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5 bodies found in sunken superyacht off Sicily as search continues: Report

Fire brigade official Luca Cari said the rescue operation is "very hard."

LONDON and ROME -- Five bodies have been found from the superyacht that sunk off the Sicilian coast, according to the Italian coast guard. One final passenger remains missing.

Four of the bodies have been brought to the surface, but none has been identified.

Two bodies were brought ashore on Wednesday morning, according to the Italian coast guard, while two other bodies were recovered later on Wednesday. The fifth body has been found, but not yet brought to the surface, Salvatore Cocina, director general of the region of Sicily, said.

MORE: US citizens among Sicily superyacht missing as search continues

Rescue teams are facing a "very hard" operation to find those still missing after the superyacht sunk on Monday, a spokesperson for the onsite fire brigade teams told ABC News.

Luca Cari said the rescue operation for the people still missing from the U.K.-flagged Bayesian was ongoing Wednesday. The vessel was lost early on Monday in stormy weather around half a mile from the fishing village of Porticello, close to the city of Palermo.

Fifteen people were rescued alive in the immediate aftermath while one body was previously recovered.

"For us, it remains a rescue operation," Cari told ABC News Wednesday morning, prior to the recovery of the five bodies, when asked if emergency services were transitioning to a recovery operation.

Asked if there was any hope that the missing may be surviving thanks to air pockets inside the sunk vessel, Cari responded: "One can never exclude anything but it seems rather improbable."

Cari said that 12 of the 18 divers leading rescue efforts on Wednesday are specialized divers who have extensive experience working inside caves.

MORE: 1 killed, 6 missing as superyacht sinks off Sicilian coast, Italian officials say

Divers have been operating inside the yacht for two days, he added. "But the job is very hard because there are large obstacles and [we] have to work in very narrow spaces."

"It's a long process and we can only operate in short spells," Cari added. Divers have to be rotated constantly, with each only able to stay underwater for around 12 minutes, he said.

Two Americans -- Christopher and Neda Morvillo -- are among the six people still missing, ABC News confirmed on Tuesday.

Christopher Morvillo is a partner at law firm Clifford Chance and represented the yacht's owner -- British tech tycoon Mike Lynch -- in his recent fraud case brought by Hewlett Packard. He is a former assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York .

Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Anne Elizabeth Judith Bloomer are also among the six missing passengers.

Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah are believed to also be among the missing.

ABC News' Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.

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Family clings to hope of air pocket in sunken superyacht as debris hampers search

PORTICELLO, Sicily — Divers searching for six missing people from a superyacht which sank off the coast of Sicily told NBC News Wednesday that debris inside the vessel, as well as its depth, were making their job difficult.  

As hopes of finding anyone alive dwindled, the divers said that they had managed to force open one of the Bayesian’s access doors but access to the cabins where people could be trapped was being hampered by detritus. 

The divers, who were not authorized to speak publicly, added that the depth of the wreck meant they were left with only 10 minutes to search the 184-foot yacht once they reached it. Then they had to return to the surface, they said. 

On Wednesday, the dock where they set off from was swarming with vehicles, boats and rescuers. Nearby tourists, reporters and photographers have gathered, eager for news. Helicopters occasionally fly over the area.  

British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and five of the 22 other people who were aboard the yacht remain unaccounted for and are believed to be trapped in the Bayesian’s hull, nearly 170 feet underwater.

Lynch's 18-year-old daughter, Hannah; Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, Judy; and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, Neda, are also missing. 

Officials confirmed Monday that at least one person, the ship’s cook, had died. 

Rescuers said Tuesday that there might be people trapped inside the cabins, especially considering the timing of the storm, but that they had so far been unable to check through the ship’s portholes.

“The operations are long and complex,” Italy’s national fire department, whose diving teams have been participating in the search, said on X . 

Italy's coast guard also said Tuesday that divers were also using a remotely-operated underwater vehicle to aid in the search.

The Bayesian is owned by a firm linked to Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who was one of the 15 people rescued Monday after it capsized near Sicily’s main city of Palermo in what Italian officials called a “violent storm.” 

Built by Italian shipbuilder Perini Navi in 2008, the U.K.-registered Bayesian could carry 12 guests and a crew of up to 10, according to online specialist yacht sites. Its nearly 250-foot mast is the tallest aluminum sailing mast in the world, according to CharterWorld Luxury Yacht Charters.  

Lynch, who was regularly described in U.K. media as “Britain’s Bill Gates,” was acquitted by a San Francisco jury of fraud charges stemming from the 2011 sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion.

Prosecutors alleged that Lynch and Autonomy’s vice president for finance, Stephen Chamberlain, had padded the firm’s finances ahead of the sale. Lynch’s lawyers argued that HP was so eager to acquire Autonomy that it failed to adequately check the books .

The Mediterranean sailing vacation was designed to be a celebration for Lynch, who brought Morvillo, one of his U.S. lawyers and Bloomer, who testified in his defense, on the trip.

Bloomer’s twin brother, Jeremy, told the BBC on Tuesday the family was “coping the best we can” and he was hopeful there might still be air pockets inside the hull. 

Chamberlain was not aboard the Bayesian.

In what appears to be a tragic coincidence, a car struck and killed Chamberlain on Saturday as he was jogging in a village about 68 miles north of London, local police said.

Claudio Lavanga and Claudia Rizzo reported from Porticello and Yuliya Talmazan from London. 

Claudio Lavanga is Rome-based foreign correspondent for NBC News.

Yuliya Talmazan is a reporter for NBC News Digital, based in London.

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Ukraine targets moscow in one of largest-ever drone attacks on russian capital as war intensifies.

Ukraine targeted Moscow with at least 11 drones on Wednesday, one of the biggest such attacks on the Russian capital since the war began. 

Russia’s Ministry of Defense said it shot down a total of 45 drones over the country on Wednesday, with 11 intercepted over the Moscow region, 23 over Bryansk, six in Belgorod, three in Kaluga and two in Kursk. 

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said some of the drones were destroyed over the city Podlsk, just 24 miles south of the Kremlin headquarters. 

“This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow using drones ever,” Sobyanin said on Telegram.

“The layered defense of Moscow that was created made it possible to successfully repel all the attacks from the enemy UAVs.”

Russian outlets aired unverified footage of several drones soaring overhead above Moscow before they were shot down by the Kremlin’s air defense system. 

Officials in the regions where the drones were spotted said no deaths or serious damage had been reported as a result of the drone strike.  

Main sites of the Ukrainian counteroffensive

• Melitopol:  Kyiv’s forces continued advancing toward the city of Melitopol on the Sea of Azov in the south. If Ukraine were to claw back Melitopol, it could bring it closer to breaking through the Russia-held land corridor linking the annexed Crimean Peninsula to mainland Russia, splitting Moscow’s forces in two and cutting their supply lines.
• Zaporizhzhia:  Intense battles raged in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, where US officials said Kyiv has launched its “main thrust” aimed at retaking 20% of its occupied territory. While Moscow claimed to have repelled Ukraine’s attacks involving dozens of armored vehicles and inflicted heavy losses on Kyiv’s troops, the Institute for the Study of War reported that the Ukrainian offensive appeared to have broken through some Russian defenses.
• Donetsk:  Ukrainian troops on Thursday recaptured the strategically significant village of Staromaiorske located in the Donetsk region south of a cluster of settlements along the Mokri Yaly river that Kyiv had seized at the start of the counteroffensive. Control of the village could open the way for Ukraine to push southward toward the coast.
• Bakhmut:  Ukrainian forces were said to be “gradually moving forward” near Bakhmut in the east, where Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar claimed Russians were dying at a rate eight times higher than Ukrainians. Geolocated footage showed that Kyiv’s troops have made gains south of the town of Klishchiivka, and additional fighting was reported near the settlements of Kudriumivka and Andriivka.

The attack was reminiscent of the May 2023 assault where eight drones were shot over Moscow in what Russian President Vladimir Putin slammed as Kyiv’s attempt to scare and provoke the Kremlin.  

Since the start of the year, Ukraine has stepped up its drone warfare against Russia, attacking oil refineries and airfields to slow the enemy invasion. 

The latest drone strikes come 15 days into Ukraine’s ground incursion in Kursk, where Kyiv has seized dozens of Russian towns and hundreds of square-miles of land past the border. 

Russia’s state media claims 31 people have died since the incursion began on Aug. 6, with official figures yet to be independently verified. 

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With more than 120,000 civilians fleeing neighboring towns, Russian officials have condemned the Ukrainian incursion and said “any possibility” for peace has passed. 

Who will negotiate with them after this, after the atrocities, the terror that they are committing against peaceful residents, the civilian population, civilian infrastructure and peaceful facilities,” said Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry. 

Kyiv has said it’s looking to establish a “buffer zone” in Russia after Ukraine took out three bridges in the region, hindering Moscow’s supply lines and redeployment efforts to fight off the invading soldiers. 

With Post wires 

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Tech Billionaire Goes Missing After Superyacht Sinks

"they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.", fatal premonition.

A British tech tycoon and his 18-year-old daughter have gone missing after the superyacht they were vacationing upon sank off the coast of Sicily.

As the BBC reports , Autonomy and Invoke Capital founder Mike Lynch and his daughter are two of the six people missing after the Bayesian, the 183-foot-long luxury yacht  on which they were sailing, sunk early in the morning on Monday after being struck by a tornado east of the port town of Palermo.

Considered " Britain's Bill Gates ," the 59-year-old tech tycoon became a billionaire after selling his enterprise software firm Autonomy to Hewlett Packard in 2011. As The Guardian  notes , Lynch was under federal fraud investigation in the United States for that sale until June of this year, when he was acquitted on all counts.

Prior to his disappearance, Lynch said that he believed that if he went to prison over the fraud charges, he would likely have died there due to a lung condition he suffers from.

"I have various medical things that would have made it very difficult to survive," he told the Guardian last month . "If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense."

Death Spout

Witnesses to the tragedy told the Italian news agency Ansa , per the BBC , that the force of the waterspout — a tornado that occurs over water, basically — caused the ship's aluminum mast to snap in half, causing the craft to become unstable and eventually sink.

Of the 22 people on board the Bayesian, 15 people — including an infant girl and Lynch's wife Angela Bacares — have been rescued. One person, whose identity has not been revealed, has been found dead, and three other people whose names have not been revealed are also missing.

As  CNN notes in its reporting on the luxury vacation gone horribly wrong, Bacares, the one-year-old girl, and six other people were hospitalized. The person who died was apparently found on the ship's hull, per an Italian Coast Guard statement provided to CNN.

Salvo Cocina, who leads Italy's civil protection agency, noted in a media conference quoted by ABC that another superyacht in the vicinity suffered far less damage than the Bayesian.

"They were in the wrong place at the wrong time," Cocina said.

He also noted, per  ABC , that the other nearby yacht, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, helped rescue Lynch's wife and the 14 others who were saved from the disaster.

More on maritime terror: Man Rowing Across Ocean Suddenly Realizes He's Surrounded by Over 1,000 Whales

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Ukraine carries out one of the largest-ever drone attacks on Moscow as Kursk incursion continues

By ruxandra iordache,cnbc • published august 21, 2024 • updated on august 21, 2024 at 12:39 pm.

• Ukraine carried out one of the largest-ever drone attacks against Moscow on Wednesday.
• "This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow with drones ever. We continue to monitor the situation," Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a Google-translated Telegram post.

Ukraine carried out one of the largest-ever drone attacks against Moscow on Wednesday, as Kyiv continues to launch counteroffensives on Russian soil.

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Russia's Defense Ministry said it destroyed 45 Ukrainian drones overnight, of which 11were over Moscow, according to a Google-translated update on Telegram .

"This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow with drones ever. We continue to monitor the situation," Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a separate Google-translated Telegram post , after assessing the strikes resulted in "no damage or casualties at the site of the fall of the debris" in earlier updates reporting the offensives.

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Some of the drones were neutralized over Podolsk, a nearby city south of Moscow, the official added . Citing Russian aviation watchdog Rosaviatsiya, state news agency Tass said in a Google-translated report that airports in the Moscow region resumed regular operations after restrictions were briefly introduced during the night.

CNBC has reached out to Ukraine's Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.

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The drone offensive took place just as Russian President Vladimir Putin carried out his first trip in 13 years to Chechnya to inspect local troops and volunteers prepared to participate in the war against Kyiv, according to a Google-translated Kremlin readout .

Ukraine weathered its own barrage of aerial attacks, with the country's air force saying it destroyed 50 out of 69 Russian-launched drones overnight, in its latest Google-translated report .

CNBC could not independently verify either set of developments on the ground.

The tides of the Russia-Ukraine war, largely carried out through artillery and drone advances, changed earlier this month, when Ukraine pivoted into the counteroffensive with a surprise cross-border incursion on Russian territory.

In the more than two years since Russia's February 2022 invasion, Kiyv has notched fewer frequent military attempts against the capital of Moscow, instead focusing its firepower on the airfields and oil facilities of the world's second-largest oil exporter. The counteroffensive has also raised questions of a potential impact on flows through the Soviet-era Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline that deliveries gas from west Siberia through the Sudzha hub in the Kursk region, before crossing into Ukraine and flowing toward Slovakia.

The incursion has likewise further slimmed the odds of a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Russia has previously conditioned its willingness to join the talks table on its ability to retain four Ukrainian territories it illegally annexed since its invasion. Kyiv has repeatedly said it will not concede territory.

Moscow is now unlikely to fall in the "negotiation trap" following Ukraine's attack on the Kursk region, according to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

"No more negotiations until the enemy is completely defeated!" he urged in a Google-translated Telegram post .

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Massive drone attacks exchanged between on Moscow, Kyiv: Officials

(LONDON) — In one of the largest exchanges of drone attacks since the Russia-Ukraine war began, dozens were shot down in Russia and Ukraine in overnight assaults, officials in both countries said.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said Wednesday they shot down more than 50 Ukrainian long-range drones over various regions, including nearly a dozen around Moscow.

The drones over Moscow were shot down Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, local time, according to Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin.

Unverified videos published online showed explosions in the sky over Russia. Sobyanin said some of the drones were destroyed in the region surrounding Moscow, brought down by the city’s layered air defense.

Ukrainian authorities have not yet commented on the attack in Russia.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces shot down 50 Shahed drones and subdued 16 others in a prolonged attack — the longest drone assault since the start of the full-scale — officials in Ukraine said.

Ten drones were shot down around Kyiv, according to Maj. Gen. Anatoliy Barhylevych, the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces. The drone assault lasted for 16 hours, from 10 p.m. Tuesday till 2 p.m. Wednesday local time, he said.

Russian authorities have not yet commented on the attack in Ukraine.

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv warned in an alert Wednesday to American citizens in Ukraine that “during the next several days and through the weekend there is an increased risk of both nighttime and daytime Russian drone and missile attacks.”

The alert said the threat was tied to Ukraine’s upcoming Independence Day and did not suggest it was connected to any Ukrainian military activities inside Russian territory.

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