's coast guard on Monday started evacuating a stranded cruise ship with nearly 1,000 people on board after tugboats failed to pull the luxury liner off an underwater sand bank in the .
The 651 passengers, most of them elderly Germans, were being transferred from the Mona Lisa onto two naval ships, which would take them to Ventspils, a port city in northwestern , the coast guard said. The passengers were descending ladders from the liner to the naval ship, it said.
Rescuers also planned to remove most of the 327 crew members and six crew interns from the ship, which ran aground early Sunday about 10 miles off Latvia's coast.
Source: Business Week