Palermo, Italy
Reuters
 — 

A diver died on Friday during preliminary operations to recover British tech tycoon Mike Lynch’s superyacht from the waters off the coast of northern Sicily, local police said.

The 56-meter-long (184-foot) Bayesian was moored off the small port of Porticello, near Palermo, in August last year when it was likely hit by a downburst, a very strong downward wind, killing seven people, including Lynch and his daughter Hannah.

The accident happened on Friday while the diver was underwater in Porticello, police said, adding that the precise cause of death was still unknown.

The attempt to lift the yacht off the seabed is expected later this month and should help shed light on how a supposedly unsinkable vessel disappeared into the sea.

Italian news agencies reported that the diver was a 39-year-old Dutch national who worked for the Dutch specialist salvage company Hebo Maritiemservice.

The AGI news agency said the man was hit by a piece of metal as divers were cutting the boom – the horizontal pole attached to the vertical mast of the ship – from the wreck of the Bayesian.

Hebo was not immediately available for comment.

A spokesperson for TMC Marine, the UK-based marine consultancy leading the salvage effort, confirmed the death in a statement.

“The circumstances of the accident are currently being investigated by the authorities and all parties are offering their full cooperation. We are giving every support to the salvage team on site at this heartbreaking time and our thoughts are with the family of the deceased,” the spokesperson said.

Editor’s Note: A new episode of “The Whole Story: “Saving Venice,” a city threatened by rising sea levels and the millions of tourists desperate to visit while they still can, airs Sunday, May 11th at 8pm ET/PT on CNN.

CNN
 — 

Gondolas, canals and all those bridges. For many tourists, Venice is all that and only that: the floating city born for Instagram.

For others it’s a symbol of the excesses of the modern world: a city turned into a theme park, trampled by overtourism and hollowed out by vacation rentals. The statistics are stark. Around 30 million tourists visit Venice every year, dwarfing the local population, which has now dwindled to less than 50,000.

Venetians wanting to remain in their city face a lack of housing stock — since homes have been converted into vacation rentals — a lack of shops for day-to-day life, and a lack of jobs for anyone not involved in the tourist industry.

In the meantime, the visitors keep coming, and keep posting those delectable canal shots on Instagram. Around 90% of them are thought to be day-trippers — so although they don’t take up that ever-dwindling housing stock, they use city resources but leave virtually no money behind in the local economy.

No wonder some people call Venice the “dying city” and the “sinking city,” Simone Venturini, the city councilor for tourism, tells CNN in documentary “The Whole Story: Saving Venice.”

But while the city authorities’ actions — like the 5 euro (roughly $5) daytripper fee trialed in 2024 and set to be repeated in 2025, and the Smart Control Room, which monitors the movements of visitors to the city — have met a mixed response, plenty of other Venetians are taking their own steps to preserve life in the city as they know it.

What’s more, many of them are working with visitors, hoping to allay the damage caused by mass tourism with more sustainable projects.

In 2018, Emanuele Dal Carlo launched Fairbnb — a platform for vacation rentals owned strictly by local residents.

One of the major reasons for the exodus of Venetians to the mainland in recent years is the dearth of housing stock in the city. There are currently 8,322 Airbnb listings in Venice according to Inside Airbnb, 77% of which are entire properties. Two thirds of hosts have multiple listings –— meaning they’re not just renting out their spare room, or their late nonna’s apartment.

“We have nothing against private property, but if you rent 20 houses only to tourists, then you become a problem for your community,” says Dal Carlo, who is one of the tens of thousands of Venetians who have left the city for the mainland, a 10-minute train ride (plus ferry ride to the city center) away.

Fairbnb is a similar platform — but all its rentals are owned by local residents, and owners are capped on the number of properties they can advertise.

What’s more, 50% of the platform fees are channeled into an on-the-ground project in the destination they are visiting.

Tourists may feel that they’re not doing much harm by renting a regular apartment for a few days, but with a rapidly depleting housing stock for locals, Dal Carlo warns that there’s a tipping point.

“There’s not going to be another Venice,” he says. “Once you have helped change this place forever, it’s not coming back.”

Other residents fight decline by keeping traditions going. Elena Almansi practices voga alla veneta, the stand-up rowing technique used by Venetians to navigate the lagoon for centuries. A competitor in Venice’s regular regattas, she’s one of a group of women offering rowing lessons with Row Venice, a sustainable tourism initiative which takes visitors on trips through the canals of the city, seeing its buildings the way they were meant to be seen: from the water.

Then there’s Matteo Silverio, whose startup, Rehub, takes waste materials from the famous glassblowing process on Murano, and upcyles it, using a 3D printer to turn it into artistic creations, including crockery.

Another person taking up the baton is Michela Bortolozzi, a designer who had lived abroad but returned to her native city during the pandemic. Realizing she wanted to stay and buffer the community, she opened a shop, now called Relight Venice, where she makes products that look like souvenirs but give you pause for thought.

Her signature products are candles and soaps taking the form of the architectural flourishes of the Venetian gothic architecture. She started off by making lollipops using the pattern of the Doge’s Palace’s famous colonnade.

“That was the question: you want to consume it or keep it?” she asks.

“My point is that Venice is as beautiful as my product — much more so. Don’t consume Venice because we cannot rebuild or re-buy it.”

She hopes that other young people will open similar businesses. “If we can fight, we can stay,” she says.

Is it not already too late to save Venice? Not according to Fabio Carrera, whose Venice Project Center at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts has been studying the city’s problems since 1988. Born in Venice, he splits his time between Italy and the US.

“I think enough people realize that the [tourism] card has been overplayed now and there’s going to be some sort of retrenching,” he says, mentioning the recent protests in destinations like Mallorca and the Canary Islands as examples of local communities pushing back.

“I’m oddly optimistic,” he says.

Carrera’s team studies ways to improve the liveability of the city, from introducing boat routes for deliveries in order to cut down on moto ondoso (the waves produced by boats which slap against and weaken the city foundations) to looking at the potential for a microalgae farm in the lagoon.

The lagoon is of course Venice’s blessing and curse. It was the water that allowed the city to become one of the most formidable maritime powers of the medieval and renaissance periods, and found the Republic of Venice — still to this day the world’s longest-lasting republic.

But new canals cut through the lagoon during the industrial age, increasing maritime traffic and rising water levels due to climate change all mean that the city is flooding easier and more frequently than ever before.

In 2020, Venice saw the debut of the MOSE flood barriers, which had been in the works since 1988. But already the barriers — which were designed to be raised a handful of times each year — are in frequent use, especially during the fall and winter. In its first 14 months, the system was used 33 times.

Not only does this have sweeping cost implications — the barriers cost around 200,000 euros ($206,000) to raise every time — but there are knock-on effects for the lagoon, which is “designed” by nature to flush itself out twice a day. Closing the barriers also means closing off access to the port, which is one of the most important in Italy.

But while scientists are studying how to handle the lagoon, Carrera is looking at more practical issues to combat Venice’s major social problem: the lack of residents. For starters, he thinks a better transport system would help attract people to live in Venice.

“It could make a big difference if we had, say, a subway system which was talked about for a while,” he says. ”You could live in Venice and work on the mainland and get there real quick. On the mainland around Venice, there are plenty of jobs, hi tech jobs — all the stuff we’re talking about bring here already, is there.”

Dal Carlo agrees that attracting people who have nothing to do with tourism to live in Venice is key. “I think it’s important that we are trying to attract people, or to maintain here people that are clever, entrepreneurial because that is in the genes of the city,” he says, adding that Venice was never “a city of shop owners and renters. That’s what it’s become.”

Bortolozzi believes that responsible tourism can help. “I think it is important that if people from abroad meet a local person to get to know the culture, get to know the tradition, get to know our problem and our happiness… he can maybe enjoy Venice in a nice way and maybe help us to preserve it,” she says.

Cesare Perris, who owns Squero San Isepo, one of the last boatyards in the city, fears it might be too late to help Venice — but adds that, if it isn’t, it could be huge. He quotes a friend, who likes to say that saving Venice is the same as saving the world from mass tourism:

“If you find a way to have tourists in Venice that don’t kill the city, we maybe find the method to save all the cities of the world.”

CNN
 — 

Sasha had only heard a little about South Carolina, and even less about the town of Hartsville, when he and his family moved there in September 2022.

They were forced to suddenly leave behind their life in Kyiv because of the war with Russia. They are not the only Ukrainians in the “small, rural community” where they have been welcomed and begun to rebuild their lives.

“For me, the United States, it was like a fortress of democracy, of freedom, of opportunities, and I thought, finally, finally, I’m in the place where I can begin my life all over again,” Sasha, who is not using his last name for fear of reprisal, told CNN.

Sasha, his wife and his young daughter are among the approximately 280,000 Ukrainians who have relocated to the United States through “Uniting for Ukraine” (U4U), a US government humanitarian parole program that allowed private US citizens to sponsor and help support Ukrainian refugees.

Now, Sasha’s family and scores of others who came to the US under the U4U program fear their lives may once again be uprooted, as decisions on parole extensions, temporary protected status, and work authorizations have been paused amid the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to the immigration system.

“This really could be catastrophic, not just for the Ukrainian families, but for our community,” said Curtis Lee, Sasha’s sponsor and a member of “Carolinas for Ukraine.”

A spokesperson for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services said there is “an administrative hold on all pending USCIS Benefit Requests filed by Parolees Under the Uniting for Ukraine (U4U) Process.”

“This is pending the completion of additional vetting to identify any fraud, public safety, or national security concerns,” they said in a statement to CNN. “USCIS is committed to safeguarding the integrity of our nation’s immigration system and carrying out President Trump and Secretary Noem’s mandate to make America safe again.”

For Liana Avetisian and Alina Mirzoian, Ukrainian cousins who settled with their family in DeWitt, Iowa, that “administrative hold” could spell the end to their American dream. They paid thousands in application fees through the immigration system but have not yet received temporary protected status (TPS) and the administration suspended processing humanitarian parole extensions before theirs were granted, their sponsor Angela Boelens explained. The lack of action threatens to leave them in limbo.

Avetisian said she feels betrayed. Boelens, who is also the president of Iowa Newcomer Community & Exchange (IA NICE), said the community feels betrayed too.

“This community feels absolutely devastated. We don’t know what we’re going to do with all the home mortgages here in town, the people who are losing their valuable employees, their friends in school are crying. They had to hire a counselor at the school locally to help the children understand some of what’s going on,” she told CNN. Boelens explained that the community “had raised half a million dollars to buy transitional houses” for newcomers to stay in. Some have since been able to buy houses of their own.

“This entire community feels really hurt, and this is a very, very red community, they’re in disbelief,” she said. “So, they’ll never step up again and help people like they did, because they also feel like they’ve been betrayed.”

Sam Heer, who employs four Ukrainian workers including Avetisian and Mirzoian, told CNN “it would hurt” if they had to leave.

Heer said the community is committed to helping them with their bills. He applied for work visas for the four of them, but he doesn’t “have a good feel” for the status of those permits, he said.

“They’re great assets to our community, they’re hard working. They want to learn. They want to provide for their families,” he said.

The town of Hartsville is also bracing for the potential impact if their Ukrainian neighbors cannot stay.

“They have become such an integral part of our community,” Lee told CNN, noting at least one company that relies on skilled labor from resettled Ukrainians. “People just embraced it. And it’s going to tear us apart if that happens.”

Lee warned that the US government “doing nothing will actually force many of them to leave.”

“They should at least give them some certainty,” he said, “even if they just kicked the can down the road and gave them all a blanket parole and work authorization until after the midterms.”

Lee, who said he is a registered Republican, believes the U4U program aligns with the Trump administration’s priorities. Because of the sponsorship aspect, it has a relatively low cost for the US government. Boelens described the program as “the right kind of refugee program, handled perfectly.”

“The US is not on the hook for tickets,” Lee noted. “We are basically taking on the burden of resettlement,” he noted.

“Little towns like mine, we need to have people coming in, just from a pure population standpoint, and especially ones that are going to bring additional talent and diversity,” he said.

The Ukrainians who came to the US through U4U “followed the legal process.”

“They went through the background checks. They’ve done everything that they’re supposed to do. They follow the laws. They’re paying their taxes,” Lee said. “For all this talk of, well, you know, we’re going to get rid of the immigrants that supposedly aren’t good for the US – that’s not this group.”

Uncertainty and fear

For the Ukrainians who may be affected, the specter of uprooting their lives again has already been traumatizing.

“I feel really bad about the situation,” said Mirzoian, telling CNN she feels “nervous all the time.”

Avetisian who came with her husband as well as her now 14-year-old daughter, and Mirzoian came to DeWitt in May 2023 from near Kyiv. They had returned to Ukraine after relocating for two months to Bulgaria at the start of Russia’s war, but then in autumn 2022 found that life there was “harder and more dangerous” amid Moscow’s relentless attacks on critical infrastructure.

“No light, electricity, and it was cold, and we were sitting in our houses with candles,” she explained.

When they came to DeWitt, they were welcomed into the community, where a couple of other Ukrainian families had also settled.

“People here are all so good. They really helped us,” Avetisian told CNN. Now, if they are made to leave, they don’t feel that they can return to Ukraine.

“I don’t want to take my 14-year-old daughter and go to another country and start there and learn a new language and make new friends and look for a new house. It’s very hard,” she said.

Sasha said he feels like he’s back in the “worst period” of his life during the war, where he felt like he was not in control of his life.

His family fled Kyiv with just minutes to pack their suitcases after explosions near their home and separated for several months – his wife and daughter went to Italy while he remained helping build shelters in Ukraine. He heard about the U4U program through a friend, and the family quickly made the decision to apply so they could be together.

They were “a little bit confused and scared because we don’t know where we’re going, we didn’t know what to expect,” said Sasha.

Speaking over video chat with Lee and his wife, Barbara, who were their sponsors, helped assuage some of those fears, he said. Their concerns were further eased when they arrived.

Now, Sasha has restarted his construction business in Hartsville, building affordable tiny houses out of shipping containers.

“He’s invested a lot, not just in time and effort, but he has a rental contract for the place he’s using to build stuff, he’s purchased a lot of equipment,” Lee explained.

“I’m trying to not think about” possibly having to leave the US, Sasha said. He recalled that his daughter had just begun to talk when they relocated to the US after having to move several times.

“She had the same question all the time, ‘Daddy, where is our home?’ When you can’t answer this question, I can’t even explain how it feels,” he told CNN. “A couple months ago, she started to call this place where we live in, she started to call it home.”