Life Raft

On his second day in Los Angeles, Suraj Sharma was on a mission. "In-N-Out Burger is gonna happen whether or not anything else happens," said the lanky 19-year-old star of "Life of Pi," who was visiting the U.S. for the first time from his home in Delhi, India. In town in June for a few days of promoting the film and visiting college campuses, Sharma was determined to experience some of California's creature comforts - the miraculous weather and a double-double, animal style.

The old wounds, physical and spiritual, healed long ago. When Lou Zamperini returned to Japan recently, it was in the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation. If any American during World War II had earned the right to hate, it was Louis Silvie Zamperini. Once one of America's best track and field athletes, he was beaten almost daily for 2 1/2 years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and fed a near-starvation diet.

Skipper David Giese of Costa Mesa looked at the bleary-eyed crew in the life raft and couldn't bear to say aloud what he was thinking: They were going to die. He and his five-member crew aboard the Morado, a 150-foot commercial fishing vessel, left Los Angeles Harbor in early March in calm seas for what was to be a 17-day trip to Ecuador. Day 1 passed uneventfully, as did several succeeding days. But on Day 11, March 11, they were 64 miles off the Mexican coast when it all began to go wrong.

Skipper David Giese of Costa Mesa looked at the bleary-eyed crew in the life raft and couldn't bear to say aloud what he was thinking: They were going to die. He and his five-member crew aboard the Morado, a 150-foot commercial fishing vessel, left Los Angeles Harbor in early March in calm seas for what was to be a 17-day trip to Ecuador. Day One passed uneventfully, as did the succeeding days--until Day 11, March 11, when they were 64 miles off the Mexican coast and it all began to go wrong.

Standing on the deck of a sinking fishing trawler off San Nicolas Island, Dennis Tye watched the ship's only life raft drifting away. As waves pounded against the Yatahay early Wednesday morning, water flooded its engine room at a rate of 1,000 gallons a minute under a pitch-black sky. Tye decided it was time to act. "I didn't think about it too much. I was pretty desperate," said Tye, 32, a few hours after he was rescued. "I knew we wouldn't survive unless we got the raft."

The conventional wisdom in Europe, America and Asia--and even in Russia itself--is that Boris Yeltsin's presidency is doomed. Yet the survival of Yeltsin and the Russian federation remain seriously important to Western governments, to the extent that the annual meeting of the Group of Seven, scheduled for Japan in July, may be moved up on an emergency basis to put the industrial nations' collective strength into a strategy for aiding Russia.

Current efforts by American politicians, business interests and unions to pressure China to increase the value of its currency, the yuan, to counteract the burgeoning U.S. trade deficit will not work. The yuan is not the primary cause of China's export competitiveness, and the Chinese government cannot run the domestic economic and political risks that a currency revaluation would bring. In January, the U.S.

PORTSMOUTH, Va. - The ship's engineer was seasick and spitting up his medication. A deckhand had been tossed past the mainmast, breaking three ribs. The captain had been slammed against a cabin table, wrenching his back. He could barely walk. Capt. Robin Walbridge, sailing the tall ship Bounty from Connecticut to Florida, was trying to outflank Hurricane Sandy, which was roaring toward New York. But instead of slipping around the storm, the ship had crossed directly into Sandy's path.

A U.S. Army helicopter carrying seven people crashed and sank Tuesday in rough seas off the U.S. Virgin Islands, authorities said. The seven were rescued unharmed from a life raft.

Three fishermen were rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter Saturday after spending a cold night at sea in a life raft. The fishermen's boat sank Friday.