One of the world’s most popular social networks, X, has gone offline in Brazil – the country with the fifth largest digital population – after Elon Musk’s refusal to comply with local laws meant it was blocked by the supreme court.

Millions of Brazilian X users found themselves unable to access the network on Saturday morning as internet providers and mobile phone companies began to enforce the ban.

When the Guardian tried to access the network on its computer and mobile phone, it received a message reading: “Seems like you lost connectivity. We’ll keep retrying.”

Large numbers of Brazilians sought shelter on the rival network, Bluesky, which reported that it had gained 500,000 users in the past two days. “Welcome to Bluesky!” the company posted to its new adherents in Portuguese.

Bluesky’s new members included Felipe Neto, one of Brazil’s top social media influencers with more than 17 million X followers. “Don’t forget, when you go to another country, you’re obliged to follow its legislation, even if you disagree with it,” Neto wrote.

The banning of X, which has more than 22 million users in Brazil, is the climax of a politically charged, months-long arm wrestle between the country’s top court and the rightwing tech billionaire.

Alexandre de Moraes, the influential supreme court judge responsible for the ban, had been spearheading an attempt to force X to purge anti-democratic, far-right voices in the wake of the January 2023 uprising in the capital, Brasília, carried out by supporters of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.

Musk, who has aligned himself with rightwing figures including Bolsonaro and his US ally Donald Trump, pushed back, accusing Moraes of squelching free speech and trying to censor conservative views. Musk’s public attacks on Moraes – many of them infantile and vulgar – were reminiscent of his repeated online digs at the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, during the recent far-right UK riots, which X’s owner was accused of inflaming.

The final straw before X’s blocking in Brazil came on Thursday, when Musk ignored a 24-hour deadline to name a new legal representative after the social media platform closed its local office in mid-August. In Friday’s ruling ordering the ban, Moraes accused X of treating the social network “like a no man’s land – a veritable land without law” by allowing the “massive propagation” of misinformation, hate speech and anti-democratic attacks.

Hours later, at shortly after midnight local time, Brazilian users began noticing that X had expired.

Musk ramped up his attacks on Moraes, calling the judge “Voldemort” and tweeting a meme of a dog dangling its scrotum in the face of another animal.

“He is a dictator and a fraud, not a justice,” Musk wrote on X, although Brazilian users could no longer read his words without using a virtual private network (VPN).

Prominent rightwing voices rallied to Musk’s side, underlining the growing affinity between the Brazilian far right and the world’s richest person.

“I’m going to radicalise, even it I do it on my own,” vowed Nikolas Ferreira, a prominent rightwing congressman, in the hours before X was blocked. “You are a freedom fighter,” Musk replied.

Progressive Brazilians scoffed at Musk’s claim to be defending free speech, with many celebrating the supreme court’s decision to show X’s owner that he was not above the law.

“If billionaires want to have companies that make billions in these parts, they need to learn to respect the laws. Long live the rule of law and national sovereignty,” the leftwing congresswoman Erika Hilton wrote on X late on Friday night.

In a second valedictory message, posted about half an hour before the ban came into force, Hilton announced she had relocated to Bluesky. “See you there soon,” she wrote.

Portugal has declared a day of mourning after a firefighting helicopter crashed in the Douro River leaving at least four dead and one missing.

The pilot survived the accident, which happened in Lamego a little after 12.30pm on Friday afternoon while the helicopter was returning from fighting a fire near Baião, just inland from the city of Porto.

Two bodies were pulled from inside the helicopter, which had split in two, Rui Silva Lampreia, the commander of the National Maritime Authority, told the Portuguese media.

“We’re doing underwater searches around the helicopter and on the banks.”

The cause of the accident is yet to be established.

Two more bodies were located later near the aircraft’s tail, he added. He said the search for the fifth passenger had been suspended at nightfall and would resume the next day.

The victims, aged from 29 to 45, are all members of the Emergency Protection and Rescue Unit (UEPS) of the national gendarmerie, the country’s civil protection authority said in a communique.

The civilian pilot, 44, was found alive and slightly injured, the gendarmerie spokesperson Mafalda Almeida said.

The prime minister, Luis Montenegro, who travelled to the scene of the crash, told reporters that Saturday would be a national day of mourning.

A campaign to inoculate children in Gaza against polio and prevent the spread of the virus has begun as Palestinians in the Hamas-governed coastal territory and the occupied West Bank reel from Israel’s campaigns in both regions.

Children in Gaza began receiving vaccines on Saturday, the Strip’s health ministry announced at a news conference, a day before the large-scale rollout and planned pause in fighting agreed to by Israel and the UN World Health Organization.

Associated Press reporters saw roughly 10 infants receiving doses of vaccine in the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis on Saturday afternoon.

Hours earlier, Gaza’s health ministry said hospitals had received 89 dead on Saturday, including 26 who died in an overnight Israeli bombardment, and 205 wounded – one of the highest daily tallies in months.

Meanwhile, parts of the West Bank remained on edge as Israel’s military continued its military campaign, the deadliest since the Israel-Hamas war began, and two car bombings by Palestinian militants near Israeli settlements left three soldiers injured.

Two car bombs exploded early on Saturday in Gush Etzion, a bloc of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israel’s military killed both Palestinian attackers after the bombs exploded in a compound in Karmei Zur and at a gas station, Israel’s military said. Three Israeli soldiers sustained minor injuries.

Palestinian health officials said Israel was holding the bodies of the attackers, naming the men as Muhammad Marqa and Zoodhi Afifeh.

Hamas did not claim the men as its fighters but called the attack a “heroic operation” and a “new slap to the occupation’s security system” in a statement. The Palestinian militant group said earlier this month after a bombing attack in Tel Aviv that it would continue such attacks.

The bombings took place as Israel continued its raid – which includes destruction of infrastructure, airstrikes and gun battles – into urban refugee camps in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarem, in the north of the volatile West Bank.

About 20 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s incursion started on Tuesday, causing alarm among the international community that the war may widen beyond the Gaza Strip.

Israel has described the operation as a strategy to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians, which since the start of the war have increased in the West Bank, including near settlements that the international community largely considers illegal. In return, the Palestinian health ministry noted a surge in Palestinian deaths by Israeli forces, with 663 killed in the West Bank in the nearly 11 months since the war began.

In central Gaza, Israeli airstrikes hit a multi-story building housing displaced people in and around Nuseirat, a built-up refugee camp in central Gaza, as well as farther south in Khan Younis and northward in Gaza City, officials at hospitals in the three areas said on Saturday morning.

Among the dead were a physician and his family and a child whose right leg had been previously amputated, according to an initial list of casualties from the hospital and footage released on Saturday by civil defence officials who operated under Gaza’s Hamas-run government.

Israel is expected to pause some of its operations in Gaza on Sunday to allow health workers to roll out their campaign to administer polio vaccines to 650,000 Palestinian children, the WHO said earlier this week.

Officials said the pause would last at least nine hours and is a byproduct of an agreement with WHO, and unrelated to ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Israel, Hamas and regional mediators.

The vaccination campaign comes after a case was discovered earlier this month for the first time in 25 years after doctors concluded a 10-month-old had been partially paralysed by a mutated strain of the polio virus after not being vaccinated due to the war.

Healthcare workers in Gaza have been warning of the potential for a polio outbreak for months, as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has deepened throughout the war which broke out after Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting about 250. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not say how many were militants.

The US, Qatar and Egypt have spent months trying to mediate a ceasefire that would see the remaining hostages released. But the talks have repeatedly petered out as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed “total victory” over Hamas and the militant group has demanded a lasting ceasefire and a full withdrawal from the territory.

A campaign to inoculate children in Gaza against polio and prevent the spread of the virus has begun as Palestinians in the Hamas-governed coastal territory and the occupied West Bank reel from Israel’s campaigns in both regions.

Children in Gaza began receiving vaccines on Saturday, the Strip’s health ministry announced at a news conference, a day before the large-scale rollout and planned pause in fighting agreed to by Israel and the UN World Health Organization.

Associated Press reporters saw roughly 10 infants receiving doses of vaccine in the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis on Saturday afternoon.

Hours earlier, Gaza’s health ministry said hospitals had received 89 dead on Saturday, including 26 who died in an overnight Israeli bombardment, and 205 wounded – one of the highest daily tallies in months.

Meanwhile, parts of the West Bank remained on edge as Israel’s military continued its military campaign, the deadliest since the Israel-Hamas war began, and two car bombings by Palestinian militants near Israeli settlements left three soldiers injured.

Two car bombs exploded early on Saturday in Gush Etzion, a bloc of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israel’s military killed both Palestinian attackers after the bombs exploded in a compound in Karmei Zur and at a gas station, Israel’s military said. Three Israeli soldiers sustained minor injuries.

Palestinian health officials said Israel was holding the bodies of the attackers, naming the men as Muhammad Marqa and Zoodhi Afifeh.

Hamas did not claim the men as its fighters but called the attack a “heroic operation” and a “new slap to the occupation’s security system” in a statement. The Palestinian militant group said earlier this month after a bombing attack in Tel Aviv that it would continue such attacks.

The bombings took place as Israel continued its raid – which includes destruction of infrastructure, airstrikes and gun battles – into urban refugee camps in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarem, in the north of the volatile West Bank.

About 20 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s incursion started on Tuesday, causing alarm among the international community that the war may widen beyond the Gaza Strip.

Israel has described the operation as a strategy to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians, which since the start of the war have increased in the West Bank, including near settlements that the international community largely considers illegal. In return, the Palestinian health ministry noted a surge in Palestinian deaths by Israeli forces, with 663 killed in the West Bank in the nearly 11 months since the war began.

In central Gaza, Israeli airstrikes hit a multi-story building housing displaced people in and around Nuseirat, a built-up refugee camp in central Gaza, as well as farther south in Khan Younis and northward in Gaza City, officials at hospitals in the three areas said on Saturday morning.

Among the dead were a physician and his family and a child whose right leg had been previously amputated, according to an initial list of casualties from the hospital and footage released on Saturday by civil defence officials who operated under Gaza’s Hamas-run government.

Israel is expected to pause some of its operations in Gaza on Sunday to allow health workers to roll out their campaign to administer polio vaccines to 650,000 Palestinian children, the WHO said earlier this week.

Officials said the pause would last at least nine hours and is a byproduct of an agreement with WHO, and unrelated to ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Israel, Hamas and regional mediators.

The vaccination campaign comes after a case was discovered earlier this month for the first time in 25 years after doctors concluded a 10-month-old had been partially paralysed by a mutated strain of the polio virus after not being vaccinated due to the war.

Healthcare workers in Gaza have been warning of the potential for a polio outbreak for months, as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has deepened throughout the war which broke out after Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting about 250. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not say how many were militants.

The US, Qatar and Egypt have spent months trying to mediate a ceasefire that would see the remaining hostages released. But the talks have repeatedly petered out as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed “total victory” over Hamas and the militant group has demanded a lasting ceasefire and a full withdrawal from the territory.

Oasis fans seeking tickets for the band’s reunion tour have been facing technical issues and long online waits that often ended in disappointment.

Demand to see the Gallagher brothers was incredibly high, so much so that fans accessing ticket-selling websites including Ticketmaster, reported issues including error messages, or being deemed to be bots and kicked off before they could purchase tickets.

To combat scalpers seeking to resell tickets at vastly inflated prices, the band said tickets “sold in breach of the terms and conditions will be cancelled by the promoters”.

A limited number of people were able to secure the coveted tickets through a presale ballot on Friday evening. Those who successfully battled through the competitive ballots and last-minute website issues said they were looking forward to the “special” gigs after nabbing the sought-after tickets.

Joseph Martin, 29, and his fiance Molly Abbott, 26, faced a “rollercoaster of emotions” on Saturday morning in an attempt to secure a pair of tickets. Abbott, who was on holiday in Greece, joined an online queue at 8am. After about two hours, the unthinkable happened. “She got to the front of the queue and then the site crashed and she got kicked out,” he said. “She called me in tears and said ‘Oh my god, I’m never going to listen to Oasis again’. I was gutted.”

Moments later, he received a text from Abbot that said: “‘Oh, my god, I tried it again, and I’m at the checkout for two tickets’”.

The pair will travel from Brighton to the band’s home turf, Manchester. “It’s going to be insane,” said Martin.

The pair paid £350 for a one-night stay at a Premier Inn in the city, roughly the same cost as their tickets. The couple consider Oasis their “all-time favourite” act – Abbott even has a Don’t Look Back in Anger tattoo – and had considered paying above the odds if they were unsuccessful on Saturday morning.

“We discussed the possibility of not having a holiday next year and instead going to see Oasis, but some of the resale prices I was seeing probably would have ruled us out. I’d have been willing to spend £800, but when people are talking about multiple thousands of pounds, I couldn’t do that,” said Martin.

Pete Cross, 50, said he was looking forward to a summer “full of enthusiasm and joy” after bagging tickets to see the band next year with his family in the presale on Friday.

He said his entire family, including his wife, 21-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son, put themselves on a ballot to receive a presale code but he was the only one who was lucky enough to get one.

“My kids are as obsessed as I am about music – Oasis underpins it all. When my daughter was five she would take a Definitely Maybe CD [into her room] to play quietly while she went to sleep,” said Cross.

Some “loyal” Oasis fans received a separate email with a guaranteed presale code. He said he was “naffed off” not to have received one of these emails, considering he had spent about £200 on two versions of Definitely Maybe on vinyl, a CD tape bundle and a T-shirt in recent months. “A mate of mine got a loyal customer presale code for seemingly signing up to the Oasis mailing list,” he said.

Nevertheless, he is delighted to have secured four tickets to see the band at Wembley Stadium in London. “The relief was massive as the screen changed. We were going to see Oasis as a family. Quick hugs. A lovely moment,” he said.

For Cross, next summer cannot come fast enough. “It’s going to be so full of enthusiasm and joy. Oasis are back.”

Official prices for a ticket ranged from £73 for a standing ticket to £506.25 for access to a pre-show party, exhibition and seated package at Wembley.

However, by Saturday afternoon, floor-standing tickets were being resold from about £720 to £4,500 on StubHub, while seats in some lower-level sections were on offer at £9,037.

On Ticketmaster, some fans were faced with sums far above the original asking price after the site deployed dynamic pricing. These tickets were labelled “in demand” and were priced at double in some cases. Social media users reported seeing standard tickets that should be priced at £148.50 each being relabelled as “in demand standing tickets” with a price tag of £355.20 each.

A Ticketmaster spokesperson said the company does not set prices itself, pointing out a page on its website that said: “Promoters and artists set ticket prices. Prices can be either fixed or market-based. Market-based tickets are labelled as ‘Platinum’ or ‘In Demand’.”

The UK Music chief executive, Tom Kiehl, called inflated ticket prices of “great concern” on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Obviously, it’s a natural tendency, if you can’t get tickets, to find alternative sources but I very much urge music fans today, if they don’t get tickets, not to take that route.”

The concerts will take place in July and August, in Cardiff, London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin.

The dates for Oasis’s 2025 UK and Ireland tour are: 4, 5 July, Principality stadium, Cardiff; 11, 12, 19 and 20 July, Heaton Park, Manchester; 25, 26 July, 2, 3 August, Wembley; 8, 9 August, Murrayfield, Edinburgh; and 16, 17 August, Croke Park, Dublin.

The concerts come 16 years after the band split acrimoniously when Noel Gallagher quit before a show at a French festival, and 30 years since the release of their second album, 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?.

Weight-loss drugs are poised to revolutionise healthcare by slowing down the ageing process and by allowing people to live for longer and in better health. That is the dramatic message from leading scientists after studies were presented last week at the European Society of Cardiology Conference in London.

Research has already found that semaglutide – also known by the brand names Wegovy and Ozempic – reduced the risk of death in people who were obese or overweight and had cardiovascular disease.

But fresh studies have found that Ozempic has impacts beyond what was originally imagined for the drug. People who took the drug died at a lower rate from all causes, not just from cardiovascular causes, researchers discovered.

“Semaglutide has far-reaching benefits beyond what we initially imagined,” said Prof Harlan Krumholz of the Yale school of medicine. “It’s not just avoiding heart attacks. These are health promoters. It wouldn’t surprise me that improving people’s health this way actually slows down the ageing process.”

The studies were produced from the Select trial in the US, which studied 17,604 people aged 45 or older who were overweight or obese and had established cardiovascular disease but not diabetes. They received semaglutide or a placebo and were tracked for more than three years.

A total of 833 participants died during the study, of which 58% were related to cardiovascular causes and 42% from others, with infections being the most common cause of death in this latter group. Crucially, those who took semaglutide were less likely to die of infections than those in the placebo group while it also consistently reduced the risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes, it was found.

“The robust reduction in non-cardiovascular death, and particularly infections deaths, was surprising,” said Benjamin Scirica, a Harvard professor and the lead author of one of the studies. “These findings reinforce that overweight and obesity increases the risk of death due to many etiologies which can be modified with therapies like semaglutide.”

A 2007 Miss Teen USA contestant who drew widespread mockery because of a stuttering response to a question that she fielded at the competition has said it is “a shame” – as well as condemned “online bullying” – after JD Vance recirculated a video of her difficult moment to attack Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, the Republican nominee for vice-president in November’s election has ruled out apologizing to Caitlin Upton, who has spoken openly about how she previously contemplated suicide at the height of the ordeal revived by Vance.

Upton went viral for the wrong reasons 17 years earlier when – while competing for the Miss Teen USA crown – actor and pageant judge Aimee Teegarden asked her why she believed an estimated 20% of Americans were unable to find their own country on a world map.

“I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps,” replied Upton, then the 18-year-old representative of South Carolina. “And, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the US should help the US, uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries – so we will be able to build up our future.”

Host and actor Mario Lopez had barely finished deadpanning “Thank you very much, South Carolina” over the audience’s polite applause before detractors pummeled Upton, especially online. An August 2007 piece from the online publication Salon titled “Miss dumb blond USA? Our national embarrassment over a South Carolina teenage contestant’s world knowledge” summarized the reaction to Upton’s verbal flub.

In 2015, Upton told New York magazine that some college baseball players later taunted her cruelly at a party, and someone even mailed her a note telling her to “go die for [her] stupidity”. She described how the harassment plunged her into a depression and prompted her to have suicidal thoughts.

But she said support from her family as well as other loved ones helped her to overcome the ordeal as she pursued a real estate career and became a mother of two children.

Upton in the interim also reportedly posted online about her support for Donald Trump’s presidency, including his lies that voting fraudsters unduly orchestrated his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

She had mostly faded from the public consciousness when Trump’s running mate thrust her back into it Thursday, shortly before CNN aired Harris’s first news network interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Vance’s X account republished a video clip of Upton’s infamous 2007 remarks along with the caption, “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.”

Upton on Friday made clear that she did not appreciate Vance’s post.

“It’s a shame that 17 years later this is still being brought up,” Upton wrote on X, just a short time before deleting her account from the social media platform entirely. “Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying still needs to stop.”

Vance in turn appeared Friday on CNN, dismissed the video of Upton as little more than “a 20-year-old meme” and suggested Upton “laugh it off”.

“Politics has got way too lame,” Vance said to anchor John Berman. “You can have some fun while making an argument to the American people about improving their lives.

“I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke – but I wish the best for Cailtin and hope she’s doing well.”

The entire sequence is unlikely to lessen Republicans’ concerns over Vance’s performance during the campaign as polls show Trump trails Harris.

He has repeatedly grappled with scandals over his past comments about women and what he perceives their role to be in American society, especially after he characterized Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” and excoriated a teachers union president for not having “her own” children.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reported on Saturday that Vance gave a 2021 podcast interview in which he said professional women had chosen “a path to misery” by prioritizing their work over having children.

A 2007 Miss Teen USA contestant who drew widespread mockery because of a stuttering response to a question that she fielded at the competition has said it is “a shame” – as well as condemned “online bullying” – after JD Vance recirculated a video of her difficult moment to attack Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, the Republican nominee for vice-president in November’s election has ruled out apologizing to Caitlin Upton, who has spoken openly about how she previously contemplated suicide at the height of the ordeal revived by Vance.

Upton went viral for the wrong reasons 17 years earlier when – while competing for the Miss Teen USA crown – actor and pageant judge Aimee Teegarden asked her why she believed an estimated 20% of Americans were unable to find their own country on a world map.

“I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps,” replied Upton, then the 18-year-old representative of South Carolina. “And, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the US should help the US, uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries – so we will be able to build up our future.”

Host and actor Mario Lopez had barely finished deadpanning “Thank you very much, South Carolina” over the audience’s polite applause before detractors pummeled Upton, especially online. An August 2007 piece from the online publication Salon titled “Miss dumb blond USA? Our national embarrassment over a South Carolina teenage contestant’s world knowledge” summarized the reaction to Upton’s verbal flub.

In 2015, Upton told New York magazine that some college baseball players later taunted her cruelly at a party, and someone even mailed her a note telling her to “go die for [her] stupidity”. She described how the harassment plunged her into a depression and prompted her to have suicidal thoughts.

But she said support from her family as well as other loved ones helped her to overcome the ordeal as she pursued a real estate career and became a mother of two children.

Upton in the interim also reportedly posted online about her support for Donald Trump’s presidency, including his lies that voting fraudsters unduly orchestrated his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

She had mostly faded from the public consciousness when Trump’s running mate thrust her back into it Thursday, shortly before CNN aired Harris’s first news network interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Vance’s X account republished a video clip of Upton’s infamous 2007 remarks along with the caption, “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.”

Upton on Friday made clear that she did not appreciate Vance’s post.

“It’s a shame that 17 years later this is still being brought up,” Upton wrote on X, just a short time before deleting her account from the social media platform entirely. “Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying still needs to stop.”

Vance in turn appeared Friday on CNN, dismissed the video of Upton as little more than “a 20-year-old meme” and suggested Upton “laugh it off”.

“Politics has got way too lame,” Vance said to anchor John Berman. “You can have some fun while making an argument to the American people about improving their lives.

“I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke – but I wish the best for Cailtin and hope she’s doing well.”

The entire sequence is unlikely to lessen Republicans’ concerns over Vance’s performance during the campaign as polls show Trump trails Harris.

He has repeatedly grappled with scandals over his past comments about women and what he perceives their role to be in American society, especially after he characterized Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” and excoriated a teachers union president for not having “her own” children.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reported on Saturday that Vance gave a 2021 podcast interview in which he said professional women had chosen “a path to misery” by prioritizing their work over having children.

The search for an Indian tourist who was swallowed by a sinkhole in Malaysia’s capital has stalled after being deemed “too risky”.

Vijaya Lakshmi Gali was walking along a road in Kuala Lumpur on 23 August when the pavement beneath her suddenly collapsed. She plunged into an 8-metre-deep (26ft) sinkhole and disappeared. Rescuers have found no trace of her so far except for her slippers.

The search operation has involved tracker dogs, remote cameras and ground-penetrating radar.

As the search entered its eighth day on Saturday, the country’s fire and rescue department said it was too dangerous to send down divers, according to the Straits Times.

“There are various factors for halting the operation, which include the safety and health of the rescue personnel,” said Dr Zaliha Mustafa, a minister in the prime minister’s department.

Searchers have flushed portions of the underground drainage system using high-pressure water jets and excavators to remove debris.

Two divers entered early on Thursday but it was too dangerous and they were pulled out before they could reach the obstacle.

Authorities said a soil slip was also reported in the same location last year. A second sinkhole appeared on Wednesday about 50 metres from where the woman disappeared, causing concern over public safety. Some roads in the area have been closed.

Maimunah Mohd Sharif, the mayor of Kuala Lumpur, has reassured the public of the city’s safety. She said a taskforce has been formed to inspect sewage pipes and assess the safety of structures in the surrounding area.

Police said Gali came to Malaysia with her husband and friends about two months ago for a holiday. The accident occurred a day before they were due to return home.

A 32-year-old woman has been arrested after six people were hurt in a knife attack on a bus headed to a festival in western Germany. Authorities said there was no evidence of a political or religious motive.

Three of those attacked are in life-threatening condition, police said on Friday evening.

The knife attack took place in Siegen, east of Cologne. The bus was on its way to a festival in the town and at least another 40 people were on board when the attack took place at about 7.40pm.

Police and prosecutors said the six people wounded were aged between 16 and 30 and all were from the region. By Saturday morning, three of them had left the hospital after outpatient treatment.

Local authorities planned to go ahead with the festival.

The stabbing in Siegen happened a week after a knife attack in Solingen, a city in the same state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in which a suspected Islamic extremist from Syria who had avoided being deported is accused of killing three people and wounding another eight.

The Solingen attack prompted the governing coalition to draw up plans to tighten knife laws and make deportations easier.

Police said the woman arrested in Siegen was a German citizen with no immigrant roots.

The US military and Iraq launched a joint raid targeting suspected Islamic State group militants in the Iraqi western desert that killed at least 15 people while seven American troops were hurt, officials said on Saturday.

The US military’s central command said the militants were armed with weapons, grenades and explosive belts during the battle on Thursday, which Iraqi forces said happened in the Anbar desert.

“This operation targeted ISIS leaders to disrupt and degrade ISIS’ ability to plan, organize, and conduct attacks against Iraqi civilians, as well as US citizens, allies, and partners throughout the region and beyond,” central command said, using an acronym for the militant group. “Iraqi security forces continue to further exploit the locations raided.”

It added: “There is no indication of civilian casualties.”

An Iraqi military statement said “airstrikes targeted the hideouts, followed by an airborne operation”.

“Among the dead were key ISIS leaders,” Iraq’s military said, without identifying them. “All hideouts, weapons, and logistical support were destroyed, explosive belts were safely detonated and important documents, identification papers and communication devices were seized.”

A US defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the operation, said some American troops were wounded while two others were injured in falls. “All personnel are in stable condition,” the official said.

It was not immediately clear why it took two days for the US to acknowledge its part in the raid. Iraq did not say the US took part when initially announcing it. Iraqi politicians are debating the future of having American troops in the country.

For years after dislodging the militants from their self-declared caliphate across Iraq and Syria, US forces have continued fighting the Islamic State group, though the casualty numbers from Friday’s raid were higher than others in the time since.

At its peak, the Islamic State group ruled an area half the size of the UK as it attempted to enforce its extreme interpretation of Islam, attacking religious minority groups and inflicting harsh punishment on Muslims deemed to be apostates.

A coalition of more than 80 countries led by the US was formed to fight Islamic State, which lost its hold in Iraq and 2017 and in Syria in 2019. The militants have continued to operate in the Anbar desert in Iraq and Syria, while claiming attacks carried out by others elsewhere in the world. The IS branch in Afghanistan is known to carry out intensely bloody assaults.

Smashing a rare museum artefact dating back thousands of years would probably earn you a lifetime ban at the very least.

But a four-year-old who accidentally toppled a jar from the bronze age, leaving it broken into pieces, was welcomed back to the Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel, a week after the unfortunate incident.

“It was just a distraction of a second,” said Anna Geller, a mother-of-three from the northern Israeli town of Nahariya. “And the next thing I know, it’s a very big boom boom behind me.”

Her son, Ariel, was perusing the museum’s ancient artefacts when Anna looked away for just a moment. Then a crash sounded, a rare 3,500-year-old jar was broken on the ground, and her son stood over it, aghast.

The bronze age jar that Ariel broke last week has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered. It was probably used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500BC.

On Friday, the family returned to the museum. Ariel gifted the museum a clay vase of his own and was met with forgiving staff and curators.

Alex said Ariel, the youngest of his three children, was exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash last Friday, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

“I’m embarrassed,” said Anna, who said she tried desperately to calm her son down after the vase shattered. “He told me he just wanted to see what was inside.”

The jar was one of many artefacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbar Rivlin, the director of the museum.

She said she wanted to use the restoration as an educational opportunity and to make sure the Gellers, who curtailed their initial museum visit soon after Ariel broke the jar last week, felt welcome to return.

There were a lot of children at the museum that day and Alex said he was “in complete shock” after learning that it was his son who caused the damage.

Alex went over to the security guards to let them know what had happened in the hope that it was a model and not a real artefact. The father even offered to pay for the damage.

“But they called and said it was insured and after they checked the cameras and saw it wasn’t vandalism they invited us back for a make-up visit,” Alex said.

Experts are using 3D technology and high-resolution videos to restore the jar, which could be back on display as soon as next week.

“That’s what’s actually interesting for my older kids, this process of how they’re restoring it, and all the technology they’re using there,” Alex said.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Shafir added that the artefacts should remain accessible to the public, even if accidents happen because touching an artefact can inspire a deeper interest in history and archaeology.

“I like that people touch. Don’t break, but to touch things, it’s important,” he said.