered by the water's unusual warmth, said Rick Shema, a certified consulting meteorologist who served in the Navy.

"The water spout was an uncommon occurrence," he said. "But again, these things happen, especially in warmer water."

At 83.7 degrees, water in the area was more than 3 degrees hotter than average on the day the Bayesian sank, likely the result of climate change, Shema said.

"Hurricanes can form at 80 degrees. This was almost four degrees higher than that," he said.

The water spout may have spun up when cooler air dropped from mountainous places nearby onto the hot water, he said. "A water spout is a vortex, basically like a tornado, spinning real fast, sucking up water and moisture as the column rises," he said.

Although water spouts only reach around 120 mph, as compared with tornadoes on land, which can reach up to 300 mph, "you don't need 200 mph to sink a ship," he said.

"Even an average tornado, 120 miles an hour, that's a lot of wind," he said, "which would heel the boat over for sure."

Water spouts spring up suddenly, Shema said. Before they strike, winds can be slow, but "once the water spout comes over, bam, it's on," he said.

Before sunrise, the ship's crew may not have seen the water spout coming. "The visibility was probably a big factor," he said.

With the windows of the yacht opened, as they likely were in the hot weather, the water spout could have triggered water that flooded through the portholes, Shema said, causing the ship to sink.

Tragedy strikes: Scramble to find survivors after Bayesian yacht sinks off Sicily coast

Search continues, but shift to recovery phase approaches

Italian authorities said the Bayesian was probably at anchor when the storm struck, meaning it couldn't maneuver and ride the waves, according to Mitchell Stoller, a captain and maritime expert witness. Other ships in the area that turned on their engines rode out the storm, he said.

"When you're at anchor and you see weather, you start your engine and you put the wind on the bow. You don't let it get on the side," he said.

Schanck said another key question concerns the position of the keel, a heavy weight underneath the boat that acts as a counterbalance to keep it upright, when the ship sank. When lifted, "that's going to affect the stability of the vessel, because, obviously, you've now raised the center of gravity of that vessel," he said.

The Bayesian was floating over 160 feet of water at the time, deep enough that the keel would likely be deployed. But the fact that "the vessel heeled over so heavily makes me question that," Schanck said.

The cause of the disaster may not be known until the ship can be examined in more detail, experts say. Prosecutors in a nearby town have already opened an investigation.

Schanck said investigators will have plenty to work with once the operation moves into a recovery phase.

"The vessel is intact and in good condition on the seabed," he said. "There's a lot of eyewitness accounts from other vessels in the area and the shore."

As the search entered its second day on Tuesday, the rescue effort may shift in that direction soon. "I suspect, later on, today or tomorrow, we'll probably see some mention of a recovery operation being stated," Schanck said.

The decision to would depend on whether rescuers find signs of life in the ship and air pockets or survivable spaces, Schanck said. At this point, survivors on the water's surface looks unlikely. "My professional opinion is that the casualties will be located within the vessel," he said.

"There is a risk versus benefit in all maritime search and rescue incidents," he said. "Where we start transitioning to a recovery phase, that line shifts."

Contributing: Reuters

Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA Today. Reach her on email at [email protected]. Follow her on X @CybeleMO.

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Dramatic video shows 130ft superyacht sinking off Italy coast after being battered in storm

Nine people rescued before boat went under, article bookmarked.

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Dramatic footage has captured the moment a 40-metre superyacht sank into the Mediterranean sea after being battered in a storm.

The 40-metre-long luxury vessel was sailing from Gallipoli to Milazzo overnight on Saturday when it got into trouble around 15km from Italy’s Catanzaro Marina.

Footage shows the yacht, named My Saga, rapidly disappearing beneath waves, as lifeboats appear to float beside it.

The captain sent out a distress call to the Port Authority of Crotone, with officials told the yacht was taking on a significant amount of water from the stern.

The Italian coastguard dispatched two patrol vessels and rescued all four passengers and five crew members on board.

A tugboat sent out at dawn was unable to save the superyacht from sinking because of worsening weather conditions, the Super Yacht Times reports. The Saga finally sank at around 1pm on Sunday.

The outlet reports the yacht, which was built in Monaco back in 2007, was flying under the Cayman Islands flag with an all-Italian crew when it sunk.

An investigation has been launched into the cause.

It comes after a £6 million superyacht sunk after it went up in flames in the UK on the Torquay harbourside.

The 85ft vessel was consumed by fire , with thick black smoking billowing into the sky.

The yacht reportedly drifted out into the harbour after the fire burnt through ropes securing it to the pier, but the vessel was later secured by the fire service.

A fire service statement revealed that the vessel contained approximately 8000 litres of diesel fuel.

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Sinking of luxury yacht: Experts say Mediterranean sea is growing more dangerous

ROME - The shipwreck of a luxury yacht moored off the coast of Sicily is the latest sign that the Mediterranean is becoming a more dangerous sea to sail in, climate experts and skippers say.

One man died and six people are still missing, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, after the Bayesian, a 56m-long sailboat, was hit by a ferocious storm on Aug 19, sinking in a matter of minutes.

Climatologists say global warming is making such violent and unexpected tempests more frequent in a sea used as a summer playground for millions of tourists, including a wealthy few sailing its waters on superyachts.

Mr Luca Mercalli, president of Italy's meteorological society, said the sea surface temperature around Sicily in the days leading up to the shipwreck was about 30 deg C, almost three degrees more than normal.

"This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms," he told Reuters.

The changes in "Mare Nostrum" (Our Sea), as the ancient Romans called the Mediterranean, are also being noticed by experienced skippers such as Mr Massimo Aramu, who runs the Akua sailing school on the coast near the Italian capital.

Currently sailing around Greece, Mr Aramu said he did not like navigating Italy's Tyrrhenian coast around Sicily or the Spanish Balearic islands because there are "often critical situations with little warning".

Last week, a storm similar to the one that sank the Bayesian hit the Balearic archipelago, which includes the islands of Ibiza and Mallorca, leaving several yachts washed up ashore.

Mr Giuliano Gallo, a former skipper who crossed the Atlantic and has written several books on sailing, said the Mediterranean was becoming more like the Caribbean, which has areas that many boats steer clear of at certain times of the year.

"But things are less predictable in the Mediterranean," he said.

Another sign of the more erratic weather in the Mediterranean was seen a year ago when thousands of people were killed in Libya by flash floods triggered by a so-called medicane - a supercharged Mediterranean storm fuelled by warmer seas.

Mr Karsten Borner, the captain of a boat that was moored alongside the Bayesian but escaped harm, said the Aug 19 storm had been "very violent, very intense, a lot of water and I think a turning system like a tornado".

He also blamed more frequent episodes of intense heat during the summer months for playing a role in causing such storms.

"The water is... way too hot for the Mediterranean and this causes for sure heavy storms, like we had one week ago on the Balearics, like we had two years ago in Corsica and so on," he said. REUTERS

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British tech magnate Mike Lynch, 2 US citizens among missing after luxury yacht sinks off Sicily

15 people were rescued and one body believed to be the cook was found near the wreck, but six others were unaccounted for and believed inside the hull, by andrea rosa and nicole winfield | the associated press • published august 19, 2024 • updated on august 19, 2024 at 3:21 pm.

British tech magnate Mike Lynch and five other people were missing after their luxury sailing yacht sank during a freak storm off Sicily early Monday, Italy’s civil protection and authorities said. Lynch’s wife and 14 other people survived.

Lynch, who was  acquitted in June  in a big U.S. fraud trial, was among six people who remain unaccounted for after their chartered sailboat sank off Porticello, when a tornado over the water known as a waterspout struck the area overnight, said Salvo Cocina of Sicily’s civil protection agency.

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One body was recovered, and police divers spent the day trying to reach the hull of the ship, which was resting at a depth of 50 meters (163 feet) off Porticello where it had been anchored, rescue authorities said. They returned to the site after 10 p.m. to see if it would be possible to search through the night, when weather conditions were expected to worsen, said Luca Cari, spokesman of the fire rescue service.

It had a crew of 10 people and 12 passengers, the Italian coast guard said. A sudden fierce storm had battered the area overnight, and struck the place precisely where the 56-meter (184-foot) British-flagged Bayesian had been moored.

“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Cocina, noting that another superyacht nearby wasn't as badly damaged and helped rescue some of the 15 survivors, who included Lynch's wife Angela Bacares.

The Bayesian was notable for its single 75-meter (246-feet) mast — one of the world’s tallest made of aluminum and which was lit up at night, just hours before it sank. Online charter sites listed it for rent for up to 195,000 euros (about $215,000) a week.

One of the survivors, identified as Charlotte Golunski, said she momentarily lost hold of her 1-year-old daughter Sofia in the water, but then managed to hold her up over the waves until a lifeboat inflated and they were both pulled to safety, Italian news agency ANSA reported, quoting the mother. The father, James Emsley, also survived, said Cocina.

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Karsten Borner, the captain of the Sir Robert Baden Powell, said he had noticed the Bayesian nearby during the storm but after it calmed he saw a red flare and realized the ship had simply disappeared, ANSA and the Giornale di Sicilia newspaper reported. Borner said he and a crew member boarded their tender and found a lifeboat with 15 people, some of them injured, who they then took aboard and alerted the coast guard.

Eight of those rescued were hospitalized while the others were taken to a hotel. One body believed to be the cook was found near the wreck, but six others were unaccounted for and believed inside the hull, said Cari, the fire rescue spokesperson. The rescue operations, which were visible from shore, involved helicopters and rescue boats from the coast guard, fire rescue and civil protection service.

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#Palermo , naufragio imbarcazione a Porticello: recuperato dai #sommozzatori dei #vigilidelfuoco il corpo senza vita di un uomo, all’esterno del relitto. Proseguono le operazioni di ricerca con il coordinamento in mare della @guardiacostiera [ #19agosto 11:30] pic.twitter.com/Y2m9o5ohCe — Vigili del Fuoco (@vigilidelfuoco) August 19, 2024

Fisherman Francesco Cefalu’ said he had seen a flare from shore at around 4:30 a.m. and immediately set out to the site but by the time he got there, the Bayesian had already sunk, with only cushions, wood and other items from the superyacht floating in the water.

“But for the rest, we didn’t find anyone,” he said from the port hours later. He said that he immediately alerted the coast guard and stayed on site for three hours, but didn't find any survivors. “I think they are inside, all the missing people.”

He said he had been up early to check the weather to see if he could go fishing, and surmised that a sudden waterspout had struck the yacht.

“It could be that the mast broke, or the anchor at the prow pulled it, I don’t know,” he said.

Cocina said the crew and passengers hailed from a variety of countries: In addition to Britain and the United States, passengers and crew were from Antigua, France, Germany, Ireland, Myanmar, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain, he said.

Among the dead and missing, four were British, two were American, and one was a man with dual citizenship from Canada and Antigua, according to Luciano Pischedda, the Italian Coast Guard official overseeing the rescue operations.

The UK Marine Accident Investigation Branch is deploying a team of four inspectors to Italy to conduct a preliminary assessment. The Foreign Commonwealth and Development office said it was “providing consular support to a number of British nationals and their families.”

Dutch foreign ministry spokesperson Casper Soetekouw said the lone Dutch citizen on board, a man, had been rescued and was not in life-threatening condition.

Lynch, once hailed as Britain’s king of technology, was cleared in June of fraud and conspiracy charges related to Hewlett Packard’s $11 billion takeover of his company, Autonomy Corp.

The not-guilty verdicts followed an 11-week criminal trial in San Francisco that delved into the history of HP’s  2011 acquisition  of Autonomy, a business software firm founded by Lynch.

The  fraud accusations  represented a dramatic turn in the fortunes of an entrepreneur once described as the Bill Gates of Britain — a title he seemed to live up to when he netted an $800 million from the Autonomy sale.

The acquittal vindicated Lynch, who had vehemently denied wrong doing and portrayed HP as a technological train wreck.

“I’m looking forward to returning the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field,” Lynch said in a statement released after the verdict.

The yacht, built in 2008 by the Italian firm Perini Navi, can accommodate 12 passengers in four double cabins, a triple and the master suite, plus crew accommodations, according to Charter World and Yacht Charters.

The vessel, which previously was named Salute when it flew under a Dutch flag, featured a sleek, minimalist interior of light wood with Japanese accents designed by the French designer Remi Tessier, according to descriptions and photos on the charter sites.

AP writers Danica Kirka and Sylvia Hui contributed from London.

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Five bodies found in sunken superyacht, officials say

Divers have found five bodies in the sunken wreckage of a superyacht that sank off Sicily this week, Italian officials told news agencies and local media Wednesday, leaving one person still missing.

Three bodies were brought ashore and two others were also found inside the shipwreck, Salvatore Cocina, head of the Sicily civil protection agency, told the Associated Press, after divers were photographed by the agency unloading body bags. Cocina did not identify the deceased.

The British-flagged, 183-foot-long Bayesian was carrying 12 passengers and 10 crew members roughly half a mile from the Sicilian fishing village of Porticello when it encountered what authorities called a “violent storm” about 4 a.m. Monday.

Of the 15 people rescued, eight – including a 1-year-old girl – were taken to hospitals in conditions that were not life-threatening. The body of the yacht’s chef, identified as Recaldo Thomas, a Canadian Antiguan, was found during initial recovery efforts.

Among the passengers was Mike Lynch, 59, the British founder of the tech venture capital firm Invoke Capital and co-founder of the tech firms Autonomy and Darktrace. This summer, he was acquitted of all charges after a decadelong U.S. fraud trial related to the 2011 sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.

The voyage on the Bayesian, owned by a company controlled by Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was intended to be a celebration of his legal victory, Britain’s Telegraph reported.

Among those missing were Lynch; his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah; Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, Judy; and attorney Chris Morvillo, a partner at Clifford Chance in New York who represented Lynch in the recently concluded legal battle, and his wife, Neda. Bacares, Lynch’s wife, was among the survivors.

It’s not clear exactly what type of storm struck the Bayesian, but weather data suggests it was probably a tornadic waterspout or severe thunderstorm.

Charlotte Golunski, a guest of Lynch who was rescued, described to Italian media holding onto her 1-year-old daughter, Sophie, amid the storm. “For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea,” she told Giornale di Sicilia. “Then I immediately hugged her again amid the fury of the waves.”

Lynch sold Autonomy, which was once England’s biggest software company, to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for more than $11 billion. He was subsequently accused of overvaluing the company and was charged in the United States with fraud. He was acquitted in June.

The Bayesian was built in 2008 by Italian shipmaker Perini Navi, according to the SuperYacht Times.

The Sir Robert, a Dutch-flagged sailing vessel anchored nearby, responded immediately to help survivors before the Italian coast guard arrived.

The yacht sank to a depth of more than 160 feet. The first attempt by fire-brigade cave divers to search inside the yacht was unsuccessful, rescue authorities said.

Bryan Pietsch contributed to this report.

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Rescue crews race to find survivors after luxury yacht sinks in Mediterranean

• ENVIRONMENT

A sea tornado just sank a yacht in the Mediterranean. We might be seeing more of them.

A deadly waterspout is strongly suspected of sinking a yacht off the coast of Italy. Scientists weigh in on whether they’ll worsen as the planet warms.

A superyacht carrying 22 people, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, sank off the coast of Palermo, Italy, in the early hours of August 19.  

The 183-foot Bayesian yacht is believed to have been hit by a waterspout —a tornado that forms over the ocean—and some experts are concerned that climate change could worsen these storms in the Mediterranean and other quickly warming waters.

Here’s what you need to know about waterspouts and whether hotter temperatures could cause more of them.

What is a waterspout?

A waterspout is a tornado that forms over water. “The tornado doesn't really care what surface it’s over,” says David Sills, executive director of the Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “Whether it's a city or a forest or crops or water, the tornado is going to do its thing."  

These columns of rotating air “form where an air boundary exists, for example where warm and cold air collide,” says a spokesperson at the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) via email.

Changes in wind direction at different heights can cause a rotation.

“Imagine just above the ocean, the wind is blowing in one direction,” says Peter Inness , meteorologist at the University of Reading. When the wind higher up blows in another direction, “the air between those two levels of wind starts rotating around the horizontal axis.”

The warm air below rises and these “spinning parcels of air are also lifted and stretched in this process and can concentrate on the surface of the water creating a vortex,” says the BOM.

As the air is sucked upwards into the storm, the spinning intensifies like taking the plug out of the bath, says Innes: “the water going down the plughole rotates very intensely because it's being sucked downwards.”

It’s similar to a figure skater, adds Sills: “When they bring in their arms, and then they spin faster and faster.”  

How dangerous are waterspouts for boats?

Although the wind associated with waterspouts can reach 55 miles per hour, they typically move at under 25 miles per hour, are short-lived, and don’t cause much damage. “They usually only impact any single point for a few minutes,” says the BOM.

The Bayesian was moored overnight when it sank. Although people have attributed this to a waterspout, it’s not yet been confirmed.  

“It was dark and there are no images available,” says Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorological Society , via email.

Boats are designed to right themselves when blown over by strong winds. “Those sailboats have a big, heavy keel so that when you start to go over, it pulls you back up,” says Sills.

But if water gets into the ship, it can lose buoyancy. “It's called a knockdown,” he says. “Time spent over like that means water and waves can get into open doors and it starts to take on water. Then you start to sink.”

The rapid change in wind strength and direction are also dangerous for boats, says Innes, “because it could result in the boat rocking backward and forward very violently.”

Will climate change cause more waterspouts?

One study has found more frequent waterspouts off the coast of Spain’s Balearic Islands when sea surface temperatures are higher, particularly between 73 and 78°F.

This year, “the Mediterranean is [over 5°F] above average,” says Mercalli, which is “an anomaly considered "extreme". These unusually warm waters could be partly due to climate change as well as year-on-year variability.

Some people are concerned that climate change could cause an increase in tornadoes on land and water.

“Global warming will increase all weather extreme events, because it injects more energy into the atmosphere,” says Mercalli.

But experts are wary of confirming a definite link with climate change. “Waterspouts are a very short-lived and local scale phenomena, and therefore difficult to attribute to impacts of climate change,” says the BOM.

The Mediterranean is warming more quickly than the rest of the ocean. Although climate change will make sea surface temperatures warmer, it’s unclear how it will affect the other conditions needed to create waterspouts.

Waterspouts need a temperature difference between air and sea. If the air is warming at the same rate as the bodies of water, an increase in waterspouts is unlikely, says Sills.  

Low pressure is also needed. “Even if the water is really warm, if you've got an area of high pressure over the Mediterranean, you won't get those thunderstorms,” says Inness. “You won't get waterspouts.”

Wind direction also comes into play. In this region, humid air from the north is more likely to cause storms than dry winds coming up from North Africa.    

Due to poor historic data, it’s not possible to confirm that waterspouts are increasing, says Mercalli, “but surely all heavy storms, including thunderstorms that generate strong winds, downbursts, heavy rains and hail are increasing worldwide and in Italy.”

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Dozens are dead and hundreds feared missing from migrant ship sinking off Greece

The Associated Press

This undated handout image provided by Greece's coast guard on Wednesday, June14, 2023, shows scores of people covering practically every free stretch of deck on a battered fishing boat that later capsized and sank off southern Greece. AP hide caption

This undated handout image provided by Greece's coast guard on Wednesday, June14, 2023, shows scores of people covering practically every free stretch of deck on a battered fishing boat that later capsized and sank off southern Greece.

KALAMATA, Greece — Rescue workers transferred the bodies of dead migrants to refrigerated trucks as a major search continued Thursday for possible survivors of a sea disaster in southern Greece. Hundreds of people are still feared missing.

At least 78 bodies have been recovered after a fishing boat crammed with migrants seeking to make it from Libya to Italy capsized and sank a day earlier in deep waters off the Greek coast.

Rescuers saved 104 passengers — including Egyptians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Afghans and Palestinians — but authorities fear that hundreds of others may have been trapped below deck. If confirmed that would make the tragedy one of the worst ever recorded in the central Mediterranean.

Authorities revised the confirmed death toll from 79 following an overnight count of the bodies.

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"The survivors are in a very difficult situation. Right now they are in shock," Erasmia Roumana, head of a United Nations Refugee Agency delegation, told The Associated Press after meeting the rescued migrants in a storage hangar in the southern port of Kalamata.

"They want to get in touch with their families to tell them they are OK, and they keep asking about the missing. Many have friends and relatives unaccounted for."

Greece declared three days of mourning and politicians suspended campaigning for a general election on June 25.

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said she was "deeply saddened" by the tragedy and promised to strengthen cooperation between the European Union and nearby countries to try to further crack down on migrant smugglers.

But human rights groups argue that the crackdown means migrants and refugees are being forced to take longer and more dangerous routes to reach safe countries.

The search operation south of Greece's Peloponnese region failed to locate any more bodies or survivors overnight or early Thursday.

A map shows the route that a fishing boat carrying migrants to Italy from Libya sank in the Mediterranean Wednesday. AP hide caption

A map shows the route that a fishing boat carrying migrants to Italy from Libya sank in the Mediterranean Wednesday.

"The chances of finding (more survivors) are minimal," retired Greek coast guard admiral Nikos Spanos told state-run ERT television.

"We have seen old fishing boats like this before from Libya: They are about 30 meters (100 feet) long and can carry 600-700 people when crammed full. But they are not at all seaworthy. To put it simply, they are floating coffins."

Coast guard experts believe the boat may have sunk after running out of fuel or suffering engine trouble, with movement of passengers inside the vessel causing it to list and ultimately capsize.

An aerial photograph of the vessel before it sank released by Greek authorities showed people crammed on the deck. Most were not wearing life jackets.

Migrants Continue To Die In Attempts To Cross Mediterranean Sea To Europe

"We are witnessing one of the biggest tragedies in the Mediterranean, and the numbers announced by the authorities are devastating," said Gianluca Rocco, head of the Greek section of IOM, the U.N. migration agency.

The IOM has recorded more than 21,000 deaths and disappearances in the central Mediterranean since 2014.

Greece's coast guard said it was notified by Italian authorities of the trawler's presence in international waters. It said efforts by its own ships and merchant vessels to assist the boat were repeatedly rejected, with people on board insisting they wanted to continue to Italy.

Twenty-nine of the survivors in southern Greece remain hospitalized, mostly with symptoms of hypothermia, while eight have been questioned by coast guard investigators. Government officials said the survivors would be moved to a migrant shelter near Athens later Thursday or Friday.

A survivors of a shipwreck washes his face outside a warehouse at the port in Kalamata town, about 240 kilometers (150miles) southwest of Athens on Wednesday, June 14, 2023. Thanassis Stavrakis/AP hide caption

A survivors of a shipwreck washes his face outside a warehouse at the port in Kalamata town, about 240 kilometers (150miles) southwest of Athens on Wednesday, June 14, 2023.

The spot is close to the deepest part of the Mediterranean Sea, and depths of up to 17,000 feet (5,200 meters) could hamper any effort to locate a sunken vessel.

The IOM said initial reports suggested up to 400 people were aboard. A network of activists said it received a distress call from a boat in the same area whose passengers said it carried 750 people.

The Mediterranean's deadliest shipwreck in living memory occurred on April 18, 2015, when an overcrowded fishing boat collided off Libya with a freighter trying to come to its rescue. Only 28 people survived. Forensic experts concluded that there were originally 1,100 people on board.

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Boat Sinks in Mediterranean, and at Least 55 People Drown

The accident is the latest in a series of recent deadly accidents involving migrants trying to reach Europe.

By Emma Bubola

At least fifty-five people drowned after their boat sank off the coast of Libya, the United Nations migration agency said on Wednesday, the latest in a series of deadly accidents in just a few days involving migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

The rubber boat, carrying 60 people, left Tuesday morning from Garabouli, a small town a few dozen miles east of Tripoli, Libya’s capital, according to the agency, the International Organization for Migration . Only five survivors were brought to shore by the Libyan coast guard.

“This is a very high number of lives,” said Safa Msehli, a spokeswoman for the organization. “And these deaths have become normalized, as a matter of fact,” she added. “That is a very, very dangerous thing .”

Human rights organizations have for years protested the lack of preventive search and rescue patrols by countries around the Mediterranean.

The latest disaster happened shortly after the bodies of dozens migrants, killed as their boats sank or capsized last week, washed ashore on the beaches of Sabratha, west of Tripoli. And on Monday, 33 people died in four different accidents near the Italian island of Lampedusa, according to Flavio di Giacomo, a spokesman for the U.N. agency.

In total, 661 people have died in the central Mediterranean this year, he said. The number of deaths at sea includes people who went “missing” but after some hours are considered dead.

After the dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi was toppled and killed in 2011, Libya descended into civil war and its territory remains divided among warring factions. Amid the chaos of recent years, it has become a major transit point to Europe for tens of thousands of African migrants. With few pathways for legal migration available, many pay smugglers to help them make the dangerous sea crossing.

Ms. Msehli called the situation in Libya “extremely concerning,” with migrants within the country who are subject to kidnapping, abuse, arbitrary detention and exploitation by criminal groups and trafficking networks. Then some depart on overcrowded rubber dinghies handled by smugglers, making the central Mediterranean the deadliest maritime route in the world, according to the agency.

“That only signals the despair that people are facing possibly back home and the conditions that they’re facing in Libya ,” she said.

Emma Bubola is a reporter based in London. More about Emma Bubola

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After yacht sinks, experts say Mediterranean growing more dangerous

By Antonella Cinelli and Gavin Jones

ROME (Reuters) - The shipwreck of a luxury yacht moored off the coast of Sicily is the latest sign that the Mediterranean is becoming a more dangerous sea to sail in, climate experts and skippers say.

One man died and six people are still missing, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, after the Bayesian, a 56-metre-long (184-ft) sailboat, was hit by a ferocious storm on Monday, sinking in a matter of minutes.

Climatologists say global warming is making such violent and unexpected tempests more frequent in a sea used as a summer playground for millions of tourists, including a wealthy few sailing its waters on superyachts.

Luca Mercalli, president of Italy's meteorological society, said the sea surface temperature around Sicily in the days leading up to the shipwreck was about 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), almost three degrees more than normal.

"This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms," he told Reuters.

The changes in "Mare Nostrum" (Our Sea), as the ancient Romans called the Mediterranean, are also being noticed by experienced skippers such as Massimo Aramu, who runs the Akua sailing school on the coast near the Italian capital.

Currently sailing around Greece, Aramu said he did not like navigating Italy's Tyrrhenian coast around Sicily or the Spanish Balearic islands because there are "often critical situations with little warning".

Last week, a storm similar to the one that sank the Bayesian hit the Balearic archipelago, which includes the islands of Ibiza and Mallorca, leaving several yachts washed up ashore.

Giuliano Gallo, a former skipper who crossed the Atlantic and has written several books on sailing, said the Mediterranean was becoming more like the Caribbean, which has areas that many boats steer clear of at certain times of the year.

"But things are less predictable in the Mediterranean," he said.

Another sign of the more erratic weather in the Mediterranean was seen a year ago when thousands of people were killed in Libya by flash floods triggered by a so-called medicane - a supercharged Mediterranean storm fuelled by warmer seas.

Karsten Borner, the captain of a boat that was moored alongside the Bayesian but escaped harm, said Monday's storm had been "very violent, very intense, a lot of water and I think a turning system like a tornado".

He also blamed more frequent episodes of intense heat during the summer months for playing a role in causing such storms.

"The water is ... way too hot for the Mediterranean and this causes for sure heavy storms, like we had one week ago on the Balearics, like we had two years ago in Corsica and so on," he said.

(Additional reporting by Gavin Jones and Giselda Vagnoni; Writing by Gavin Jones; Editing by Crispian Balmer and Helen Popper)

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Killer whales sink yacht in med: ‘knew what they were doing’.

SHAMU ATTACK YOU

Owen Lavine

Breaking News Intern

Doval J/Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

A pod of orcas smashed a $128k yacht into pieces in the Mediterranean in a two-hour attack described by its owner as “terrifying.” Robert Powell, the owner of the 39-foot Bonhomme William , told the New York Post that he had set sail from Vilamoura, Portugal only a day prior on a birthday trip to Greece when the orcas struck. “To me, they were not playing at all, they knew exactly what they were doing,” Powell told the Post. “They knew the weak points of the boat, and they knew how to sink it,” he added. Powell described five orcas circling the boat “like watching wolves hunt,” before they began attacking the rudder. Powell radioed for help as the attack began. Fifteen hits from the killer whales later, the boat was dead in the water, two miles off the Spanish coast. “They were taking it in turns to come in—sometimes two would come in at the same time and hit it,” Powell described the whales’ attack. With the rudder gone, the whales began knocking the hull for an hour and a half before the boat split. “I have a feeling that this group are boat sinkers—I think they knew what they were doing, I’m sure of it,” Powell said. A Spanish salvage vessel arrived only minutes before Powell’s boat capsized.

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Moment ukraine destroys russian bridges in kursk with us-made weapons.

Dramatic video has captured Ukraine blowing up one of Russia’s pontoon bridges to handicap Moscow’s response to the incursion in Kursk, where Kyiv seeks to keep its foothold.

The Ukrainian military released the footage Wednesday of the pontoon bridge along the Seym River , in Kursk, being blown to bits by a hail of bombs.

“Where do Russian pontoon bridges ‘disappear’ in the Kursk region ? … Operators, together with units of the Defense Forces of Ukraine, are accurately destroying them,” Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces touted in a post on Telegram.

The video goes on to show several other heavy bombardments along shorelines in the area, including strikes against a Russian munitions warehouse and electronic warfare complex.

While the location of other strikes could not be independently verified, the Kremlin has said at least three bridges in Kursk have been decimated by Kyiv in less than a week.

The destruction of the bridges greatly hinders Moscow’s supply lines and ability to deploy its troops to fight off the advancing Ukrainian army.

It also hinders civilian evacuations in the area as more than 120,000 Russians have already fled from Kursk after Kyiv troops took over dozens of towns in the region.

Moscow has also accused Ukraine of conducting the bridge attacks with US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) , with Kyiv acknowledging for the first time Wednesday that it was in fact using the American weapons inside Russia.

President Biden had previously greenlit HIMARS to be used against Russia when defending Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which saw some of the most intense fighting of the war in June.

The US and other allies have previously barred Ukraine from conducting long-range missile strikes with their weapons inside Russia.

Washington has yet to respond to the use of HIMARS so deep inside Russia as part of Kyiv’s incursion, by which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hopes to establish a “buffer zone.”

With Post wires

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Putin rattled after Moscow ‘under attack from biggest ever drone strike’

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Moscow came under one of the largest attacks yet by Ukrainian drones since the start of fighting in 2022, further rattling Vladimir Putin as he attempts to fight Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region.

The Ministry of Defence claimed that Russia downed 45 Ukrainian drones overnight, with 11 destroyed over the Moscow region, 23 over the Bryansk region, six over Belgorod, three over Kaluga and two over Kursk.

Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin said on his Telegram channel: ‘This was one of the biggest attempts of all time to attack Moscow using drones.’ 

He said strong defences around the capital made it possible to shoot down all the drones before they could hit their intended targets.

Some Russian social media channels shared videos of drones apparently being destroyed by air defence systems, which then set off car alarms.

Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine, reported a ‘mass’ attack on his region but that 23 drones were destroyed.

While Ukraine has been bogged down in a land conflict in eastern Europe in which the Russians have been driving forward slowly at a heavy cost to both sides, Kyiv has also been attacking Russia with drones.

Ukraine has targeted oil refineries and airfields in an attempt to weaken Russia’s fighting potential, and has also targeted the capital several times.

The drone attacks come as Ukrainian forces are continuing to push into Russia’s western Kursk region.

The daring incursion into Russia has raised morale in Ukraine with its surprising success and changed the dynamic of the fighting.

But it is uncertain how long Ukraine will be able to hold the territory it has seized in Kursk.

It has also opened up another front in a fight where Ukrainian forces were already badly stretched.

The gains in Kursk come as Ukraine continues to lose ground in its eastern industrial region of Donbas.

The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, said in its daily report late on Tuesday that the Ukrainians had made additional advances in their incursion, now in its third week.

The Russian state news agency Tass reported that 31 people had died since Ukraine’s attack on Russia began on August 6, citing an unnamed source in the medical service – figures which are impossible to verify.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected] .

For more stories like this, check our news page .

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