From a 9-year-old boy who wanted no kid to go hungry to a high-school coach who reached out to an armed student, here are TIME’s heroes of 2019.

Defenders of Notre Dame
William Daniels—Panos for TIMELaurent Prades, left, and Antoine-Marie Préaut on Nov. 29As flames leaped from the roof of Notre Dame cathedral on April 15, those who knew its innermost secrets ventured into the pitch darkness of the smoke-filled nave. Their aim: to rescue some of the most valuable treasures in all of Christianity. “There was no electricity, there was a lot of water, there were alarms going off,” says Antoine-Marie Préaut, conservator of historic monuments in the Paris region, remembering the moment he entered the cathedral with Notre Dame’s operational director, Laurent Prades, and a group of firefighters. “The atmosphere was apocalyptic.”

Millions across the world watched aghast as fire shot from the medieval masterpiece in the heart of Paris. Less visible was how close Notre Dame came to total collap..

One year ago, TIME named besieged journalists the 2018 Person of the Year, gathered under the rubric the Guardians and the war on truth. Neither that war nor its consequences for democracy have abated in the intervening 12 months.

For Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose henchmen killed and dismembered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate, life goes on much as before. In the spring, after the CIA detected new threats against Khashoggi’s associates, warnings went out to Canada, Norway and Washington, D.C. In November, the FBI arrested two former employees of Twitter, the platform often described as Saudi Arabia’s closest thing to a public square. Both were charged with passing on information about dissidents to bin Salman’s government.

By then, the crown prince had gone back to doing interviews with foreign press. Thirteen months and one day after Khashoggi’s murder, he presided over an IPO that valued the Saudi national oil company at $1.7 trillion, a wor..

(WHAKATANE, New Zealand) — New Zealand police and military specialists have launched a risky operation to recover the bodies of eight victims of a volcanic eruption on an island that has left at least eight others dead.

Just after first light Friday, two helicopters from the New Zealand Defence Force lifted off from the township of Whakatane and began the 50-kilometer (30-mile) journey to White Island off New Zealand’s eastern coast.

Eight military specialists wearing protective clothing and using breathing apparatuses will land to try to recover the bodies. Scientists have warned that gases on the island after Monday’s eruption are so toxic and corrosive that a single inhalation could be fatal.

(MOSCOW) — Russia’s foreign ministry said Thursday that it has expelled two German diplomats in retaliation for Germany doing the same last week.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said that it was making the move “due to the reciprocity principle” and ordered them to leave the country within the next seven days.

The German Foreign Ministry expelled two employees of the Russian Embassy in Berlin last Wednesday, after Russian authorities didn’t answer requests by Germany to help shed light on a brazen daylight slaying of a Georgian man in Berlin.

German federal prosecutors took over the investigation after concluding that evidence suggests involvement either by the government of Russia or Chechnya.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement last week that the “politicized approach to the investigation is inappropriate” and promised to take “reciprocal measures.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this week that the slain man was “a bandit” and “a murderer” and said that ..

(BERLIN) — One of Germany’s richest families, which owns Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Pret A Manger and other international brands, is giving millions to support Holocaust survivors as it seeks to atone for its use of forced laborers during the Nazi era and its enthusiastic support of Adolf Hitler, The Associated Press has learned.

In addition to 5 million euros ($5.5 million) being given to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany to help thousands of elderly survivors around the world, the Reimann family’s JAB Investors company plans to announce Thursday that it will provide another 5 million euros to find and support forced laborers used by its predecessor under the Nazis. An additional 25 million euros will be provided annually to Holocaust education and promoting democratic values to fight the rise of populist nationalism.

The family established the Alfred Landecker Foundation in Berlin to oversee the efforts, named after a German Jew who was killed by the Nazis and —..