Two men spent more than a week adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, surviving on a small raft and rations after their barge sank during Tropical Storm Debby.
Gerald Chessher, 57, and Vance Bryan, 48, were moving cargo on a barge from Captiva Island in Florida to Cancun when they got caught in the storm.
?The rain was so tremendous. It was like a zillion marbles,? Chessher said in an exclusive interview on ?Good Morning America.?
As waves crashed against their boat, it became clear the duo had a problem.
? We?ve lost power, our filters are clogged, our engines are running at less than half throttle and we have to abandon our load and find help because we are headed for the center of the Gulf of Mexico,? Bryan said.
The men evacuated to a raft, where they would spend the next nine days being ?tossed around like rag dolls? while the U.S. Coast Guard searched for them.
When rescuers found their capsized barge, they feared the worst. Chessher?s mother began to plan her son?s funeral.
Meanwhile, the men fought to survive in the blistering heat.They rationed their water? just ten ounces a day? and ate fish they caught from the sea.
?We were dazed. We were extremely rattled. We had lost our whole flotilla, almost our lives, we was in a storm that wasn?t supposed to be there,? Bryan said.
On Thursday, the men were spotted by a Good Samaritan on a passing boat, which notified the U.S. Coast Guard.
? Our time was up. Thank god for those guys.� They come through,? Bryan said. ?They did save our lives.?
SEOUL ? China is quietly inviting tens of thousands of North Korean guest workers into the country in a deal that will provide a cash infusion to help prop up a teetering regime with little more to export than the drudgery of a desperately poor population.
The deal, which has not been publicly announced by either Beijing or Pyongyang, would allow about 40,000 seamstresses, technicians, mechanics, construction workers and miners to work in China on industrial training visas, businesspeople and Korea analysts say. Most of the workers' earnings will go directly to the communist North Korean regime.
"The North Koreans can't export weapons anymore because of [international] sanctions, so they are using their people to raise cash," said Sohn Kyang-ju, a former South Korean intelligence official who now heads the Seoul-based NK Daily Unification Strategy Institute.
Although migrants from North Korea, as well as Vietnam, Myanmar and the Philippines, have worked illegally in China for years, it is unprecedented for Beijing to issue visas for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, several labor experts in China said. The deal, which provides workers for a region where China suffers no labor shortages, underscores how far Beijing is willing to go to support its potentially unstable protege.
Longtime leader Kim Jong Il died last year and was replaced by his son Kim Jong Un, who is in his late 20s.
"My gut feeling is that this is the beginning of a larger wave of North Korean workers coming in. It could be quite significant," said John Park, an academic who has written widely on North Korean-Chinese relations. "It will allow the North Koreans to piggyback on China's economic success to jump-start the economy under the new leadership."
Over the years, North Korea has exported smaller numbers of workers to far eastern Russia, where they work in logging and mining, as well as to Libya, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia and Angola. Hundreds of young North Korean women used to work in garment and shoe factories in the Czech Republic, but their contracts were canceled because of European human rights activists' concern that they were virtually slave laborers.
The first North Korean workers under China's new program arrived a few months ago in Tumen, a sleepy town hugging the North Korean border.
"They are already here," said a Tumen-based businessman, who asked not to be quoted by name. He said he knew of 140 North Koreans who were working in an underwear factory in town.
Other workers were reported to be arriving in Dandong, a larger border city on the Yalu River, famed as the crossing point for Chinese Communist troops during the Korean War, and in Hunchun, a border town on a new road leading to the North Korean shipping port of Rason, where China is also developing port facilities.
Under the new arrangement, each North Korean worker should bring Pyongyang cash remittances of about $2,000 per year. Out of salaries of $200 to $300 per month, workers are likely to keep less than $50. Nevertheless, the jobs are considered a privilege because wages at home are well under $10 per month and food is scarce for many families, experts say.
The North Korean government "will make a very meticulous selection process. They will pick mostly people who are very loyal, with relatives in the Workers' Party, so they can be sure they will not run away, and they will be very tightly controlled while in China," said Kim So-yeol, a reporter with NK Daily, a specialty news service in Seoul. Workers also must be married.
Kim believes that the workers already agreed to are only the first wave and that as many as 120,000 will arrive this year.
North Korea already has a small number of workers in China at North Korean-government run restaurants where young women in traditional Korean gowns sing karaoke and grilled beef and nengmyon, a cold noodle specialty, are served. But most North Korean workers in China are illegal border crossers who do hard labor for $1 a day and bowls of rice.
The remittances from the sanctioned workers should help to make up for some of the cash flow Pyongyang has lost with the collapse of several South Korean-run projects, which had netted the regime hundreds of millions.
"Right now, the North Korean economy is practically bankrupt. In order to expand employment, they need to reform, but the leadership is unwilling. So they look overseas to earn money," said Park Hyeong-jung, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification.
As for the Chinese employers, Park said, "There are no better employees than North Koreans: They are obedient, efficient and cheap."
The labor deal has not been publicized by either government, both preternaturally secretive, especially when it comes to deals struck by their respective ruling parties. Another sensitivity is that the arrangement could be seen as violating the spirit, if not the letter, of U.N. sanctions against North Korea for its continued pursuit of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
The hiring of North Korean workers is not likely to be popular in China. A recent incident in which North Korean sailors hijacked three Chinese fishing boats infuriated many Chinese who believe their government is too indulgent of Pyongyang. And although many parts of China have labor shortages, the northeastern provinces don't.
The North Koreans "will be competing directly with local youths for job opportunities," said Zhang Lianggui, a North Korea expert at the Central Party School in Beijing.
WASHINGTON ? After three and a half years of attempting to halt Iran?s nuclear program with diplomacy, sanctions and sabotage, the Obama administration and its allies are imposing sweeping new sanctions that are meant to cut the country off from the global oil market. Many experts regard it as the best hope for forcing Iran to change its course.
Abedin Taherkenareh/European Pressphoto Agency
A complex in Khuzestan Province in southwestern Iran is part of the country’s vast oil industry, suffering already from sanctions.
On Sunday, the European Union is putting in place a complete embargo of oil imports from Iran, which was the Continent?s sixth-biggest supplier of crude in 2011.
Three days ago, the United States imposed a new round of sanctions that could punish any foreign country that buys Iranian oil. However, it has issued six-month exemptions to 20 importers of Iranian oil who have significantly cut their purchases, including China, which has openly opposed the pressure on Iran.
Even before these steps, Iran conceded last week that its oil exports were down 20 to 30 percent. Its currency has plunged more than 40 percent against the dollar since last year. But so far the escalating sanctions, which the Bush administration started and the Obama administration has intensified, have failed in their central goal of forcing Iran?s mullahs to stop enriching uranium. Negotiations have stalled, though it is unclear whether this is a tactical move by Iran or a collapse of the latest diplomatic effort.
On Friday, Iran?s ambassador to the United Nations indicated that the harsh new measures might not sway Tehran, saying negotiations were at a ?critical point.? The sanctions indicate ?that they are not willing to engage with us in a meaningful dialogue,? the envoy, Mohammad Khazaee, told reporters.
Still, President Obama and his European allies ? with little help from the Chinese, who actually increased their purchases of Iranian crude in May ? are placing a bet that another big turn of the economic screws may change Iran?s attitude.
?It is our assessment that the Iranians have not experienced deep enough sanctions, long enough to fully understand what their isolation means,? a senior administration official closely involved in strategy said Friday in an interview.
?The supreme leader,? the official said, referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ?has not made the decision to deal,? even though the administration argues that it was the imminence of the newest round of sanctions that brought Iran to three rounds of negotiations in recent months.
David S. Cohen, Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, described the measures as particularly potent because they focus on the ?lifeblood of Iran?s economy.?
?We?re going directly at their revenue, and making it increasingly difficult for them to access that revenue? by isolating their financial system, Mr. Cohen said.
Already Iran?s exports have declined to about 1.5 million barrels a day from about 2.5 million barrels a day last year.
The round of penalties that come into full effect on Sunday, some historians say, represent one of the boldest uses of oil sanctions as a tool of coercion since the United States cut off oil exports to Japan in 1940. That experiment did not end well: The Japanese decided to strike before they were weakened.
The measures, of course, are not the only tool in use. Mr. Obama has tried open appeals to the Iranian people and private letters to the supreme leader. And he accelerated the most sustained cyberattack on a sovereign state in American history, a covert program known as Olympic Games that sought to exploit vulnerabilities in Iran?s nuclear program.
Even though the covert program has set Iran back and sanctions have made it difficult for the country to obtain high-technology goods, the Iranians have nonetheless added to their stockpile of enriched uranium. Iran now has enough to produce roughly five weapons, if it enriched the fuel to higher levels and could build a weapon. The Israelis are again asserting that Iran?s progress is about to tip it into a ?zone of immunity,? where its program could not be stopped.
Mr. Obama keeps repeating that there is ?time and space? to force a diplomatic solution, though he has been deliberately vague about how much time.
Mitt Romney has complained that the president has been ?weak? on Iran, noting that as negotiations grind on, Iran is continuing to enrich uranium. But he has not been specific about what kind of additional pressure he would impose.
R. Nicholas Burns, who helped design the Bush administration?s sanctions strategy, said Friday that the combination of the new American and European sanctions ?are the toughest sanctions imposed to date.?
He continued, ?We should give them a few months to have the kind of impact for which they are designed ? to force Iran to negotiate more seriously.?
CAIRO (Reuters) - The Egyptian government signed an agreement on Sunday with the Saudi-based Islamic Development Bank (IDB) that will provide $1 billion to finance energy and food imports, the government said in a statement.
The agreement with the International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation, part of the IDB, was signed in Cairo by Waleed Abdul Mohsen al-Wohaib, chief executive officer of the institution, and the Egyptian government, the statement said.
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Coverage: Live on BBC One, BBC Two, BBC HD Channel, red button, BBC Radio 5 live, mobiles, tablet and the BBC Sport website
Andy Murray is refusing to look beyond his Wimbledon third-round match with Marcos Baghdatis after seeing Rafael Nadal knocked out by Lukas Rosol.
Nadal, who has beaten Murray in the last two semi-finals and could have met him there again this year, was stunned by the world number 100 in round two.
"It is completely irrelevant to me unless I reach the semi-finals," said Murray, who is third on Centre Court.
"I've got a guy who's been in a Grand Slam final next so that's my focus."
Murray game impresses Baghdatis
Baghdatis reached the Australian Open final in 2006, the same year he beat Murray en route to the last four of Wimbledon.
That was their only previous match on grass and the career head-to-head now stands at 3-3, although Murray has won the last two.
The fourth seed is the highest-ranked player left in the bottom half of the draw but he is aware of the threat posed by world number 43 Baghdatis.
"The draw has opened up for Philipp Kohlschreiber - who was meant to be playing Nadal in the next round - not me," Murray told BBC Sport.
"I've got a tough opponent in Baghdatis and maybe he will have a performance like Rosol, you never know, so you've just got to be ready for each match."
Baghdatis is coached by Miles Maclagan, who knows Murray well having worked with the Scot from late 2007 to July 2010.
"But I played him again in Brisbane and felt much more comfortable. Now I wouldn't have thought it would have any bearing on the match really."
Baghdatis beat Albert Montanes in the first round and was leading Grigor Dimitrov 7-5 4-1 when the Bulgarian retired in round two.
The 27-year-old's first appearance on Centre Court this year is against the home favourite, but he said: "The crowd here are very nice to all the players and I'm looking forward to going back to the big courts.
"For sure it's going to be a tough match for me - I'll just go out there, try to find a way to win and do my best.
"He does everything very good. He's a great player - he serves well and has all the strokes, but maybe his backhand down the line is the nicest shot.
Of the Maclagan connection, Baghdatis added: "He knows Andy very much but I don't think we'll talk too much about Andy, we'll talk about what I have to do.
"Everybody knows Andy, everybody knows what he's capable of doing on the court. We'll fight and I'll maybe try to be the winner."
Sixth seed Serena Williams opens play on Centre against Zheng Jie at 13:00 BST, with David Ferrer v Andy Roddick on court before Murray and Baghdatis.
Petra Kvitova, Juan Martin del Potro and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga all play on Court One, with Ana Ivanovic, Victoria Azarenka and Marin Cilic - a potential last-16 opponent for Murray - on Court Two.
Rosol returns to action when he plays Kohlschreiber in the second match on Court 12.
Thousands of Sudanese children have fled the violence in a remote region to reach a refugee camp in Yida, South Sudan. More Photos �
YIDA, South Sudan ? Thousands of unaccompanied children are streaming out of an isolated, rebellious region of Sudan, fleeing a relentless aerial assault and the prospect of famine.
Sent by their parents on harrowing odysseys across battlefields and malaria-infested swamps, the children are repeating one of the most sordid chapters of Sudanese history: the perilous flight of the so-called Lost Boys during the civil war in the 1990s, who wandered hundreds of miles dodging militias, bombers and lions.
Now, a new generation of Lost Boys, and some Lost Girls, too, is emerging from a war that, despite a peace agreement, has never completely ended.
Haidar Musa, 14, recently trudged into the muddy, mushrooming refugee camp here in Yida, which is growing by 1,000 people a day, turning a lush green jungle into a squalid sea of white United Nations tarps. With him were eight other boys with shredded clothes and bellies full of grass, their only sustenance for several days.
They stood barefoot in the dirt, eagerly watching an enormous vat of beans come to a boil, ready for a real meal and a new home: a crushed cardboard box to sleep on, in a rat-infested hut.
?We don?t talk about our parents anymore,? Haidar said, fumbling with the broken buttons of a donated shirt. ?Even if we go back, we won?t find anybody.?
John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, which fights to end genocide and crimes against humanity, worked closely with the Lost Boys 20 years ago. ?Those survivors seemed to have a one-time story, never to be repeated,? he said. ?But here we are again.?
Sudan, perhaps more than any other country in this region, seems to have a destructive capacity to sink back to the worst days of its past.
So many other African nations have plunged into civil war but eventually pulled themselves out. Even bullet-riddled Somalia is finally shaking off chaos. But the Sudanese have essentially been at war with themselves for 56 years, with few respites. Today, this war grinds on in many of the same old places, in many of the same old ways.
A hallmark of the Sudanese government?s counterinsurgency strategy is an unsparing assault on civilians, unleashed in the south in the 1980s, the Nuba Mountains in the 1990s and Darfur in the early 2000s.
Now, it is the Nuba Mountains again, where bombing by the Sudanese air force has forced entire villages to retreat to mountaintop caves, leaving fields unplowed, markets empty and people on the brink of starvation.
The bloodshed in Nuba is directed by some of the same officials responsible for previous massacres, like President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, in power since 1989, and Ahmed Haroun, governor of the state that encompasses the Nuba Mountains. Both are wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity for the bloodshed in Darfur, and Mr. Bashir has also been charged with genocide.
The current offensive seems to be putting Nuban children square in the cross hairs, and often there is nowhere to run.
A caretaker in the Yida camp said 14 boys trying to get here were gunned down at a Sudanese Army checkpoint. Bomb shrapnel has sliced apart countless others. Disease is sweeping the countryside, and many infants who make it to Yida on their mothers? backs are so skinny and sick that they are immediately treated in a field hospital with feeding tubes up their noses.
Since even before independence in 1956, Sudan has been dogged by center-periphery tensions often expressed in exploding shells. Just as the central government has a tradition of brutality, minority groups in the hinterland have a tradition of heavily armed insurrection.
Today, tens of thousands of Nuban soldiers, equipped with artillery, rockets and tanks, are refusing to disarm until the government falls in Khartoum, Sudan?s capital, saying that they have been marginalized and oppressed, partly because many Nubans are non-Arab and Christian, while the Khartoum government is dominated by Arab Muslims.
The newly independent nation of South Sudan, which split off from Sudan last year, is suspected of funneling weapons to the Nuban rebels, who operate just north of the border and fought alongside the southern Sudanese for years. Sudan and South Sudan have nearly gone to war in recent months, after hitting an impasse over how to share oil profits and demarcate the border.
The economies of both countries are reeling, with riots breaking out across Sudan this past week, testing Mr. Bashir?s grip on power and encouraging the Nuban rebels to fight on. No one sees this war letting up anytime soon.
MEXICO CITY ? �A single party dominated Mexico for most of the past century, and its loss 12 years ago proved to many that the country was finally a democracy. Now the nation's voters seem ready to bring it back to power in Sunday's presidential election.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party, led by telegenic former Mexico State Gov. Enrique Pena Nieto, has held a strong lead throughout the campaign, and also seems poised to retake at least a plurality in Congress.
The party has been bolstered by voter fatigue with a sluggish economy and the sharp escalation of a drug war that has killed roughly 50,000 Mexicans over the past six years. The desire for change suddenly works to benefit the party known as the PRI that ran Mexico from 1929 to 2000.
Hoping for a shocking upset are leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose narrow loss in Mexico's last election led to charges of voter fraud and weeks of massive protests, and the candidate of the ruling National Action Party, Josefina Vazquez Mota, the first woman ever nominated for the presidency by a major party in Mexico.
It would be a once-unthinkable comeback for the PRI, which many believed was doomed after its 2000 loss and which was still reeling in the last presidential election, when it finished a weak third.
Pena Nieto has cast himself as a pragmatic economic moderate in the tradition of the last three PRI presidents of the 20th century. He has called for greater private investment in Mexico's state-controlled oil industry, and has said he will try to reduce violence by attacking crimes that hurt ordinary citizens while deemphasizing the pursuit of drug kingpins.
All of the parties are accusing rivals of emulating the traditional PRI tactic of offering voters money, food or benefits in return for votes. Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party says Pena Nieto's campaign has handed supporters prepaid money cards worth nearly $5.2 million (71 million pesos).
PRI activists have published photographs of truckloads of handouts it said were given out by Democratic Revolution backers.
But electoral officials have repeatedly insisted that outright fraud is almost impossible under the country's elaborate, costly electoral machinery.
The government also promises efforts to avoid outbursts of violence linked to the country's endemic drug gang violence.
Military and civilian officials announced that the army would step up election day patrols in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, where a bomb in a pickup truck exploded outside city hall on Friday.
The 45-year-old Pena Nieto, who is married to a soap opera star, also has been dogged by allegations that he overspent his $330 million campaign funding limit and has received favorable coverage from Mexico's television giant, Televisa.
University students launched a series of anti-Pena Nieto marches in the final weeks of the campaign, arguing that his party hasn't changed since its days in power.
Pena Nieto says his party has abandoned the heavy-handed ways of the past and will govern in an open and pluralistic manner, and many say the PRI would not be able to reimpose its once near-total control even if it wanted to because of changes in society, the judiciary and Congress.
"The context has changed dramatically," said Rodrigo Salazar, a professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico City. "Society isn't the same. It's a very critical society, a very demanding society, with a strong division of powers."
The final pre-election polls on Wednesday, the last day they could legally be published, showed Pena Nieto with a lead ranging from 8 to 17 percentage points.
Lopez Obrador, 58, was a center-leftist as Mexico City mayor and pioneered some programs that Pena Nieto emulated in the neighboring state of Mexico, such as local pensions for the elderly. But he alienated many voters with his refusal to recognize the narrow victory of National Action's Felipe Calderon in 2006, declaring himself "legitimate president" and mounting protests that gridlocked much of the capital for weeks.
Lopez Obrador says he wants to keep state control over the national oil company, make Mexico self-sufficient in energy and food production, and fund new social spending and jobs programs by cutting waste and corruption, not by raising taxes.
Vazquez Mota, 51, is a former secretary of education and social development in the conservative administrations of President Vicente Fox and his successor, Calderon. She campaigned on the slogan, "different," but has struggled to distinguish herself from Calderon while maintaining the support of the party's power structure.
She has pledged to continue Calderon's war on drug cartels, increase penalties for public corruption and ease rules on hiring and firing employees in order to spur economic growth. On the last day of campaigning, she even promised to make Calderon her attorney-general if elected.
The latest polls showed Pena Nieto favored by 32.2 percent to 41.2 percent of voters, in polls with margins of error ranging from 2.5 to 3 percent.
Lopez Obrador had support ranging from 23.8 to 25.4 percent. Josefina Vazquez Mota had 18.8 to 20.8 percent.
Also running is Gabriel Quadri de la Torre, 57, the candidate of the New Alliance Party, which has links to the powerful teacher's union. His poll support remains in the low single digits.
Mexicans are also electing 500 members of the lower house of Congress and 128 senators. Voters will also select Mexico City's mayor and governors in the states of Chiapas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Tabasco and Yucatan. The president is elected for a single six-year term and cannot stand for re-election.
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