Family confirmed the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage in Gaza, hours after Israel’s army said it had discovered a number of bodies there during combat and its military was working on removing and identifying them.

The Israeli military (IDF) asked the public to refrain from speculation about the identities of the dead. The US president, Joe Biden, said his office was in contact with the Israelis and confirmed that they had discovered bodies in Gaza but he was not at liberty to give identities.

The family issued a statement early on Sunday. “With broken hearts, the Goldberg-Polin family is devastated to announce the death of their beloved son and brother, Hersh,” it said. “The family thanks you all for your love and support and asks for privacy at this time.”

Goldberg-Polin was one of the best-known hostages as his parents had met with world leaders and pressed relentlessly for their help. Last month, they addressed the Democratic convention, where the crowd chanted: “Bring them home.”

At least 40,691 Palestinians have been killed and 94,060 injured in Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip since 7 October, the Palestinian territory’s health ministry said in a statement on Saturday. The war was triggered when the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

On Saturday, clashes broke out between Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters in the occupied West Bank as Israel pushed ahead with a military operation in the flashpoint city of Jenin. Hundreds of Israeli troops have been carrying out raids since Wednesday in one of their largest actions in the West Bank in months.

Biden, speaking to reporters in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, said he was “still optimistic” about a ceasefire. “I think we’re on the verge of having an agreement,” he said. “It’s time this war ended.”

“People are continuing to meet … We think we can close the deal, they’ve all said they agree on the principles.”

With Reuters and the Associated Press

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 Organisation (WHO).

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 the 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.

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.

Donald Trump has come out in support for a proposed constitutional amendment that would legalize recreational marijuana in Florida, the state in which he resides.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump said “personal amounts of marijuana will be legalized for adults” with Florida’s amendment 3, “whether people like it or not”.

The former US president said “someone should not be a criminal in Florida, when this is legal in so many other States”. He added: “We do not need to ruin lives & waste Taxpayer Dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them.”

Trump, as a resident Floridian, will be able to cast a vote on the state’s amendment 3 in November, which would allow adults over 21 to legally buy and use marijuana without a medical card.

Under the proposed amendment, growing marijuana independently would still be illegal, and individuals could possess no more than three ounces for personal use.

Trump’s support contrasts with Florida’s governor and fellow Republican, Ron DeSantis, who has been a vocal opponent of the ballot measure. “This is bad policy and even worse constitutional law,” DeSantis wrote in an X post this week.

DeSantis has said he opposes amendment 3 because of the smell, and has claimed, without evidence, that people would be “able to bring 20 joints to an elementary school”.

In his social media post, Trump called on the state’s lawmakers to implement regulations that would ban the use of marijuana in public spaces “so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go”.

But advocates of marijuana legalization argue that Republican lawmakers are exaggerating the scale of the smell problem in order to support policies banning the public use of cannabis, which has become increasingly accepted by Americans for years.

Most US states now allow medical or recreational consumption of marijuana. In recent years, 24 states and the District of Columbia have legalized the recreational use of cannabis – and 14 others have approved it for medical use, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Florida amendment requires 60% voter support to pass. And public opinion polls show that a majority of Florida voters favor the measure.

Voters in South Dakota and North Dakota will also decide ballot initiatives proposing to legalize recreational marijuana in the November election.

Trump’s marijuana-related Truth Social post on Saturday came amid polls which generally show that he is trailing the vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in key battleground states which could decide the White House race between them.

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’s a shame” – and also 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 on national television for the Miss Teen USA crown – the actor and pageant judge Aimee Teegarden asked her why she believed an estimated 20% of Americans would fail 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 I believe that our education like such as South Africa and the Iraq and everywhere, like, such as, and I believe that they should … our education over here in the US should help the US, 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 descended on 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 at a pageant which Donald Trump owned – along with Miss Universe and Miss USA – from 1996 to 2015, the year before he won the presidency.

Upton later told New York magazine that some college baseball players taunted her cruelly when she attended a party at one point, and someone mailed her a note suggesting she “go die for [her] stupidity”. She described how the harassment drove her into a depression and prompted her to have suicidal thoughts.

But she said her family and other loved ones ultimately helped her overcome the painful experience. She eventually pursued a real estate career, got married and had two children.

Upton in the interim also reportedly demonstrated her support online for 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. “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 urged Upton to “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 Caitlin and hope she’s doing well.”

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

He has repeatedly grappled with scandals over his past declarations 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.

Furthermore, the Guardian reported 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. Those comments had largely gone unnoticed previously.

The US rapper Fatman Scoop has died after he collapsed mid-performance during a free concert in Connecticut on Friday night, according to reports.

The New York-born artist, whose real name is Isaac Freeman III, was headlining the so-called Green & Gold Party in Hamden, Connecticut, when he had what was described as a medical emergency. He was seen in a video posted on X to have collapsed behind the DJ booth after urging concertgoers to “make some noise”.

The 53-year-old rapper – best known for his collaborations with Missy Elliott and Ciara on the 2005 hit Lose Control, and on Mariah Carey’s It’s Like That – was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.

“Fatman Scoop VOICE & energy have contributed to MANY songs that made the people feel HAPPY & want to dance for over 2 decades,” Missy Elliot said in a post on X. “Your IMPACT is HUGE & will be NEVER be forgotten.”

Fatman Scoop had an early hit in the UK and Ireland when a re-release of Be Faithful – which was produced by American hip-hop duo Crooklyn Clan – topped the charts in 2003. It reached the top 10 in Australia and Denmark.

The song, a mashup of Faith Evans’ Love Like This – itself constructed from a looped sample of Chic’s Chic Cheer from 1978 – took years to clear for wide release because it contained numerous additional samples.

Evans later recalled to the Times that her husband, the Notorious BIG, had gone on a trip to St Tropez when someone put on Fatman’s track.

“This lady was really tipsy, and she came up to my husband and said: ‘Man, I love this song – who are they?’ That was the first time we realized how big the record was. It was funny, but it was cool, too – they wouldn’t know me if I was sitting next to them yet they know my song! Now I’m trying to reach people who know that song, and let them know me by my name.”

Fatman Scoop collaborated with a roster of other prominent artists, including Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston. In 2004, he was tapped to mentor six British musicians in the UK TV series Chancers. He also appeared in the anime series The Boondocks and opened his own ice-cream parlor.

His booking agent MN2S said: “Scoop was a beloved figure in the music world, whose work was loved by countless fans across the globe. His iconic voice, infectious energy, and great personality made an indelible mark on the industry.”

His death comes 13 months after the Houston rapper Big Pokey died upon collapsing on a stage in a bar in Beaumont, Texas, according to the musician’s publicist. The rap star, best known as part of the Screwed Up Click collective, was 48.

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.

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.

There was frustration and disappointment for many Oasis fans earlier as they struggled for hours to buy the million-or-so tickets available for the Manchester band’s 17-date reunion tour.

Tickets went on sale at 9am and were expected to be snapped up in minutes, but instead many waited in online queues for hours, only to be kicked off booking websites.

Just after 7pm, Oasis and Ticketmaster finally announced that tickets had sold out.

Perhaps it was inevitable that there would be drama surrounding the Oasis reunion. The band’s brothers, Noel and Liam Gallagher, had a famously fiery relationship, and had refused to speak to each other for long periods after splitting up in 2009. If they’re still keeping score, they will probably, possibly, be pleased to have made a bigger splash than last year’s reunion of their Britpop rivals, Blur.

The star of the day was Error 503 – not a track by cult 90s musician Aphex Twin, but the message received by some after they thought they had reached the front of the queue.

Some of those who did manage to select tickets for gigs in Cardiff, Edinburgh, Dublin, London and, of course, Manchester found that the cost had risen unexpectedly – double in some cases – thanks to a policy of dynamic pricing.

The web portals of Ticketmaster, Gigs and Tours and See Tickets all seemed to struggle with demand, prompting flurries of social media posts from fans, politicians and celebrities.

Dan Walker, the Channel 5 newsreader and former Strictly Come Dancing star, pleaded: “There has got to be a fairer, simpler, more efficient way of selling tickets that isn’t so open to touts, scammers, resellers and bots.

“In the queue, out of the queue, refresh / don’t refresh, wait in line, back of the line, accused of being a bot … timed out.”

Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South, posted screenshots of her failed attempts to buy tickets. “Nationalise Ticketmaster,” she wrote.

A limited number of people were able to secure tickets through a presale ballot on Friday evening. Some apparently put their tickets up for resale, with floor-standing tickets listed for £720 to £4,500 on StubHub, while seats in some lower-level sections were on offer at £9,037.

Ticket touting had been high on the agenda for Oasis, who had warned that tickets “sold in breach of the terms and conditions will be cancelled by the promoters”.

But touts may have been behind the ticket website problems, according to Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at Eset, a software security firm. Resellers often use automated software to manipulate ticket websites.

“Being the next series of concerts since the demand for Taylor Swift tickets, I would suggest there would be a huge possibility of bots being used to swoop in,” he said.

There was also plenty of fuss about dynamic ticket pricing. Fans reported seeing standard tickets previously at £148.50 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’.”

Tom Kiehl, UK Music’s chief executive, said inflated ticket prices were of “great concern” on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, in one of several reports the show devoted to news of the tickets going on sale.

“Obviously, it’s a natural tendency, if you can’t get tickets, to find alternative sources,” Kiehl said, “but I very much urge music fans today, if they don’t get tickets, not to take that route.”

By 1.23pm, Ticketmaster’s Irish site reported that all its tickets for gigs at Dublin’s Croke Park had sold out, but UK sites continued to list tickets deep into the day, albeit with a warning they had “low availability”.

Those who successfully battled through the ballots and last-minute website issues said they were looking forward to the “special” gigs after nabbing some sought-after tickets.

Oasis megafans Joseph Martin, 29, and his fiancee Molly Abbott, 26, faced a “rollercoaster of emotions”. Abbott, who was on holiday in Greece, began queueing 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 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 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. Instead they will only need to cover £350 for a night in a hotel – roughly the same cost as their tickets.

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.”

Three people were dead after a small plane crashed into a row of townhouses on Saturday morning in a neighborhood east of Portland, setting the homes ablaze, authorities told KATU-TV.

Officials earlier in the day had said the plane was carrying two people and that at least one resident had been unaccounted for.

The Federal Aviation Administration said that a twin-engine Cessna 421C came down at about 10.30am local time near the Troutdale airport.

“The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate,” the FAA said in a statement. “The NTSB will be in charge of the investigation and will provide any updates.”

Scott Lewis, chief of the nearby Gresham fire department, said the fire spread from two units to four. Lewis said the fire displaced five families and two people were treated for injuries at the scene.

The Multnomah county sheriff’s office posted to X that it was responding to the scene. John Plock, a public information officer from the sheriff’s office, later gave a news conference where he said the initial call came at 10.20am local time reporting black smoke.

“At some point during the crash, it hit a power pole or tower, causing it to fall over. The aircraft crashed into a building of townhomes and that structure also caught fire,” Plock said, according to KATU.

The plane was split into multiple parts as it crashed in the residential area in the city of Fairview, AP reported. Troutdale airport is described on the Port of Portland’s website as a “flight training and recreational airport”.

The full extent of the damage and injuries was not clear, but images and videos on social media showed a plume of smoke above the site, with one user writing that “lots of customers now without power”.

According to the US power outage site, 13,921 Portland General Electric customers in Multnomah county were without electricity.

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.

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.