Latest news with #BlackForest
Daily Mail
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
True crime drama fans 'binge-watched in one sitting' hits BBC iPlayer for free - after being hailed as 'wonderfully authentic and unpretentious'
A true crime drama fans have 'binge-watched in one sitting' has hit BBC iPlayer and can now be watched for free. The four-part series, titled The Black Forest Murders, was recently acquired by the broadcaster. Based on the non-fiction book SOKO Erle by Walter Roth, the German show takes inspiration from the criminal cases of two murdered women in southern Germany. The fictional series stars Nina Kunzendorf as Senior Detective Barbara Kramer and Tilman Strauß as Thomas Riedle, amongst others. A synopsis reads: 'The clock is ticking... When a woman is bludgeoned to death, detectives face mounting pressure to crack the case and catch a killer. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new Showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. 'Intense crime drama inspired by real-life cases.' BBC boss Sue Deeks previously said: 'The Black Forest Murders is an authentic and compelling crime series focusing on the work of a meticulous investigative team. 'As well as being a gripping murder mystery, the series offers a detailed look at the challenges of solving complex crimes, and the psychological toll on those involved in such high-stakes investigations.' The series has become a hit with viewers and one wrote on Google: 'I watched the entire series in one sitting and thought it was excellent. 'The meticulous investigation was amazing. Nina Kunzendorf was at her best as a fair and likeable boss in a strong team. 'Unfortunately, the translation often came across poorly, as several actors spoke in dialect. But thank goodness there's subtitles in the media library. It's sad, but you can help yourself.' Another added: 'I found this four-part series extremely good. It was exciting, with good dialogue, some of which was mumbled—it was due to the dialect - and a very good portrayal of a real series of murders. 'The actors did a very good job, especially Ms. Kramer, who acted convincingly. It was a glimpse behind the scenes of a special investigation unit. I'd be happy if there were more short series.' The four-part series has become a hit with viewers and some took to Google to leave reviews of the show Someone else penned: 'We liked the series so much that we watched all the episodes right away. And it never got boring. 'This crime thriller was free of staged chases and unnecessary action—just good, real police work. Good actors, though difficult to understand at times. The sound was the only downside to this strong crime thriller.' But not everyone has been impressed and one viewer penned: 'I watched three episodes and waited with suspense for the investigation to reach its climax. 'Then, in the fourth episode, I was completely disappointed... A completely unknown perpetrator, who was never even considered before and never appeared, just some truck driver, completely anonymous to the viewer! 'That was the end! What a waste of time, very flat and... why is everyone smoking all the time, apart from that dialect! No suspense!' Another drama hit BBC iPlayer recently and viewers broke down in tears after all instalments of a 'masterpiece' family drama were finally loaded onto the streaming platform. The Last Anniversary, which hit the on-demand platform on Saturday, follows journalist Sophie (Teresa Palmer) after she inherits her ex-boyfriend's great-aunt's house on the remote, fictional Scribbly Gum Island. As she settles in, she also attempts to solve a 50-year-old local cold case that has haunted the island - and drawn in true crime tourists - for years. But not everyone has been impressed and one viewer penned their take on Google reviews too The Australian six-part comedy-drama, first released down under in March, is based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty, the author behind Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers. Alongside lead Teresa (The Fall Guy), it also stars Oscar-nominated British actress Miranda Richardson (Good Omens) and Australian actress Danielle Macdonald (The Tourist). Co-produced by Nicole Kidman and Liane herself, among others, it has impressed critics and viewers alike, whose reviews and comments online sing their praises for the high-quality show. Stream The Black Forest Murders on BBC iPlayer.
Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
16 Maoists including 2 PGLA members surrender in Chhattisgarh's Sukma
BASTAR: Sixteen Maoists who had a collective bounty of ₹25 lakh surrendered in Chhattisgarh's Sukma district, police said on Monday. Sukma superintendent of police (SP) Kiran G Chavan said nine of the 16 Maoists who surrendered were from Kerlapenda village panchayat under Chintalanar police station limits. With their surrender, the village has become free of Maoists and will receive ₹1 crore for development funds under a new scheme of the state government, Chavan said. The district police chief said the surrenders come in the wake of the state police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) intensifying operations against the Maoists in the region. 'These 16 naxals had a combined bounty of ₹25 lakh on them. Among them were naxals from battalions and other divisions, including some from Odisha…,' he said. A statement issued by the Sukma police said the 16 includes two senior cadres – Rita alias Dodi Sukki (36), a woman who was an active member of the central regional committee (CRC) company number 2 of the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army (PGLA), and Rahul Punem (18), a member of PLGA battalion no. 1 of Maoists. The two carried a reward of ₹8 lakh each, it added. The surrendered Maoists are being given financial assistance of ₹50,000 each, and will be rehabilitated in line with the state government's policy. The development came days after security forces killed top Maoist leader Nambala Keshav Rao or Basavaraju and dismantled what the authorities described as the unified headquarters of several Maoist formations in an operation titled Black Forest, which concluded on May 11. According to government data, 401 Maoists have been killed in the state while 1,355 surrendered between December 1, 2023, and May 21, 2025.
NDTV
2 days ago
- Business
- NDTV
Unemployed To Business Owner: Himachal Youth Move To Beekeeping, Earn Lakhs
Hamirpur/Una: Starting his humble beekeeping vocation with a meagre Rs 1 lakh, Anubhav Sood from Una is now a proud business owner with an annual income of Rs 30 lakh. His story mirrors that of many unemployed young men across Himachal Pradesh who are embracing beekeeping under the Mukhyamantri Madhu Vikas Yojana, yielding positive results, officials said on Monday. The scheme has proven beneficial for both the unemployed and those engaged in farming and fruit cultivation, as it aids in pollination while generating additional income. Anubhav, who hails from Ambota Village, is also responsible for 10 people to whom he provides direct employment. Inspired by his mother Nisha Sood, who is associated with food processing, Anubhav took a month's training at Nauni University, Solan, followed by a week's training at the Sher-e-Kashmir Agricultural University, Katra and started beekeeping with 25 boxes. Later, he expanded his business by taking a loan of Rs 10 lakh from the Canara Bank under the Prime Minister Employment Generation Program and launched his product Pahadi Honey in the market offering varieties like Black Forest, Black Diamond, Multi Flora, Kesar, Acacia which fetch 500 to Rs 1200 per kilogram, depending on the variety. Currently, he has 300 bee boxes and produces about 10,000 kg of honey in a year. Anubhav says he migrates bees to parts of Himachal, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan for honey production in different seasons and with this technique, he is producing higher quality and diverse honey varieties. The products are certified by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. Rs 1.60 lakh, including 50 boxes of bee species, is provided for beekeeping under the scheme besides financial assistance of Rs 10,000 for transporting bees, Deputy Director Horticulture Una K K Bhardwaj said. The department also provides an 80 per cent subsidy or financial assistance of Rs 16,000 on the purchase of beekeeping equipment, he added. The beekeeping business is also beneficial in terms of health benefits, as honey contains anti-bacterial and anti-allergic elements and its consumption increases immunity, District Ayurvedic Department Medicine specialist Dr Ashok Chaudhary said. He also noted that honey is particularly beneficial for post-Covid patients. Davinder Thakur, a resident of Neri village in Kullu district also has a story similar to that of Anubhav's. He started beekeeping five years ago and is also earning in high figures now. "Beekeeping has double benefits. It helps apple orchards by ensuring proper pollination which is essential for fruit production, he says, adding that his apple crop has also increased by 30 per cent. Thakur started with two boxes of hill bees which can even survive snowy conditions and now, he has 60 boxes producing 200 kgs of honey annually sold for Rs 2000 per kg. There are 20 to 25000 bees in one box. Gopal Kapoor (84) from Gwalpathar village in Hamirpur is another success story. Although he was not unemployed, he was in dire straits financially which made him turn to beekeeping. Earning Rs 3 to 4 lakh annually now, Gopal started with five boxes and at present has 50 boxes of Italian and Indica species. All these men are also imparting training in beekeeping to other farmers. This scheme gives youth and others as well the freedom to be self-employed, and the beekeeping training being free is another bonus, Deputy Commissioner Una Jatin Lal said.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Black Forest Murders review – like watching a hugely satisfying puzzle come together
It's never a good sign, is it, to see a young woman going for a run in the woods at the start of a gritty European crime drama? The Black Forest Murders takes the real-life killing of two young women in the south of Germany as its basis, and turns it into an extremely thorough police procedural. The detective work here is complex, precise and painstaking, and there is a sense that the film-makers have no wish to spare viewers any of the intense slog it takes to track down the perpetrator (if indeed the police manage to do so). Nina Kunzendorf is senior detective Barbara Kramer, who grew up in the area but moved to Berlin to make her name in the police force. Now that her father is getting older, and more infirm, she has moved back to her (fictional) small, rural home town in the south, where she is treated as an outsider. Kramer seems like a loner, smokes a lot and is the sort of cop who will slam down the phone when she doesn't like what she's hearing on the other end of it. She is your classic TV lead detective. The force at her command are local people who have remained local, and they largely resent her Berlin ways and lack of community knowhow. But she, too, is contemptuous of their amateur methods, small-town gossip and the low hum of sexism that threatens to rear its head again and again. It's a standard culture-clash setup. When 27-year-old Stefanie Berghoff fails to come home from a jog, it sparks an enormous search for her. Her husband, Tobias (David Richter), could only look more shifty if he started waving around a murder weapon and winking at the camera, but surprisingly, he has a rock-solid alibi. The hunt for Stefanie is complicated by the fact that the entire village has been out to help, even before the police manage to arrive in the area, which means evidence could have been trampled. Kramer is not having any of it. Given the title, and the fact that 'Murders' is not singular, it isn't much of a spoiler to say that Stefanie's body is discovered, and towards the end of the first episode, so is that of another young woman. Both were killed and moved a short distance, leaving 'drag marks', a small detail that I found particularly horrible. The question is whether the two cases are connected. I tend to judge dramas about the violent deaths of women by how much the camera lingers on their naked bodies during the inevitable autopsy scenes, but this is not that kind of drama. It avoids salaciousness, seemingly as a matter of principle. In many ways, The Black Forest Murders shares a modus operandi with The Breakthrough, the Swedish procedural, also based on real-life events, that was a hit on Netflix at the start of the year. Like The Breakthrough, this has a linear and essentially straightforward narrative: crimes are committed, the police investigate, gather up all the evidence they can find, and then we get our answers. Kramer notes that it could be a long road, and tells a story about a 12-year hunt for a killer in Berlin. The drama is essentially forewarning viewers to settle in for the long haul. So we see officers carefully combing the branches of a shrub, under a magnifying glass, in the hope that they might find a speck of something that could offer up DNA. Suspects are interviewed and eliminated, based on rough times of death, which is ascertained in Stefanie's case through the contents of her stomach, the time that her phone stopped working and reports of screams. On the other hand, Kramer counters her own list of evidence, explaining the flaws, or the counterarguments, in the information that has been gathered. Perhaps Stefanie ate later than usual? Perhaps her phone battery died? Perhaps those who heard a scream got it wrong? Something isn't adding up, but over the first two episodes, it's not clear what's wrong, or why. The levels of precision and detail that worked in The Breakthrough's favour are not quite as convincing here. Partly, that is because The Black Forest Murder's tropes are familiar and well worn. There is the conflict between rural and urban, between village and city. There is the outsider looking in, who has her own past to contend with, and must relearn the local knowledge that she has lost. There is even a bit of the female boss being undermined by her male colleagues, Prime Suspect-style. Its attention to every single moving part means that the drama itself moves very slowly, and it is not so much a thriller as a satisfying puzzle, steadily coming together. Not a bad drama, then, but not a revolutionary one, either. The Black Forest Murders aired on BBC Four and is available on iPlayer
The Hindu
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Is this the endgame for the Maoists?
The recent killing Nambala Kesahava Rao (70) alias Basavaraju alias Ganganna in the Abujhmadh area of Chhattisgarh, has hit the banned CPI(Maoist) very hard. Getting Basavaraju, the general secretary of the party, at his headquarters, especially when he was guarded by his special protection force, which is referred to as Company no. 7, comes as a huge surprise for the left wing extremists. They are already on the backfoot with the ongoing operations by the security forces at Karregutta in Chhattisgarh, as part of operation Kagar and Black Forest and now the elimination of their top most leader, is the biggest blow that the security forces could give to the LWE, ever since they had launched their offensive. But would the killing of Basavaraju, be termed as the 'Endgame' for the Maoist? Going by their brief six-decade existence, it may not be so. In early 1990s, after the unified Andhra Pradesh government had launched the counter offensive with the formation of the elite anti-Naxal force the Greyhounds, the Maoists then referred to as CPI (ML) PWG (People's War Group), were reduced to just one single dalam. But they regrouped and bounced back to own up the formation of a 'liberated zone' in Chhattisgarh. But as per security analysts, things in the 1990s were different and now the entire scenario has reversed. It was the Greyhounds that had pushed the Maoists from Andhra Pradesh to Chhattisgarh and Odisha and then the police force in these states were not equipped to handle the level of guerilla warfare unleashed by the Maoists. Now, not only Telangana and Andhra have the well trained Greyhounds, who are touted to be one of best in jungle guerilla warfare, all LWE-affected states such as Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Odisha, have trained special forces to beat the extremists at their own game. Maharashtra has C-60, Odisha has SOG (Special Operations Group), and Chhattisgarh has the CRPF CoBRA and the DRG (District Reserve Guards). At least 26 Naxalites killed in encounter in Chhattisgarh Now all the forces are not only in possession of superior firepower, they are well trained, we have strengthened our intelligence network, we have high-end technological support and the most importantly we work as a team, which includes intelligence sharing, across the States, said a senior police officer from Andhra Pradesh. In fact, it was Andhra Pradesh Police that had shared vital information about Basavaraju's location to the Chhattisgarh police, before the operation. Reaching the elusive Basavaraju, has been elusive for the last five decades. He was never arrested since he had joined the active movement. Reaching him was not an easy task, as he was protected by at least a three layer protection ring. Sources say that apart from intelligence inputs from various sources and AP Police in particular, the members of DRG unit who undertook the operation had played a key role. Many in the DRG personnel were former surrendered Maoists from that region and they were well aware of the terrain and his hideouts. Moreover, a few months ago, a couple of Maoists from Basavaraju's close circles, including from Company 7 had surrendered. There is an indication that they could have led the forces, said a senior officer engaged in anti-Maoist operations. As per sources in the DRG, the operation was meticulously planned over three months with the Narayanpur police and it was on for the last couple of weeks, before zeroing down on him. On the night of the encounter, both Basavaraju and the DRG personnel unknowingly camped within a radius of 1 to 1.5 km. At dawn, a chance firing took place between Basavaraju's sentry and a DRG Jawan, which led to the fierce gun battle that lasted for about 30 to 40 minutes and over 300 rounds were fired by both the sides. The identity of Basavaraju was confirmed by a DRG Jawan, who was a former Maoist and had worked with him. Where did Maoists go wrong? Security analysts, who have been closely monitoring the Maoists for decades, opine that the present outfit of the LWE had made a few key mistakes, which is costing them heavily now. The Maoists basically have two verticals – the political wing and the military wing. Since the formation of CPI (Maoist) in 2004, the focus has been on developing the military wing and the political wing was grossly neglected. This apparently distanced them from the people and a large part of the intelligentsia, who had once supported them ideologically. Mindless killing of innocent tribals branding them as informers did not go well with the sympathising community, rather they had openly objected to it. There has been ideological clashes between the Central Committee members who wanted both the wings to develop, as it was hampering the recruitment of intellectual and learned young men. The external support base of the banned party has shrunk so much that even after the killing of their top most leader, the protest has been almost negligible. In a similar scenario, when three top leaders were eliminated by the AP Police on December 2, 1999, in Koyyur forest area of Karimnagar district in now Telangana, the State almost burnt for a few days, with protests erupting across the State. Documents seized from the earlier encounter sites, clearly indicated that the main reason for the expulsion of Kondapalli Seetharamiah, the founder of PWG, was the ideological clash. He wanted more focus on the political side rather than the military offensive. But the then young guns like Basavaraju and Ganapathi (the predecessor of Basavaraju) wanted to develop militarily. We had deviated from our core focus area and we are paying the price now, said a former Maoist. Ever since the focus has shifted to military tactics, most of our over ground organisations such as RSU (Radical Students Union) or RCS (Rythu Coolie Sangam), which had played the role of propagating our ideology and as well was our recruitment front, have taken a backseat, he added. Who after Basavaraju? Now with Basavaraju gone, the main propagator of military tactics and the Central Committee and Politburo dwindled to single digit from about 30 members, till a few years ago. Basavaraju's demise will create a huge void in the military wing, and the remaining CC members are beyond 60 years of age. Two names are making the rounds: Mallojula Venugopal alias Vivek alias Sonu and Malla Raji Reddy alias Sattenna alias Sangram. Both are said to be moderate in their approach and not expert military strategists like Basavaraju. On the other hand Madvi Hidma the youngest in the CC, is said to be too young, brash and a protege of Basavaraju, who believes in the ideology of military dominance. The question that looms large, will they be able to re-mobilise the political side, keeping the military flock with them, or as experts suggest that the endgame is on.
