Appeal judges in Brazil yesterday upheld charges against only two of the three men accused of murdering Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips, in a decision “received with indignation” by Indigenous activists.

The three judges ruled that there was “insufficient evidence of authorship or participation” by Oseney da Costa de Oliveira, a fisher, in the 2022 deaths of the Brazilian Indigenous expert and the British Guardian journalist.

However, the charges against the other two accused – fellow fisher Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira (Oseney’s brother) and Jefferson da Silva Lima (also known as Pelado da Dinha) – were upheld, and they will face a jury trial.

This decision does not mean Oseney has been acquitted, as prosecutors can still appeal against the ruling or file a new charge against him. But he could be transferred from maximum security to house arrest if his lawyer submits a request, which he said yesterday he would, and if one of the judges grants it.

In a statement, Univaja, the Indigenous association where Pereira worked, said it “received the decision with indignation,” considering it “worrying” because “it may lead to … Oseney’s release”.

“According to evidence collected at the time by police during the investigation, the defendant was directly involved at the scene of the tragic murder of our friends Bruno and Dom,” it said.

Univaja also expressed “confidence” that prosecutors would appeal and said it expected the judiciary to “handle this case according to the evidence collected” and to conduct the process “in a proper and unimpeachable manner”.

Pereira and Phillips were ambushed and killed near the Amazon town of Atalaia do Norte while returning from a reporting trip to the entrance of one of Brazil’s largest Indigenous territories.

Months after the crime, public prosecutors had charged Oseney with double aggravated homicide – Amarildo and Silva Lima, who, unlike Oseney, confessed to the crime, were also charged with concealment of a corpse. Last May, a first-instance judge accepted the murder charges against all three, but Oseney’s lawyer appealed, leading to yesterday’s decision.

According to prosecutors, a witness had seen Oseney at the lake where Bruno and Dom were murdered, carrying a shotgun near the boat that Amarildo and Silva Lima were in.

In yesterday’s ruling, Judge Marcos Augusto de Souza said that “the fact that [Oseney] was carrying a shotgun – if it were in an urban area, it would have a different implication, but in a region near the border where subsistence hunting takes place … it’s common.”

Regarding his presence near the execution site, the judge said that “the testimonies of the two confessed defendants explicitly exclude Oseney from the crime scene, ie from the location and time when the crime was committed”, adding that “the indictment indeed doesn’t describe any action carried out by Oseney”.

Regarding the involvement of the other two, however, the judge said there was sufficient evidence for them to face a public jury trial for double homicide and concealment of a corpse.

No date has been set for Amarildo and Silva Lima’s jury trial, and public prosecutors have not yet announced whether they intend to appeal against the ruling on Oseney.

Oseney’s lawyer, Lucas Sá Souza, said during the trial that he would request house arrest because his client was ill, suffering from internal bleeding, and unable to undergo the necessary tests to diagnose his condition while in prison.

Pereira and Phillips were killed while travelling along the Itaquaí River on 5 June 2022. They had been visiting Indigenous patrol teams working to protect the Javari valley Indigenous territory, a vast expanse of rainforest believed to hold the world’s largest concentration of isolated Indigenous peoples.

The fishers are suspected of committing the crime on behalf of Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, whom police accuse of running a transnational illegal fishing network that exploits these protected Indigenous lands. Villar has also been arrested and charged.

Emails obtained by the Guardian reveal a behind-the-scenes network of county election officials throughout Georgia coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November’s election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement.

The emails were obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) as a result of a public records request sent to David Hancock, an election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections. Crew shared the emails with the Guardian.

Spanning a period beginning in January, the communications expose the inner workings of a group that includes some of the most ardent supporters of the former president Donald Trump’s election lies as well as ongoing efforts to portray the coming election as beset with fraud. Included in the communications are agendas for meetings and efforts to coordinate on policies and messaging as the swing state has once again become a focal point of the presidential campaign.

The communications include correspondence from a who’s who of Georgia election denialists, including officials with ties to prominent national groups such as the Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, a group run by Cleta Mitchell, a former attorney who acted as an informal adviser to the Trump White House during its attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

The group – which includes elections officials from at least five counties – calls itself the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition.

Among the oldest emails released are those regarding a 30 January article published by the United Tea Party of Georgia. Headlined “Georgia Democratic Party Threatens Georgia Election Officials”, the article was posted by an unnamed “admin” of the website, and came in response to letters sent to county election officials throughout Georgia who had recently refused to certify election results.

“In what can only be seen as an attempt to intimidate elections officials,” the article began, “the Georgia Democratic party sent a letter to individual county board of elections members threatening legal action unless they vote to certify upcoming elections – even if the board member has legitimate concerns about the results.”

The letter had been sent by a lawyer representing the Democratic party of Georgia to county election board members in Spalding, Cobb and DeKalb counties. Election board members in each of those counties had refused to certify the results of local elections the previous November. In their letter, Democrats sought to warn those officials that their duty to certify results was not discretionary in an attempt to prevent further certification refusals, including in the coming presidential election. In response, the United Tea Party of Georgia took issue with the letter, calling it “troubling” and saying that it was “Orwellian to demand that election officials certify an election even if they have unanswered questions about the vote”.

While the author of the article was not named on the United Tea Party of Georgia’s website, the emails obtained by Crew show that it was Hancock, an outspoken election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections, who has become a leading voice in the push for more power to refuse to certify results.

“All right – I finished the article and posted it,” Hancock wrote in an email the same day he published the article.

Receiving the email were a handful of county election officials who have expressed belief in Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020, and have continued to implement policies and push for rules based on the belief that widespread election fraud threatens to result in a Trump loss in Georgia in November. They include Michael Heekin, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of elections who refused to certify results this year; his colleague Julie Adams, who has twice refused to certify results this year and works for the prominent national election denier groups Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network; and Debbie Fisher of Cobb county, Nancy Jester of DeKalb county and Roy McClain of Spalding county – all of whom refused to certify results last November and who received the letter Hancock took issue with.

By 4 February, Hancock apparently hadn’t received much feedback from his article, and again shared it with the group.

“[N]o comments at all on the Democratic party of Georgia article. I guess it just wasn’t picked up by anyone important,” he wrote in an email to the group at 10.53pm that Sunday night, following up five minutes later with a link to the article. “I think the message needs to get out, so share as you feel led.”

Democrats and election experts have cited Georgia court cases dating back to 1899 dictating certification as a “ministerial”, not discretionary, duty of county election officials. At a Monday gathering of state-level election officials from several swing states, Gabe Sterling, a deputy to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, warned county election officials that they could be taken to court for refusing to certify results in November.

The communications also show members of the group coordinating on messaging regarding their false claims of widespread voter fraud. Ahead of a December meeting of the group, Adams, using her TeaPartyPatriots.org email address, sent an agenda that included an item about a “New York Times reporter traveling to several counties in Georgia”. Another agenda noted that the Federalist, a rightwing publication, was seeking “freelance writers (no experience needed)”.

The group has heard from speakers at their meetings that include the state election board member Dr Janice Johnston, an election denier who smiled and waved to the crowd at Trump’s 3 August rally in Atlanta in which he praised her and two other Republicans on the board as “pit bulls” “fighting for victory”. One agenda also noted that Frank Schneider, an election denial activist who has challenged the eligibility of more than 31,000 Georgia voters, would speak at a meeting. Other speakers at the group’s meetings include Garland Favorito, perhaps the state’s most prominent election denial activist who constantly pressures the state election board to launch investigations into supposed election fraud as well as to implement policies and rules he and others frequently submit. (In a separate release of emails obtained by the Guardian, Favorito is seen scheduling a July lunch with the state election board’s chair, John Fervier, a moderate Republican who has voted against recent denier-based rules passed by his Republican colleagues.)

Another meeting speaker was Salleigh Grubbs, the chair of the Cobb county Republican party, who successfully petitioned the state election board to adopt a rule that gives county election officials more power to refuse to certify election results. Amanda Prettyman, an election denier who spoke about election conspiracies at a 2022 Macon-Bibb county election board meeting, has also spoken at meetings of the group, as have Lisa Neisler, an election denier whose X profile contains a photo of Trump supporters at a rally on 6 January before the attack on the Capitol, and Victoria Cruz, a Republican who ran for a county commission seat in May but lost.

The emails back up previously released emails showing Hancock coordinating with Johnston on two rules passed by the state election board that give county election officials more power to refuse to certify results, as well as ongoing voter purges that Democrats have said are a violation of the National Voter Registration Act. Those emails also show Hancock’s initial response to the letter from Georgia Democrats warning county election officials like himself that they have a legal duty to certify results.

“When you have a moment, I would really appreciate your opinion on this incredible letter from an attorney for the Democratic party of Georgia regarding voting to certify an election,” Hancock wrote to Favorito on 4 January. “I guess they are trying to prepare for the 2024 elections? I don’t see how this stands – if the [board of elections] has no choice but to certify an election, then why require them to vote to certify the election?”

A Ukrainian drone attack on a large Russian weapons depot caused a blast that was picked up by earthquake monitoring stations, in one of the biggest strikes on Moscow’s military arsenal since the war began.

Pro-Russian military bloggers said Ukraine struck an arsenal for the storage of missiles, ammunition and explosives in Toropets, a historic town more than 300 miles north of Ukraine and about 230 miles west of Moscow.

Videos and images on social media showed a huge ball of flame rising high into the night sky and detonations thundering across a lake, in a region not far from the border with Belarus.

The strike was part of a broader Ukrainian drone campaign targeting Russian oil refineries, power plants, airfields and military factories, and highlights Kyiv’s enhanced long-range drone capabilities.

Earthquake monitoring stations registered what sensors thought was a minor earthquake in the area.

Ukrainian Pravda reported that the operation was conducted by the Ukrainian security service together with the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine and the Special Operations Force. An unnamed official at the Ukrainian security service said the weapons warehouse contained long-range Russian missiles and guided bombs known as KABs.

Russia’s defence ministry said 54 Ukrainian drones targeted five western Russian regions overnight and that all of them were destroyed.

But in a tacit admission of the strike, Igor Rudenya, the governor of Russia’s Tver region, said firefighters there were trying to contain a fire and that some residents were being evacuated from their homes.

Rudenya said wreckage from a destroyed Ukrainian drone had sparked a fire, but did not say what was burning.

Russian state media reported that nurseries and schools in the Zapadnodvinsk district, bordering the Toropetsk district in the Tver region, were closed on Wednesday.

Some pro-war Russian war bloggers expressed anger over how Ukrainian drones could trigger such large explosions at what was thought to be a highly fortified facility.

In a scathing statement on Telegram, Anastasia Kashevarova, a well-connected and influential blogger, blamed the Russian defence ministry and authorities for allowing Ukraine to “blow up a massive military depot”.

She wrote: “How many more mistakes can they make … It is the third year of the special military operation but the idiocy continues.”

Ukraine’s strike using domestically produced drones comes amid Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s ongoing efforts to persuade his allies to permit Kyiv to use western-supplied missiles against airbases and weapons dumps on Russian territory, to curb Moscow’s steady advances in eastern Ukraine.

Kyiv’s allies, including the US and Britain, are discussing whether to authorise Kyiv to strike deep inside Russian territory using missiles including the long-range US Atacms and Anglo-French Storm Shadows, known in France as Scalp.

The Kremlin has said such a move would imply direct western involvement in the conflict and would result in consequences, with some officials close to Vladimir Putin suggesting Moscow could respond with nuclear weapons.

Since the start of this year, Russian forces have made continuous advances in eastern Ukraine, steadily approaching the key city of Pokrovsk.

Earlier on Wednesday, Russia’s military claimed to have captured the town of Ukrainsk, which lies in between Pokrovsk and Kurakhove, another Ukrainian military stronghold.

Soldiers, emergency workers and volunteers battled through the night to reinforce defences around Wrocław, Poland’s third biggest city, as the EU said flooding in central Europe happening simultaneously alongside wildfires in Portugal showed climate breakdown in action.

More than five times the average rainfall for the whole of September has fallen in five days on swathes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, triggering devastating flooding that has killed 23 people in four countries.

In Portugal, the government declared a “state of calamity” late on Tuesday night as dozens of wildfires continued to burn across northern parts of the country. The wildfires have killed at least seven people, destroyed dozens of houses and torn through tens of thousands of hectares of forest and scrubland.

Visiting Wrocław, a city of 600,000 people where the level of the Odra (Oder) River is not due to peak until Thursday, the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, told a crisis meeting that “a lot happened” overnight but more needed to be done.

Sandbags were passed along lines of residents and civil protection workers to fortify riverbanks and buildings, helped by some of the 14,000 soldiers sent to the worst-hit areas. Army helicopters dumped more bags to strengthen emergency dams.

“We are concentrating on keeping the Oder within its banks,” said the Polish interior minister, Tomasz Siemoniak. “We have a very difficult dozen or so hours ahead of us.”

Finance minister Andrzej Domański said 2bn złotys (£395m) had been set aside for dealing with the aftermath of the floods, which have destroyed roads and bridges, submerged whole neighbourhoods and caused billions of euros of damage.

Austria has tripled its federal disaster fund to €1bn (£840m), the chancellor, Karl Nehammer, said on Wednesday, describing the past few days as “enormously challenging” and causing “great suffering and unimaginable destruction”.

Seven people have died in Poland, seven in Romania, five in Austria and four in the Czech Republic, officials said on Wednesday, with several reported missing, as Storm Boris moved steadily westward to start threatening northern Italy.

Czech media reported the latest victim there was a 70-year-old woman from a village near the north-eastern town of Jesenik who was found 20 metres from her house after leaving an evacuation centre on Sunday to return to her home.

The Polish defence ministry said more than 14,000 soldiers had been deployed to flood-hit regions, with the armed forces using helicopters to evacuate people and strengthen flood defences, while drones monitored the situation from above.

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, would travel to Wrocław on Thursday to meet the political leaders of Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, the commission said on Wednesday.

In Hungary, authorities opened a dam in the country’s north-west to direct water from the Lajta River into an emergency reservoir to protect the town of Mosonmagyaróvár and continued to shore up flood defences in the capital, Budapest.

Authorities said the Danube River was expected to peak around or slightly above 8.5 metres, probably on Friday or Saturday. “Due to heavy rains and floods, the situation is critical all across central Europe,” the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said. “According to the latest forecasts, the crucial time for Hungary begins on Wednesday, so flood protection is going full steam ahead.”

Elswehere, notably in the Czech Republic, waters were mostly receding, leaving an estimated €4bn of damage.

In Strasbourg, the EU’s crisis management commissioner, Janez Lenarčič, said the flooding in central Europe, combined with this week’s deadly forest fires in Portugal, were joint proof of climate breakdown.

“Make no mistake. This tragedy is not an anomaly. This is fast becoming the norm for our shared future,” Lenarčič told MEPs. “Europe is the fastest warming continent globally and is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events.”

Beyond the human cost, member states were also struggling to cope with mounting damage repair bills and the lengthy recovery periods from disaster, he said. “The average cost of disasters in the 1980s was €8bn. More recently, in 2021 and in 2022, the damage passed €50bn a year, so the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action.

Brussels faces growing opposition in many member states to costly measures to combat global heating.

Critics say the bloc’s plan to become climate neutral by 2050 is unrealistic and too expensive, with populist and far-right parties leading the attack. But Lenarčič said people only needed to follow the news to understand the urgency issue.

“We face a Europe that is simultaneously flooding and burning. These extreme weather events … are now an almost annual occurrence,” he said. “The global reality of the climate breakdown has moved into the everyday lives of Europeans.”

More than 5,000 firefighters tackled more than 100 separate wildfires in Portugal on Wednesday as Spain, France and Italy each sent two waterbombing aircraft in efforts to extinguish the blazes.

“We’re in a stressful situation, at the limit of our capabilities,” said the head of the Portuguese civil protection authority, Duarte Costa, adding that the reinforcements would allow for some rotation of exhausted Portuguese firefighters.

Portugal’s prime minister, Luís Montenegro, paid tribute to three firefighters who died. “My deepest condolences to the families and the firefighters who died. Three heroes who gave their lives defending Portugal and the Portuguese people. The greatest tribute we can pay them is to continue fighting, as they did,” he said.

Montenegro also said the people suspected of starting some of the fires would feel the full force of the law, adding that he would “spare no effort in repressive action” when it came to such crimes.

More than 90,000 hectares (347 sq miles) in Portugal have been burned by large-scale wildfires since Saturday, taking the total this year to at least 124,000 hectares. The burned area is the largest since 2017, when the country suffered two devastating wildfires that killed more than 100 people.

Italy’s national civil protection service has issued nearly 50 yellow alerts for Wednesday, warning of a risk of storms, landslides and floods in the Emilia-Romagna and Marche regions, which could face two months of rainfall in the next three days.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report

A former marine operator who worked for the company behind the Titan submersible that imploded last year, killing five on its journey to view the wreck of the Titanic on the bottom of the north Atlantic, told an inquiry that he believed such a tragedy was “inevitable” as safety standards were flouted.

David Lochridge, the former operations director for OceanGate, the firm behind the deep sea diving craft, testified during a US Coast Guard hearing that he alerted the company to safety concerns he had about the submersible, but was largely ignored.

His testimony came as video footage of the remains of Titan was released for the first time by the Coast Guard. In the video, a broken tail cone can be seen on the ocean floor, with fragments of the vessel visible around the cone.

During his highly anticipated testimony, Lochridge said that the “whole idea” of OceanGate was to “make money”, adding: “There was very little in the way of science.”

Lochridge told the hearing of his doubts about how the Titan was built in 2017. “[I had] no confidence whatsoever, and I was very vocal about that, and still am,” he said.

Lochridge was later fired in 2018 and sued by OceanGate, alleging that he improperly disclosed confidential information to regulators. The company also accused Lochridge of refusing to listen to assurances from a lead engineer on the matter. Lochridge and OceanGate settled their suit in November 2018.

Lochridge also gave an account of the OceanGate CEO, Stockton Rush, previously crashing another submersible in 2016 after attempting to pilot the vessel to the Andrea Doria shipwreck, located off the Massachusetts coast.

During that chaotic and near-disastrous trip, Rush reportedly threw the vessel’s controls at Lochridge in a fit of rage after a passenger asked that someone else pilot the submersible when, Lochridge said, Stockton rushed the craft too close to the wreck, got into difficulty and panicked, then would not cede control until the tearful passenger yelled at him.

The US Coast Guard hearing to investigate the Titan tragedy comes more than a year after the submersible experienced a “catastrophic implosion” deep underwater under intense ocean pressure on its way to the Titanic wreck at the bottom of the north Atlantic.

Five people, including Rush, were killed in the June 2023 incident. The other victims were the British explorer Hamish Harding; the British businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman; and the French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

A former marine operator who worked for the company behind the Titan submersible that imploded last year, killing five on its journey to view the wreck of the Titanic on the bottom of the north Atlantic, told an inquiry that he believed such a tragedy was “inevitable” as safety standards were flouted.

David Lochridge, the former operations director for OceanGate, the firm behind the deep sea diving craft, testified during a US Coast Guard hearing that he alerted the company to safety concerns he had about the submersible, but was largely ignored.

His testimony came as video footage of the remains of Titan was released for the first time by the Coast Guard. In the video, a broken tail cone can be seen on the ocean floor, with fragments of the vessel visible around the cone.

During his highly anticipated testimony, Lochridge said that the “whole idea” of OceanGate was to “make money”, adding: “There was very little in the way of science.”

Lochridge told the hearing of his doubts about how the Titan was built in 2017. “[I had] no confidence whatsoever, and I was very vocal about that, and still am,” he said.

Lochridge was later fired in 2018 and sued by OceanGate, alleging that he improperly disclosed confidential information to regulators. The company also accused Lochridge of refusing to listen to assurances from a lead engineer on the matter. Lochridge and OceanGate settled their suit in November 2018.

Lochridge also gave an account of the OceanGate CEO, Stockton Rush, previously crashing another submersible in 2016 after attempting to pilot the vessel to the Andrea Doria shipwreck, located off the Massachusetts coast.

During that chaotic and near-disastrous trip, Rush reportedly threw the vessel’s controls at Lochridge in a fit of rage after a passenger asked that someone else pilot the submersible when, Lochridge said, Stockton rushed the craft too close to the wreck, got into difficulty and panicked, then would not cede control until the tearful passenger yelled at him.

The US Coast Guard hearing to investigate the Titan tragedy comes more than a year after the submersible experienced a “catastrophic implosion” deep underwater under intense ocean pressure on its way to the Titanic wreck at the bottom of the north Atlantic.

Five people, including Rush, were killed in the June 2023 incident. The other victims were the British explorer Hamish Harding; the British businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman; and the French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

A court in Spain has opened an investigation into the death of a German woman who died after being attacked by a shark while sailing 270 nautical miles (500km) off the Canary Islands on Tuesday.

According to the country’s maritime rescue service, Salvamento Marítimo, the 30-year-old woman was travelling on the British-flagged catamaran Dalliance Chichester about 110 miles west of the Western Saharan city of Dakhla when the attack happened just before 4pm local time.

The boat’s crew made an emergency call to the Spanish rescue service, which shares responsibility for the zone with the its Moroccan counterpart. The Moroccan authorities asked Salvamento Marítimo to lead the operation effort as it had no rescue craft in the area.

A Spanish air force search-and-rescue helicopter was scrambled from Gran Canaria, which reached the woman at 20.05 on Thursday. Salvamento Marítimo also contacted nearby boats, one of which managed to offer assistance while the helicopter was on the way.

The woman, who had lost a leg in the attack, suffered cardiorespiratory failure on the helicopter flight and was pronounced dead at the Doctor Negrín hospital in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria.

A spokesperson for the Canaries’ courts service confirmed that a court in Las Palmas had begun an investigation into the incident, “as it does in the case of any accidental death”. They said no one had been called to testify. The Guardia Civil police force also said it was looking into the matter, and referred the Guardian to the courts.

According to the boat-tracking website VesselFinder, the Dalliance Chichester left the port of Las Palmas on 14 September.

Meanwhile, Salvamento Marítimo crews helped rescue 122 people who were trying to reach the Canary Islands on the perilous Atlantic route from west Africa. So far this year, 26,758 people including children have reached the Canary Islands by sea – 12,304 more than last year – once again placing a huge strain in the archipelago’s reception infrastructure.

The Spanish migration NGO Caminando Fronteras estimated that more than 5,000 people died trying to reach Spain by sea in the first five months of this year, the overwhelming majority of them on the Atlantic route.

Authorities in Nigeria have warned of the potential for flooding in 11 states after neighbouring Cameroon said it would start regulated releases from its Lagdo dam following recent heavy rainfall in west and central Africa.

Umar Mohammed, the director-general of the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NHSA), indicated that the discharges would be gradual “to avoid … triggering substantial flooding downstream in Nigeria” and that there was “no need for alarm”. Still, 11 Nigerian states from north to south lie along the Benue River’s flow trajectory and are expected to be affected to some degree.

“The water discharge is anticipated to progressively escalate to 1,000m³/s over the next seven days based on the inflow from the upstream Garoua River, which serves as the primary source into the reservoir and a significant tributary to the Benue River,” Mohammed said.

The Garoua River in Cameroon’s North region runs along the bank of the larger Benue River that flows through both countries. For years, the reservoir’s releases have been a source of headache for its larger neighbour. In 2022, releases led to the loss of more than 600 lives and an estimated $9bn (£6.8bn) in damages, according to the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics.

The NHSA said it had been notified by authorities in Cameroon on Tuesday that they had started controlled water releases from Lagdo dam. A spokesperson for Cameroon’s utility ENEO, which manages the dam, told Reuters the dam had not been opened as of Wednesday morning.

The flood alert comes a week after thousands in the north-eastern hub of Maiduguri were displaced by torrential rains after the collapse of a nearby dam which had been so neglected for years that cracks had begun to appear on its walls.

The incident, which caused a bridge to collapse and drowned some wild animals including reptiles and lions, let others loose into the metropolis and also facilitated the escape of more than 200 inmates from the city prison. The official death toll is 38 but some residents say the true figure exceeds that.

One of the three nutrition centres run by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) was cut off by the flood. Twenty-six children were evacuated from it, said Babatunde Ojei, its country director in Nigeria, on Wednesday.

“May Allah help us stop the tragedy; the situation that we find ourselves in, the environmental problem and climate change,” News Agency of Nigeria quoted President Bola Tinubu as saying during a visit on Monday, days after his deputy led a federal delegation to Maiduguri.

Nigeria’s hydrological agency first gave notice of a national disaster during the launch of the 2024 Annual Flood Outlook in April, forecasting floods in as many as 29 of Nigeria’s 36 states. Aid workers say 1.3m hectares (3.2m acres) of land nationwide has already been submerged as of 10 September. About half of that was cropland.

Across the country, the impact of climate change continues to compound the woes of some of its most vulnerable households. Rural poverty is widespread, as is malnutrition in a region with multiple, sometimes concurrent, conflicts.

Extreme rainfall is more common and more intense because of human-caused climate breakdown across most of the world, particularly in Europe, most of Asia, central and eastern North America, and parts of South America, Africa and Australia. This is because warmer air can hold more water vapour. Flooding has most likely become more frequent and severe in these locations as a result, but is also affected by human factors, such as the existence of flood defences and land use.

In Maiduguri, the birthplace of the Boko Haram insurgency that has decimated villages since 2009 when its founder was killed extrajudicially, the floods have brought a new dimension of helplessness for local people.

“I never pray for even my enemy to experience such a thing,” Aisha Aliyu, a resident of Maiduguri, told AFP last week. She is temporarily staying at one of the eight camps opened to take in survivors.

In Gubio, another camp, an unknown number of suspected cholera cases have been reported, said Ojei. If confirmed, a cholera outbreak would put many children “at extreme risk … due to existing vulnerabilities such as diarrhoea and malaria,” he added.

Astronomers have spotted two record-breaking plasma jets blasting out of a supermassive black hole and into the void beyond its host galaxy.

The enormously powerful plasma streams are the largest ever seen, measuring 23m light years from end to end, a distance that would cross 140 Milky Ways arranged side by side.

Researchers named the spectacular pair of jets Porphyrion after a giant in Greek mythology. The fierce, narrow streams emerge from the top and bottom of the supermassive black hole and have a combined power output equivalent to trillions of suns.

Black hole jets are streams of charged ions, electrons and other particles. These are accelerated to nearly the speed of light by the immense magnetic fields around black holes. Such jets have been known about for more than a century, but until recently they were thought to be rare and not so extensive.

Porphyrion was spotted by Europe’s Low-Frequency Array (Lofar) telescope during a sky survey that uncovered more than 10,000 giant black hole jets. Many are so powerful that they push far beyond the black hole’s host galaxy and deep into the vast voids of the cosmic web, the network of matter that connects galaxies.

Given the size of Porphyrion, astronomers now suspect that such giant jets have a role in shaping the evolution of the universe. Black hole jets can snuff out star formation but also spew profound amounts of material and energy deep into space.

“Porphyrion shows that small things and large things in the universe are intimately connected,” said Dr Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech in the US and lead author of a Nature paper reporting the discovery. “We are seeing a single black hole that produces a structure of a scale similar to that of cosmic filaments and voids.”

Having spotted Porphyrion, the researchers, including Martin Hardcastle, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire, used the Giant Metrewave radio telescope in India and the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii to locate it within a galaxy 10 times more massive than the Milky Way and about 7.5bn light years from Earth.

The Porphyrion jets started to form when the universe was about 6.3bn years old, less than half its present age, with the jets taking a billion years to grow to their observed length, the researchers believe.

“More Porphyrion-like black hole jet systems could have existed in the past and together these could have a major impact on the cosmic web by influencing the formation of galaxies, heating up the medium in the filaments, and also they could magnetise the cosmic void,” Oei said. “This is what we want to go after now.”

The new Dutch coalition government headed by Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom party (PVV) appears to be on a collision course with the EU over immigration after formally asking Brussels for an opt-out on asylum rules.

“I have just informed the European Commission that I want an ‘opt-out’ on migration matters in Europe for the Netherlands,” the asylum and migration minister Marjolein Faber, a member of the PVV, said on X on Wednesday.

“We have to be in charge of our own asylum policy once more!” she added. The four-party coalition, which took office in July after elections last November, has promised to introduce the country’s “toughest ever” policy on immigration.

The move is not expected to get a positive reception in Brussels or many of the bloc’s other capitals since all 27 member states – including the Netherlands – agreed last December a new EU-wide migration and asylum pact after years of talks.

“You don’t opt out of adopted legislation in the EU, that is a general principle,” the European Commission’s chief spokesperson, Eric Mamer, said last week, referring to the Dutch government’s intentions. Experts in the Netherlands have also expressed serious reservations.

“A Dutch opt-out can only be realised by amending the treaty,” said the Advisory Council on Migration, an independent body that advises the Dutch government and parliament. “This is not very likely, because the number of asylum seekers must then be distributed among fewer other member states.”

Denmark, Ireland and Poland have previously secured opt-outs from EU treaties in different policy areas including the euro, the bloc’s area of freedom, security and justice, the passport-free Schengen zone and the charter of fundamental rights.

All were negotiated as part of the treaty, not afterwards. The Dutch request is widely seen as having almost no chance of success, not least since it could open the door to similar demands from other increasingly anti-immigration governments.

The opt-out demand is unrelated to the new government’s aims to declare a “national asylum crisis”, which would allow it to implement significantly harsher immigration measures without the approval of the Dutch parliament.

These include a freeze on new applications, limiting visas issued for family members of people granted asylum, making living conditions as basic as possible and accelerating the deportation process for those not eligible for asylum.

Presenting the policy last Friday, the Dutch prime minister, Dick Schoof, said the country could not “continue to bear the large influx of migrants”. King Willem-Alexander said in a speech to open parliament on Tuesday that the government’s goal was a “faster, stricter and more modest” asylum system.

Legal experts have questioned whether the Netherlands’ asylum system can be fairly described as “in crisis”, noting that its problems are largely the result of government funding decisions rather than an external event such as war or natural disaster.

According to EU data, the Netherlands received two first-time asylum applications per 1,000 residents last year, matching the average across the bloc, with 10 member states – including Greece, Germany and Spain – reporting higher ratios.

After years of budget cuts, however, the only Dutch registration centre for asylum seekers, in the small village of Ter Apel in the north-east of the country, has been repeatedly overwhelmed, occasionally leaving hundreds to sleep outdoors.

Wilders’ nativist PVV finished a shock first in last year’s elections but the far-right, anti-Islam firebrand struggled to form a government and was eventually forced to concede he did not have enough support from would-be coalition partners to be prime minister.

Their refusal to accept some of his more extreme policies had already resulted in him ditching several anti-constitutional proposals, including bans on mosques, the Qur’an and Islamic headscarves as well as a “Nexit” referendum on leaving the EU.

Two months after its formation, cracks are already emerging in the coalition, which also includes the populist farmers’ party, BBB; the rightwing liberal VVD, long led by the former prime minister Mark Rutte, and the anti-corruption NSC.

The NSC’s acting leader, Nicolien van Vroonhoven, said this week her party’s MPs would not vote in favour of the proposed immigration measures if they were not fully approved by the Netherlands’ top advisory body, the Council of State.

Wilders responded furiously, saying on X: “I would have another hard think. The Netherlands has a huge huge asylum crisis and it will not be solved by running away in advance and threatening with the NSC to vote no.”

To catch a rat, many call pest control. But how does one go about catching the world’s largest rodent, the capybara?

Zookeepers in Shropshire are wrestling with that very problem after Cinnamon, one of the furry breed native to South America, escaped.

The 25kg (55lb) rodent bolted from her paddock at Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World near Telford on Friday when the gate to the enclosure was opened to allow a tractor in.

Now, a search operation is under way led by Will Dorrell, a partner at Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World, who explained the complexities of the task, which involves using capybara sounds and scents, as well as apples, pears and drones.

“The search operation, we’ve got up to about 20 people involved,” he said. “It’s actually easiest to do in smaller groups for the simple reason you’d end up tripping over each other, so up to about 20 people involved, usually in groups of about five people.”

On Tuesday night, Cinnamon – who is about the size of a labrador – was seen by a drone with a thermal camera just 200 metres from her paddock, right next to the zoo on land owned by the Ministry of Defence.

She had managed to hide in dense thicket, and the zookeepers decided to place live traps rather than catch her by hand and cause further stress.

“We use lots of live traps, which are essentially large cages that the animal will walk into, and then the cage closes behind them, so it’s relatively stress-free for the animal,” Dorrell said.

“Obviously we have got things that we can catch animal with, like nets, but they’re quite stressful, so we try to avoid using those if at all possible.”

More innovative methods have also been used. “We have been playing capybara sounds to try and draw her into an area. But at the moment, that hasn’t been overly successful. She doesn’t seem to be drawn particularly towards those so we’re going to start using scents instead.

“So we’re trying to use the smells of our other capybara, put some dirty bedding down in certain areas and see if that’ll draw her towards it instead … We’re also putting food in the traps and putting food in other places. Various fruits such as apples, pears – sweet things, mainly, that she can’t find in the wild.”

The nature of the capybara is presenting challenges to the search effort, Dorrell said.

“Obviously, we think of them as being tropical animals, living in rainforests and stuff like that. That is true, but, ultimately, a lot of the things that they need are just present in regular forest.

“So the woodland she’s next to at the moment, there is loads of food. There is loads of natural food, loads of grass, loads of waterways, ponds – they’re fantastic swimmers. The first thing they do is as soon as they feel threatened is run straight into a pond. So you can’t really do anything about that, because they’re a lot better swimmers than you – they can swim underwater for about five minutes.”

Cinnamon is a year old and was born at the zoo, where her parents and brother also live. The council has been notified, as is required when an animal escapes from a zoo.

While the focus is on finding Cinnamon, Dorrell said they had already reviewed the incident and put in place measures to prevent future escapes.

“She got out, unfortunately, because while the gate was opened while they took a tractor mower in there, she managed to slip around the side of the tractor mower and get out from the open gate, which has never previously been an issue in over 10 years.

“But we’re now reviewing to make sure that it can’t happen again. So, going forward, there’ll be another gate in, something like a double gate, and it’ll be a two-person job as well, to stop this from happening.”