分类： society

After more than five weeks of being stuck in the shallow coastal waters of Germany’s Baltic Sea coast, a young humpback whale nicknamed both “Timmy” and “Hope” has finally begun its journey to the deeper, open waters of the North Sea, carried in a custom water-filled barge towed through international waters. The unprecedented rescue operation has captured the attention of the entire German public, splitting marine experts and conservation groups over the wisdom and potential outcome of the risky mission.

The whale’s ordeal began in early March, when it likely became tangled in fishing netting before stranding on Timmendorfer Beach in Lübeck Bay on March 23. After initial efforts to dig a channel to coax the animal out to open water failed, the whale slowly moved east along the German coast, eventually settling in a shallow, low-salinity area off the coast of Poel Island, where it remained for 29 days. Over that period, the stranded whale became a national cause célèbre in Germany, with regular updates on its condition dominating local and national news cycles.

Multiple early attempts to lure the humpback away from the coast ended in failure, leaving rescuers to pursue a controversial, privately funded plan: coax the whale into a specially adapted water-filled barge, then transport it hundreds of kilometers around the Danish coast to the North Sea. The operation is funded by two German entrepreneurs, Karin Walter-Mommert and Walter Gunz, who have poured their resources into giving the whale a second chance. On Tuesday, the team achieved a major milestone when the whale voluntarily swam into the prepared barge, a moment that brought rescue workers to tears.

“I can’t even say how happy I am,” Walter-Mommert told reporters after the successful boarding, while Gunz added that he had never prayed as intensely as he had during the weeks of the rescue effort. Till Backhaus, environment minister for Germany’s northern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state, who has become the public face of the mission, hailed the operation as a landmark example of collective action. “If everything goes well, it will be in the North Sea in two days,” he told reporters, adding that early monitoring suggested the whale was in stable condition, and even reportedly sang overnight after being secured in the barge. After the barge and its tow vessel Fortuna B exited German territorial waters, it traveled through the Baltic Sea into Danish waters, on a route that will take it around the northern tip of Jutland and through the Skagerrak Strait to its final destination.

Felix Bohnsack, the mission’s technical and rescue director, praised every partner involved in the operation, from state environmental agencies to the German lifeguard association DLRG, but cautioned that the hardest part of the journey is still ahead. “We are not yet out of the woods,” he warned Wednesday, reflecting on the 24 hours since the whale entered the barge. “The moment Hope swam into the barge was inconceivable; we had tears in our eyes; these are images I will never forget.”

The operation has faced widespread skepticism from mainstream marine experts and conservation organizations, however. An expert panel from the International Whaling Commission has already distanced itself from the plan, noting that while the effort was well intentioned, the whale appears severely compromised and is unlikely to survive even after being moved to deeper water. The Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) group has echoed that assessment, warning that the whale has already sustained permanent skin damage from the low-salinity waters of the German Baltic coast. For the rescue to be successful, WDC officials note, the whale’s skin must fully heal and it must quickly learn to hunt for food independently in its new habitat. The German Oceanographic Museum has added that the weakened animal faces a constant risk of drowning during the transport due to its compromised condition.

A small number of experts have offered a more cautious optimistic take. Marine biologist Fabian Ritter told German press agency DPA that the whale has demonstrated a clear “will to live,” though he cautioned that this type of long-distance barge rescue is completely unprecedented, so no one can accurately predict what long-term effects the process will have on the animal. As the barge continues its northbound journey toward the North Sea, the entire nation of Germany remains closely watching for updates on the whale’s fate.

On a Tuesday afternoon in Dublin’s Ballymun neighborhood, a near-tragedy unfolded just steps away from the local Ballymun Garda Station, highlighting the growing danger of unresolved gang violence plaguing the community. What began as a routine police response to a reported firearm incident turned into a scare that has left local residents and public officials demanding greater safety measures.

According to official statements from An Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police service, uniformed unarmed officers responded to emergency calls around 15:00 local time. During their response, officers launched a foot pursuit of two male suspects: one teenage boy and one man in his 20s, with one suspect traveling on an e-scooter. As the chase unfolded near the residential area of Sillogue Gardens, one suspect discarded a loaded firearm in a dense bush before both suspects were taken into custody.

Shortly after the arrests were completed, an 11-year-old child exploring the area stumbled across the hidden weapon. When the child picked up the gun, the loaded weapon discharged a round. Miraculously, no bystanders or the child were injured in the shooting, but the incident has sent shockwaves through the tight-knit community.

Local councillor Conor Reddy, representing the People Before Profit party, confirmed that the incident is tied to an ongoing, bitter drugs feud that has sparked an escalating cycle of violence across Ballymun in recent months. He warned that repeated firearm incidents in residential areas are normalizing violent behavior for young people growing up in the neighborhood, a trend he called deeply alarming.

This event is not an isolated occurrence. Just three days prior, on Sunday, Gardaí from the Drug Unit conducting a routine foot patrol discovered a second loaded handgun hidden in a bush near Coultry Park’s public playground. That weapon was found with a round already in the firing chamber, and it has been sent for ballistic and forensic testing. As of the latest updates, no arrests have been made in that case, though investigators confirm they are following a clear line of inquiry.

Following Tuesday’s shooting, Gardaí confirmed that the 20s-aged suspect remains in police custody, while the teenage suspect has been released pending a full report to Ireland’s Director of Public Prosecutions. Law enforcement officials also noted they are providing support services to the family of the 11-year-old child who found the weapon, to help them process the incident.

Local public officials have united to call for urgent action to address the growing safety crisis. Independent councillor Gavin Pepper has submitted an emergency motion to Dublin City Council, demanding that new closed-circuit CCTV cameras be installed in all local public parks and that full-time park rangers be assigned to conduct regular patrols to deter illegal activity. Fianna Fáil councillor Keith Connolly added that the gun involved in Tuesday’s discharge has not yet been recovered by police, with early reports indicating two young people on bicycles removed the weapon from the scene after it fired. Connolly is calling for high-visibility policing in Ballymun matched to the resource levels already deployed in central Dublin, arguing that residents of suburban neighborhoods deserve the same level of protection as those in the city core.

Cllr Reddy emphasized that the most disturbing detail of the incident is the young age of people both involved in the feud and affected by it. “For an 11-year-old child to stumble across a loaded gun in their neighborhood is every parent’s worst nightmare,” he said, echoing the concerns of residents across Ballymun who now fear for their children’s safety as the drugs feud continues to escalate.

France’s justice system has launched a formal probe into the unexpected resurgence of a controversial platform tied to one of the country’s most high-profile violent sexual crime cases, renewing urgent calls for stronger regulation of unmoderated anonymous online spaces. The original platform, Coco.gg, first gained infamy during the 2024 trial of Dominique Pelicot, a man convicted of drugging his wife Gisèle Pelicot for more than 10 years, raping her repeatedly, and recruiting more than 50 random strangers via the platform’s chatrooms to join in the attacks. Forty-nine additional men were also convicted of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault against Gisèle Pelicot in the December 2024 ruling, all of whom had connected with Pelicot on the platform.

Long before the Pelicot case brought national attention to the platform, French law enforcement had linked Coco.gg to a litany of other serious crimes, including widespread child sexual abuse, drug trafficking, and even murder. The site operated with no content moderation whatsoever and required no user registration, allowing anonymous users to access open chatrooms with zero vetting. By the time authorities took the original platform offline in 2024, it had been cited in more than 23,000 official criminal activity reports, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office. The platform’s founder, Isaac Steidl, was arrested and charged with multiple offenses including possession and distribution of child pornography in January 2025, and he has formally denied all charges against him.

But in early April 2025, internet users spotted at least two new platforms with nearly identical design layouts and similar names to the original Coco site operating publicly online. One of the new platforms, Cocoland.cc, released a public statement denying any connection to the original Coco.gg and its founder. As of April 29, Cocoland.cc had been taken offline, but a second Cocoland-branded site remained accessible to users that morning.

Investigators have now opened an official investigation into the new sites on charges of “disseminating violent, pornographic, or offensive messages accessible to minors”, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed to the BBC. Steidl’s legal representative, attorney Julien Zanatta, told Agence France-Presse that his client has “nothing to do” with the newly emerged platforms.

Local French news outlet BFM TV conducted an on-the-record test of the accessible new platform, finding that journalists could create a pseudonymous profile and access chatrooms in seconds, with no registration requirements or identity verification checks. When a reporter posed as a 13-year-old girl, they were immediately contacted by multiple platform users who continued to send lewd photos and explicit sexual messages even after being told the account holder was underage.

Sarah El Haïry, France’s High Commissioner for Childhood, condemned the resurgence of the platform, calling it a “collective failure” in the fight against child sexual abuse, one of the most severe forms of violence against minors. “Websites like this exploit every legal and regulatory loophole, they actively seek out prey, and that prey is children,” El Haïry said in a public statement. She added that predators routinely target and approach children via these unmoderated platforms, holding both the site creators and hosting services accountable for enabling the harm. El Haïry also confirmed she has filed separate official complaints against two additional unregulated open chatroom platforms that pose similar risks to minors.

Tucked 100 kilometers southeast of Berlin, the historic riverside village of Lehde sits within the winding waterways of the Spreewald Forest, a protected UNESCO biosphere reserve where the Spree River splits into hundreds of narrow, shallow canals cutting through lush wetlands and old-growth forest. For 129 consecutive years, this tiny German village has held a singular distinction across the whole country: it is the only community in Germany that receives all its mail delivery by boat, a seasonal tradition that returns every spring as ice thaws and waterways become navigable once more.

This year, that long-awaited seasonal kickoff fell on a Wednesday in early April, when 55-year-old veteran postal worker Andrea Bunar stepped back onto her bright yellow 9-meter barge after a months-long winter break. For 14 years, Bunar has carried out this unique delivery route, switching between overland car trips in the frozen winter months and waterborne deliveries from April through October. On her first day back on the water, she stood at the stern of her vessel, guiding the shallow-draft barge through narrow channels with a single long oar that handles rowing, steering, and navigation all at once.

“The start of the season is always special for me,” Bunar shared as she set off, clad in her official postal uniform. “After the long winter break, I enjoy being in the nature and back on the water.” Winter overland delivery is far from ideal in Lehde: rural roads are often slick with ice and snow, forcing much longer travel times than the water route. From spring through mid-autumn, Bunar makes deliveries six days a week, dropping letters and packages into mailboxes that residents have mounted directly along the riverbanks. She also offers on-route postal services, selling stamps to locals along the remote waterway and collecting outgoing mail to bring back to the main postal hub.

The tradition of boat-borne mail delivery in Lehde dates back to the late 19th century. Before the service launched, villagers only collected their mail once a week, after Sunday church services. As rural-to-urban migration boomed across Germany, demand for more frequent long-distance communication surged, prompting the national postal service to establish regular delivery routes. For Lehde, a village crisscrossed by more waterways than paved roads, a boat delivery route was the only practical solution – turning the community into a tiny, Teutonic counterpart to Venice, built on interconnected canals.

Today, Bunar covers an 8-kilometer route every week, completing the full circuit in roughly two hours. On average, she delivers around 600 letters and 80 packages each week, a mix that has shifted noticeably in recent years: handwritten and personal letters have declined, while online shopping has led to a sharp jump in package volume. Bunar jokes that her small barge has started to feel like a miniature container ship, having delivered everything from full-sized refrigerators and lawnmowers to electric scooters. On her 2024 opening day, alongside the usual stack of bills and registered correspondence, she delivered a large industrial saw to one local resident.

For Bunar, this unconventional postal route is far more than just a job – it is a lifelong dream. “This is and has been my dream job all along,” she said with a smile, steering her barge past tree-lined canal banks. “Being on the water is just so relaxing – it slows down life.” The Spreewald biosphere, which protects hundreds of kilometers of waterways and a vast array of native plant and animal species, provides a quiet, scenic backdrop for her daily work, a pace of life that stands in stark contrast to the bustle of Berlin just an hour’s drive away.

As King Charles III and Queen Camilla arrive in the United States for their first state visit since Charles ascended to the British throne, one of the monarchy’s most enduring charitable initiatives is stepping into the global spotlight: The King’s Trust, formerly known as The Prince’s Trust, is celebrating 50 years of lifting young disadvantaged entrepreneurs and job seekers out of economic uncertainty, with plans to deepen its work across the U.S. and more than 20 other countries.

The organization’s origin story traces back to 1976, when a young Prince Charles poured his entire £7,600 Royal Navy severance pay into launching the charity amid widespread economic turmoil across the United Kingdom. Half a century later, the trust reports it has supported more than 1.3 million young people across the UK, turning early seeds of opportunity into household names from actor Idris Elba to fashion designer Ozwald Boateng. But for Scottish entrepreneur Mike Welch, now a Florida-based business leader who built a multimillion-dollar fortune as an online tire retailer, the charity’s impact is a deeply personal turning point that changed the entire trajectory of his life.

Welch, a working-class dyslexic teen, left school at 15 after struggling with college entrance exams and landed a job installing tires. When that position fell through, he found himself waiting in line at a Liverpool job center, staring at two options: an opening for a funeral director role, which he calls a “great career” but a “pretty grim” path, and an advertisement for a Prince’s Trust charity event offering small business grants to young aspiring entrepreneurs. He chose the grant opportunity, and less than a day later, he was pitching his unpolished idea: selling affordable tires to niche customers like his friends who owned customized modified cars. What the plan lacked in structure, it made up for in enthusiasm — and the trust backed him. He walked away with a £500 (worth roughly $677 today) grant and access to a mentor who offered office space for his new venture. That small startup eventually sold to tire giant Michelin for £50 million ($68 million). “It wasn’t a well thought out plan, really,” Welch recalled. “But they backed me. And they backed my enthusiasm. And they gave me a chance.” If he had chosen the funeral director listing instead, he says he would have built his career in death care instead of e-commerce.

Today, the organization bears a new name: it rebranded from The Prince’s Trust to The King’s Trust after Charles became monarch in 2023. It has long outgrown its UK origins, expanding its footprint primarily across countries that were once part of the British Commonwealth, with a growing focus on the U.S. market. Its core programs are built around one core belief: young people from marginalized communities do not just need funding — they need opportunity. Offerings include Get Hired, which supports young people without college degrees to land their first full-time job; Development Awards, small grants to cover work essentials like laptops, professional clothing or training; and the Enterprise Challenge, an afterschool program that tasks students with building small businesses to solve pressing local problems.

That model has already delivered tangible results in the U.S. At Chicago’s Collins Academy High School, located in the majority-Black, economically disinvested neighborhood of North Lawndale, students launched C2C: Crops2Customers, a small business that grows and sells fresh produce to local retailers that lack access to affordable healthy groceries. The team won the King’s Trust USA Enterprise Challenge, and for principal LaKenya Sharpe, the win was about far more than the prize. “A lot of times our babies, especially in this community, feel like no one’s watching, no one is looking, no one is paying attention,” Sharpe explained. “This shows that they can achieve anything. Their belief now is ‘Oh, other people are watching. Other people are seeing this.’ And they ask ‘How far can this go?’ My answer is, ‘It can go as far as you guys take it. Don’t let anything limit you.’”

To mark its 50th anniversary, the trust will host a high-profile gala in New York on Wednesday, designed to highlight the longstanding philanthropic partnership between the UK and the U.S. The event comes at a moment of unusual political tension between the two allies: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recent refusal to back U.S. military action against Iran has sparked anger from U.S. President Donald Trump. But charity observers note that Charles’ choice to center the trust during the state visit offers a quiet reminder of the shared priorities that bind the two nations beyond political rifts.

“The harsh reality today is that the need for the work of people like the trust is growing at a rate far faster than we can grow,” said Jeremy Green, trustee of the King’s Trust Group Company and chair of King’s Trust USA. JP Tribe, a senior law lecturer at the University of Liverpool who specializes in royal patronage, explained that Charles’ decision to build his own charity, rather than just lend his name to an existing organization, speaks to his longstanding commitment to youth employment. “Hopefully the gala is a kind of event which shows that both countries have and can continue to engage in very positive public benefit activity that helps the most disadvantaged in our society,” Tribe said.

King’s Trust USA has set an ambitious target: reach 1,000 young people across the country in 2024, working with local partners including education nonprofit City Year, workforce development organization Per Scholas, and Maryland public school districts to pilot its core programs. Victoria Gore, CEO of King’s Trust USA, notes that the organization’s focus on local impact aligns with what young participants already prioritize: solving problems in their own backyards. “Keeping employment in communities and keeping people in communities is actually the key to everyone’s success,” Gore said.

For Welch, who now runs the Anglo Atlantic advisory and investment firm, the blueprint for successful U.S. expansion is already proven. The model that worked for a teen in Liverpool works just as well for a student in Chicago or an aspiring entrepreneur in Orlando, he says — all it takes is partnership with local organizations that can connect the trust to the young people who need support most. “It doesn’t require giant investments to make an impact,” Welch emphasized, pointing to his own small £500 grant that grew into a multimillion-dollar business.

Looking ahead, the trust plans to launch a fundraising campaign in 2026 to build a permanent endowment for its UK operations, capping off a year of global celebrations for its 50-year legacy of opening doors for young people. The Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits for this story received support through a collaboration with The Conversation US, funded by Lilly Endowment Inc., with the AP retaining sole editorial control over the content.