At least 30 people have been killed and scores injured in crowd crushes at the Kumbh Mela festival, Indian police have confirmed, as vast numbers of people went to bathe at one of the holiest sites of the Hindu gathering.

Tens of millions of people flocked to the northern state of Uttar Pradesh to immerse themselves at the sacred confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers on one of the most auspicious days of the Hindu festival.

A senior police officer, Vaibhav Krishna, told a news conference that 30 people had died and at least double that number were wounded in fatal crushes that took place in the early hours of Wednesday.

It is feared the death toll could be higher than officially confirmed. Earlier, officials on the ground said 39 bodies had been brought to a hospital morgue.

According to accounts by devotees, several crowd crushes occurred at about 1am after large numbers of people congregated on the banks where the Yamuna and Ganges river meet in order to take a holy bath in the waters. As the crowd surged in different directions, people began to push their way out and some tried to jump over barriers. Many fell down the river bank in the panic and families who had been sleeping on the ground nearby were trampled.

A number of bodies were seen lying around the banks of the river. Shoes and clothes could be seen strewn on the ground, and there were scenes of desperation at nearby makeshift tent hospitals where the dead and injured were initially brought.

More than 400 million people – the biggest crowd in the event’s history – were expected to attend this year’s Kumbh Mela festivities, held over 45 days in Prayagraj, in Uttar Pradesh. A record 100 million people had been expected to attend the festival on Wednesday alone, to take part in a particularly auspicious bathing day.

The Kumbh Mela has been promoted heavily by the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose face was visible on posters across the event, and he had earlier praised the “extraordinary” and “unforgettable” crowds that were attending. In the aftermath of Wednesday’s crush, Modi called the incident “extremely sad”.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, did not acknowledge any fatalities at the festival and said the incident had been triggered when some devotees tried to cross over barricades set up by police.

Several relatives of victims placed the blame with police, accusing them of failing to properly control the crowds and causing bottlenecks of devotees in certain areas as some main routes and pontoon bridges across the river were blocked for ordinary pilgrims.

On Tuesday, as numbers attending the festival swelled beyond the authorities’ expectations, announcements broadcast over loudspeakers urged new arrivals to get in the water quickly, dip twice and then leave the site immediately, calling it a sin to do a third dip.

Narayan Singh Lodhi, 50, from Madhya Pradesh, said his sister-in-law Hukam Bhai Lodhi died in the crush after she became separated from her family as they went down to bathe. She had three children, including a daughter who was with her at the festival.

Lodhi said the trouble began when the crowds of bathers going in opposite directions began to collide. “I saw people falling to the ground and shouting, and people started treading on each other,” he said.

“I tried to rescue as many people as possible but I could only get hold of my wife and another woman. I dragged them out. I saw around 20 bodies who were clearly dead on the floor who had been crushed and others were lying there injured crying out for help.”

Lodhi was among those who said the deaths were a failure by the authorities. “It’s police who are responsible for this disaster,” he said. “We had planned to take a dip in the river around 4am but they came over earlier and tried to make everyone get in the water quickly and go. It was their fault that everyone went down to the river at once and then they didn’t properly control the crowds. Now people have lost their lives.”

There were similarly frantic scenes at the missing persons booths, where those caught in the crush tried to find missing relatives. Saroj Bhagri, 60, from Madhya Pradesh, was looking for her eight-year-old grandson, Chahat Bhagri. They had only arrived at the festival late on Tuesday night after travelling for 36 hours and were sitting on the floor, sharing some food after taking a holy dip, when the crowd surged on top of them.

“Suddenly people started pushing and falling over us and trampling us. I got up and I was holding my grandson’s hands but then I was pushed down and it got wrenched from me when there was a huge crush.

“All around people were running and screaming but he was gone.”

Manoj Kumar Paswan 45, from Uttar Pradesh, said his 65-year-old aunt, Chanara Prajapat, was missing, after they had gone down to the river in the early hours to bathe. “There was a commotion and people started falling on each other. There was a sudden push that was so forceful that I lost the hand of my aunt,” he said.

“It was a very painful and scary experience. People all around were crying and wailing. There were over a dozen people lying on the floor including children and people were just trampling over them.”

The Kumbh Mela pilgrimage takes place every 12 years and is widely seen as the “festival of festivals” in the Hindu religious calendar in India, attended by a vibrant mix of sadhus, ascetics, pilgrims and tourists.

This year’s celebration is particularly significant as the Maha or grand Kumbh Mela takes place only every 144 years, marking the 12th Kumbh Mela and a special celestial alignment of the sun, moon, Jupiter and Saturn.

Dozens of people are feared to have died in crowd crushes at the Kumbh Mela festival in India, as vast crowds of people went to bathe at one of the holiest sites of the Hindu gathering.

What is the Kumbh Mela?

The Kumbh Mela is the world’s largest religious gathering, widely seen as the “festival of festivals” in the Hindu religious calendar. This year it is being held in the north Indian city of Prayagraj, where it takes place every 12 years.

Its origins lie in ancient Hindu mythology and the legend of demons and gods fighting over a pitcher, or kumbh, of the nectar of immortality, and drops falling on to the earth in four Indian cities.

During the 45-day festival, Hindu holy men, known as sadhus, and hundreds of millions of devotees set up camp and take a dip in the triveni sangam, the sacred confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati rivers in Prayagraj, which they believe will cleanse their sins and free them from the cycle of reincarnation.

Smaller versions of the Kumbh Mela take place every three years but the iteration held in Prayagraj is considered to be the biggest and most spiritually significant. This year’s celebration, which is expected to continue until 26 February, is particularly auspicious as it is the Maha, or grand Kumbh Mela, which takes places once every 144 years. It marks the 12th Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj and a special celestial alignment of the sun, the moon, Jupiter and Saturn.

Just how big is the Kumbh Mela?

Even in a country as big and populous as India, the scale of the Kumbh Mela is staggering. This time round, the government said it expected 400 million visitors – larger than the population of the US – to turn up over the total 45 days of the Kumbh Mela, which would be a record crowd for the festival. In 2019, a smaller version of the festival in Haridwar attracted 240 million people.

Over the course of the festival, a sprawling temporary city of tents, stalls, toilets and elaborate temple facades are constructed along both banks of the Ganges river, across a 40 sq km area. Each day, millions gather at the triveni sangam to take a dip in the water, many having travelled for days to do so.

As well as pilgrims, it is mandatory for tens of thousands of sadhus, who are part of monastic sects known as Akharas, to attend the Kumbh Mela and take part in several ritual bathings in the river. It offers pilgrims a rare opportunity to offer devotion to the naga sadhus, the naked, ash-smeared holy men who largely live an isolated life of meditation and prayer in ashrams.

Spending for the festival has also increased to record highs this year, with the Uttar Pradesh state government reported to have spent 70bn rupees (£670m) on setting up the site and bringing in new technology to update the ancient festivities.

What caused the crowd crush?

Wednesday 29 January was considered one of the most auspicious days to take a dip in the holy river waters during the Kumbh Mela and was always expected to draw in huge numbers of pilgrims.

According to government estimates, 100 million people were due to take a holy dip in the waters over the course of the day. It is also when the Akharas, the 13 monastic sects of sadhus, take part in the shahi snan, one of the biggest spiritual bathing rituals of the Kumbh Mela, which begins before sunrise.

In the build-up, it had appeared the police had already struggled to manage the large numbers of pilgrims who were arriving. Many of the pontoon bridges and walkways were highly congested or shut off by police, leaving pilgrims and sadhus frustrated at the restricted movement around the site.

As large numbers arrived on the riverbank late on Tuesday evening, the authorities began to urge pilgrims to take only two dips in the water and then leave the riverside quickly. But by the early hours of Wednesday, millions of pilgrims had continued to squash on to the area around the sangam, many falling asleep on the ground after the holy dip.

According to witnesses, in the early hours of Wednesday, the crowd around the riverbank surged in multiple directions and people began to try to push their way out. Many fell over and were trampled, while many of those sleeping on the ground were crushed.

What has the government response been?

In the aftermath, dozens of bodies were seen lying on the ground around the banks of the river, and families sitting outside hospitals gave accounts of relatives who had been injured and killed in the crush. Local officials counting casualties into hospital tents said at least 38 were feared dead while other officials and doctors have given death tolls ranging from 15 to 50.

In a statement, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, offered condolences for the “lives lost”. However, the Uttar Pradesh government and police have so far refused to officially confirm any fatalities, acknowledging only that some devotees were injured.

The incident could have significant political implications for the government. The Kumbh Mela has taken on major political significance under the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). The state and central BJP government launched a huge national publicity campaign around the Kumbh Mela, which is seen as a politically lucrative symbol of Hindu unity and strength, and posters of Modi and the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, adorned every corner of the Kumbh Mela. Modi had earlier praised the “unforgettable crowds” that were attending the festival.

Is this the first deadly crush at an Indian religious event?

India has an unfortunate history of large religious gatherings ending in fatalities. At the 2013 Kumbh Mela, 42 people were killed in a crowd crush of devotees arriving at a train station, prompting an overhaul of arrangements. Earlier this month, six pilgrims died owing to overcrowding at a temple in Andhra Pradesh and in July last year, 121 people died at a religious gathering in Hathras in Uttar Pradesh, when hundreds of thousands turned up to see a popular guru.

Dozens of people are feared to have died in crowd crushes at the Kumbh Mela festival in India, as vast crowds of people went to bathe at one of the holiest sites of the Hindu gathering.

What is the Kumbh Mela?

The Kumbh Mela is the world’s largest religious gathering, widely seen as the “festival of festivals” in the Hindu religious calendar. This year it is being held in the north Indian city of Prayagraj, where it takes place every 12 years.

Its origins lie in ancient Hindu mythology and the legend of demons and gods fighting over a pitcher, or kumbh, of the nectar of immortality, and drops falling on to the earth in four Indian cities.

During the 45-day festival, Hindu holy men, known as sadhus, and hundreds of millions of devotees set up camp and take a dip in the triveni sangam, the sacred confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati rivers in Prayagraj, which they believe will cleanse their sins and free them from the cycle of reincarnation.

Smaller versions of the Kumbh Mela take place every three years but the iteration held in Prayagraj is considered to be the biggest and most spiritually significant. This year’s celebration, which is expected to continue until 26 February, is particularly auspicious as it is the Maha, or grand Kumbh Mela, which takes places once every 144 years. It marks the 12th Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj and a special celestial alignment of the sun, the moon, Jupiter and Saturn.

Just how big is the Kumbh Mela?

Even in a country as big and populous as India, the scale of the Kumbh Mela is staggering. This time round, the government said it expected 400 million visitors – larger than the population of the US – to turn up over the total 45 days of the Kumbh Mela, which would be a record crowd for the festival. In 2019, a smaller version of the festival in Haridwar attracted 240 million people.

Over the course of the festival, a sprawling temporary city of tents, stalls, toilets and elaborate temple facades are constructed along both banks of the Ganges river, across a 40 sq km area. Each day, millions gather at the triveni sangam to take a dip in the water, many having travelled for days to do so.

As well as pilgrims, it is mandatory for tens of thousands of sadhus, who are part of monastic sects known as Akharas, to attend the Kumbh Mela and take part in several ritual bathings in the river. It offers pilgrims a rare opportunity to offer devotion to the naga sadhus, the naked, ash-smeared holy men who largely live an isolated life of meditation and prayer in ashrams.

Spending for the festival has also increased to record highs this year, with the Uttar Pradesh state government reported to have spent 70bn rupees (£670m) on setting up the site and bringing in new technology to update the ancient festivities.

What caused the crowd crush?

Wednesday 29 January was considered one of the most auspicious days to take a dip in the holy river waters during the Kumbh Mela and was always expected to draw in huge numbers of pilgrims.

According to government estimates, 100 million people were due to take a holy dip in the waters over the course of the day. It is also when the Akharas, the 13 monastic sects of sadhus, take part in the shahi snan, one of the biggest spiritual bathing rituals of the Kumbh Mela, which begins before sunrise.

In the build-up, it had appeared the police had already struggled to manage the large numbers of pilgrims who were arriving. Many of the pontoon bridges and walkways were highly congested or shut off by police, leaving pilgrims and sadhus frustrated at the restricted movement around the site.

As large numbers arrived on the riverbank late on Tuesday evening, the authorities began to urge pilgrims to take only two dips in the water and then leave the riverside quickly. But by the early hours of Wednesday, millions of pilgrims had continued to squash on to the area around the sangam, many falling asleep on the ground after the holy dip.

According to witnesses, in the early hours of Wednesday, the crowd around the riverbank surged in multiple directions and people began to try to push their way out. Many fell over and were trampled, while many of those sleeping on the ground were crushed.

What has the government response been?

In the aftermath, dozens of bodies were seen lying on the ground around the banks of the river, and families sitting outside hospitals gave accounts of relatives who had been injured and killed in the crush. Local officials counting casualties into hospital tents said at least 38 were feared dead while other officials and doctors have given death tolls ranging from 15 to 50.

In a statement, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, offered condolences for the “lives lost”. However, the Uttar Pradesh government and police have so far refused to officially confirm any fatalities, acknowledging only that some devotees were injured.

The incident could have significant political implications for the government. The Kumbh Mela has taken on major political significance under the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). The state and central BJP government launched a huge national publicity campaign around the Kumbh Mela, which is seen as a politically lucrative symbol of Hindu unity and strength, and posters of Modi and the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, adorned every corner of the Kumbh Mela. Modi had earlier praised the “unforgettable crowds” that were attending the festival.

Is this the first deadly crush at an Indian religious event?

India has an unfortunate history of large religious gatherings ending in fatalities. At the 2013 Kumbh Mela, 42 people were killed in a crowd crush of devotees arriving at a train station, prompting an overhaul of arrangements. Earlier this month, six pilgrims died owing to overcrowding at a temple in Andhra Pradesh and in July last year, 121 people died at a religious gathering in Hathras in Uttar Pradesh, when hundreds of thousands turned up to see a popular guru.

OpenAI has warned that Chinese startups are “constantly” using its technology to develop competing products, amid reports that DeepSeek used the ChatGPT maker’s AI models to create a rival chatbot.

OpenAI and its partner Microsoft – which has invested $13bn in the San Francisco-based AI developer – have been investigating whether proprietary technology had been obtained in an unauthorised manner through a technique known as “distillation”.

The launch of DeepSeek’s latest chatbot sent markets into a spin on Monday after it topped Apple’s free app store, wiping $1trn from the market value of AI-linked US tech stocks. The impact came from its claim that the model underpinning its AI was trained with a fraction of the cost and hardware used by rivals such as OpenAI and Google.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, initially said that he was impressed with DeepSeek and that it was “legitimately invigorating to have a new competitor”.

However, on Wednesday OpenAI said that it had seen some evidence of “distillation” from Chinese companies, referring to a development technique that boosts the performance of smaller models by using larger more advanced ones to achieve similar results on specific tasks. The OpenAI statement did not refer to DeepSeek directly.

“We know [China]-based companies – and others – are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies,” the OpenAI spokesperson said. “As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP [intellectual property], including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models.”

OpenAI, which has itself been accused of using data without permission or a licence from publishers and the creative industry to train its own models, has already blocked unnamed entities from attempting to distill its models.

The OpenAI spokesperson added that it was now “critically important” that the company worked with the US government to “best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology”.

On Tuesday, David Sacks, Donald Trump’s AI and crypto tsar, told Fox News that he thought it was “possible” that intellectual property theft had occurred.

“There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models,” he said. “I think one of the things you’re going to see over the next few months is our leading AI companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation. That would definitely slow down some of these copycat models.”

The US navy has reportedly already banned its members from using DeepSeek’s apps due to “potential security and ethical concerns”.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the US national security council was looking into the potential implications the AI app posed.

Earlier this week, Trump called the launch of DeepSeek a “wake-up call” for Silicon Valley in the global race to dominate artificial intelligence.

The investigation by OpenAI and Microsoft into possible distillation was first reported by Bloomberg. Microsoft declined to comment.

The potential for artificial intelligence systems to be used for malicious acts is increasing, according to a landmark report by AI experts, with the study’s lead author warning that DeepSeek and other disruptors could heighten the safety risk.

Yoshua Bengio, regarded as one of the godfathers of modern AI, said advances by the Chinese startup DeepSeek could be a worrying development in a field that has been dominated by the US in recent years.

“It’s going to mean a closer race, which usually is not a good thing from the point of view of AI safety,” he said.

Bengio said American firms and other rivals to DeepSeek could focus on regaining their lead instead of on safety. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, which DeepSeek has challenged with the launch of its own virtual assistant, pledged this week to accelerate product releases as a result.

“If you imagine a competition between two entities and one thinks they’re way ahead, then they can afford to be more prudent and still know that they will stay ahead,” Bengio said. “Whereas if you have a competition between two entities and they think that the other is just at the same level, then they need to accelerate. Then maybe they don’t give as much attention to safety.”

Bengio was speaking in a personal capacity before the publication of a wide-ranging report on AI safety.

The first full International AI Safety report has been compiled by a group of 96 experts including the Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton. Bengio, a co-winner in 2018 of the Turing award – referred to as the Nobel prize of computing – was commissioned by the UK government to preside over the report, which was announced at the global AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in 2023. Panel members were nominated by 30 countries as well as the EU and UN. The next global AI summit takes place in Paris on 10 and 11 February.

The report states that since publication of an interim study in May last year, general-purpose AI systems such as chatbots have become more capable in “domains that are relevant for malicious use”, such as the use of automated tools to highlight vulnerabilities in software and IT systems, and giving guidance on the production of biological and chemical weapons.

It says new AI models can generate step-by-step technical instructions for creating pathogens and toxins that surpass the capability of experts with PhDs, with OpenAI acknowledging that its advanced o1 model could assist specialists in planning how to produce biological threats.

However, the report says it is uncertain whether novices would be able to act on the guidance, and that models can also be used for beneficial purposes such as in medicine.

Speaking to the Guardian, Bengio said models had already emerged that could, with the use of a smartphone camera, theoretically guide people through dangerous tasks such as trying to build a bioweapon.

“These tools are becoming easier and easier to use by non-experts, because they can decompose a complicated task into smaller steps that everyone can understand, and then they can interactively help you get them right. And that’s very different from using, say, Google search,” he said.

The report says AI systems have improved significantly since last year in their ability to spot flaws in software autonomously, without human intervention. This could help hackers plan cyber-attacks.

However, the report says carrying out real-world attacks autonomously is beyond AI systems so far because they require “an exceptional level of precision”.

Elsewhere in its analysis of the risks posed by AI, the report points to a significant increase in deepfake content, where the technology is used to produce a convincing likeness of a person – whether their image, voice or both. It says deepfakes have been used to trick companies into handing over money, to commit blackmail and to create pornographic images of people. It says gauging the precise level of increase in such behaviour is difficult due to a lack of comprehensive and reliable statistics.

There are also risks of malicious use because so-called closed-source models, where the underlying code cannot be modified, can be vulnerable to jailbreaks that circumvent safety guardrails, while open-source models such as Meta’s Llama, which are free to download and can be tweaked by specialists, pose risks of “facilitating malicious or misguided” use by bad actors.

In a last-minute addition to the report written by Bengio, the Canadian computer scientist notes the emergence in December – shortly after the report had been finalised – of a new advanced “reasoning” model by OpenAI called o3. Bengio said its ability to make a breakthrough on a key abstract reasoning test was an achievement that many experts, including himself, had thought until recently was out of reach.

“The trends evidenced by o3 could have profound implications for AI risks,” writes Bengio, who also flagged DeepSeek’s R1 model. “The risk assessments in this report should be read with the understanding that AI has gained capabilities since the report was written.”

Bengio told the Guardian that advances in reasoning could have consequences for the job market by creating autonomous agents capable of carrying out human tasks, but could also assist terrorists.

“If you’re a terrorist, you’d like to have an AI that’s very autonomous,” he said. “As we increase agency, we increase the potential benefits of AI and we increase the risks.”

However, Bengio said AI systems had yet to pull off the long-term planning that could create fully autonomous tools that evade human control. “If an AI cannot plan over a long horizon, it’s hardly going to be able to escape our control,” he said.

Elsewhere, the near 300-page report cites “well-established” concerns about AI including generating scams and child sexual abuse imagery; biased outputs, and privacy violations such as the leaking of sensitive information shared with a chatbot. It said researchers had not been able to “fully resolve” those fears.

AI can be loosely defined as computer systems performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.

The report, whose full title is the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI, flags AI’s “rapidly growing” impact on the environment through the use of datacentres, and the potential for AI agents to have a “profound” impact on the job market.

It says the future of AI is uncertain, with a wide range of outcomes possible in the near future including “very positive and very negative outcomes”. It says societies and governments still have a chance to decide which path the technology takes.

“This uncertainty can evoke fatalism and make AI appear as something that happens to us. But it will be the decisions of societies and governments on how to navigate this uncertainty that determine which path we will take,” the report says.

Spanish police have rescued a man who was kidnapped and bundled into the boot of a car after he managed to alert his girlfriend by sending her a photo of the vehicle’s steering wheel and a set of coordinates.

On 23 January Policía Nacional officers in the Andalucían province of Málaga received a report that a man had been kidnapped two days earlier on the promenade of the town of Sabinillas. The man had been taken by a group of men travelling in two cars who were looking for information on the whereabouts of another man who had apparently swindled them out of €30,000 (£25,000) in a drug deal.

Officers were also provided with videos of the victim, showing him face down and with a pistol at his head while he was asked where the other man was.

Unknown to his captors, however, the kidnapped man managed to contact his friends and send his girlfriend a photograph of the steering wheel logo of the car he was travelling in. He also sent coordinates that led police to a street in Torre del Mar, a town along the coast from Málaga.

“Officers then headed immediately to the location, where they found a parked car that matched the make and model of the vehicle in the victim’s photo,” the force said in a statement. “They then discovered another vehicle in the same area, which matched one of the cars used in the kidnapping in Sabinillas.”

A few hours later, police saw a man being taken from another nearby car and placed in the back of a different vehicle.

“Seeing that happen, officers began to follow the vehicle, which was finally intercepted on the A7 motorway towards Málaga,” the statement added.

“The victim, who was unharmed and in good health, was freed and four people were arrested. Fewer than 16 hours had passed between the report of the kidnapping and the rescue.”

The force said four people had been arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, belonging to a criminal organisation and illegal possession of firearms.

Damaged hearts can literally be patched up to help them work, say researchers, in what has been hailed as a groundbreaking development for people with advanced heart failure.

According to a recent study, heart failure affects more than 64 million people worldwide, with causes including heart attacks, high blood pressure and coronary artery disease.

For heart transplants there is a shortage of available organs, while artificial heart pumps are expensive and come with a high rate of complications.

Now scientists believe they have made a breakthrough by creating implantable patches composed of beating heart muscle that can help the organ contract.

Prof Ingo Kutschka, the co-author of the work from University Medical Center Göttingen in Germany, said: “We now have, for the first time, a laboratory grown biological transplant available, which has the potential to stabilise and strengthen the heart muscle.”

The patches are made from cells taken from blood and “reprogrammed” to act as stem cells, which can develop into any cell type in the body.

In the case of the patches, these cells are turned into heart muscle and connective tissue cells. They are embedded in a collagen gel and grown in a custom-made mould before the resulting hexagonal patches are attached, in arrays, to a membrane. For humans this membrane is about 5cm by 10cm in size.

Prof Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann, another author of the work from University Medical Center Göttingen, said the muscle in the patches had the characteristics of a heart that was just four to eight years old.

“We are implanting young muscle into patients with heart failure,” he said.

The team say the patches are an important development because directly injecting heart muscle cells into the heart can lead to the growth of tumours or result in the development of an irregular heartbeat – which can be deadly.

The patches, however, allow many more heart muscle cells to be administered with a higher retention and, it appears, no risk of such unwanted effects.

Writing in the journal Nature, Zimmermann and colleagues report how they tested the patches in healthy rhesus macaques, finding no evidence of irregular heartbeats, tumour formation, or deaths or disease related to the patches.

When the team studied the hearts of the animals up to six months after the patches were implanted, they found a thickening of the heart wall – with the extent dependent on the number of patches used.

The team also tested the patches in monkeys with a disease akin to chronic heart failure. In this case the team found signs of improved heart function, such as a greater ability of the heart wall to contract.

The researchers then applied the approach to a 46-year-old woman with advanced heart failure. In this case the patches were made from human cells taken from a donor, and were sutured on to the patient’s beating heart with minimally invasive surgery.

Three months later the patient – who remained stable – had a heart transplant, allowing the team to analyse the removed heart. The researchers found the patches had survived and a blood supply had developed.

While use of cells from donors means immune suppression is required, the researchers say it would be too expensive and take too much time to create patches from the cells of a patient in urgent need, with donor cells also offering the chance for “off the shelf” patches and better safety testing.

The team say it takes three to six months for therapeutic effects of patches to be seen, meaning they would not be suitable for all patients. However, 15 patients have already received the patches.

“Our ongoing clinical trial will hopefully demonstrate whether this engineered heart muscle grafts will improve cardiac function in our patients,” said Kutschka.

Zimmermann said the aim was not necessarily to replace heart transplants.

“It is offering a novel treatment to patients that are presently under palliative care and that have a mortality of 50% within 12 months,” he said.

Prof Sian Harding, of Imperial College London described the research as a groundbreaking study, but said further work was needed, not least as the heart muscle cells in the patch did not mature completely and the establishment of blood flow was slow.

Prof Ipsita Roy, of the University of Sheffield, also welcomed the work, noting the surgery involved would be less invasive than for a heart transplant.

“It is an excellent piece of work. I’m really impressed,” she said. “The concept is quite clear, you can patch up the heart wherever the heart is damaged.”

Femicide will be struck from Argentina’s penal code, according to a vow from the administration of Javier Milei, the president. It is his administration’s latest attack on women’s rights.

Mariano Cúneo Libarona, the justice minister, said the government will “eliminate the figure of femicide from the Argentine penal code” adding that feminism was a “distortion of the concept of equality”.

“This administration defends equality before the law enshrined in our national constitution. No life is worth more than another,” Cúneo Libarona said.

Femicide – the murder by a man of a woman in the context of gender violence – was added to the penal code as an aggravating factor of homicides in 2012, and is punishable with life imprisonment.

The announcement came shortly after Milei decried the concept of femicide at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and said that “equality before the law already exists in the west. Everything else is just seeking privileges.”

“We’ve reached the point that in many supposedly civilised countries, if a woman is killed, it is called femicide. And this carries more serious punishment than if you kill a man simply based on the sex of the victim – legally making a woman’s life be worth more than that of a man,” he said.

According to a report by the Argentina’s observatory of femicides of the ombudsman of the nation, 295 femicides were recorded between 1 January and 31 December last year.

Mariela Belski, Amnesty Argentina’s executive director, said it was “deeply concerning” that violence against women is not “being understood” by the state. Although globally there are more homicides of men than women, the home is the most dangerous place for women and girls, she said. Sixty per cent of women are killed by their partners or family members, compared with 12% of men.

“Removing femicide as a legal category would pose a greater danger to women and girls,” Belski said.

Argentina has a recent history of strong feminist mobilisation. In 2015, a wave of marches against femicide sparked similar protests in Peru, Uruguay, Italy and Germany, while the country’s Green Wave movement was instrumental in securing safe abortion rights in 2020. Argentina was also the first Latin American country to implement a parliamentary quota system for women in 1991.

But with that progress has come a push-back – a sentiment that Milei successfully tapped into during his campaigning. “I won’t apologise for having a penis,” he said in 2022.

Since taking power, Milei has eliminated the ministry of women and dissolved the undersecretariat for protection against gender violence. He has cut back programmes providing support for victims of gender violence, and at Davos attacked the “bloody and murderous abortion agenda”. In November, Argentina was the only country to vote against a UN general assembly resolution to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls.

“It is more of the same misogyny that this government promised in its electoral campaign and that deepens day by day,” said Soledad Deza, a prominent lawyer and president of the feminist organisation Mujeres x Mujeres.

As it ramps up its “cultural battle” against “wokeism”, Milei’s government is also now working to repeal legislation including labour quotas for sexual minorities, gender parity in electoral lists and non-binary identity documents. The administration also aims to overturn Micaela’s Law, which establishes mandatory training in gender issues for public employees.

“The Micaela Law was created because Micaela’s femicide, like so many others, could have been avoided if the people involved in the days, months and years before had made decisions with a gender perspective,” said Nestor García, the father of Micaela García, whose death led to the law’s creation. “This is a very dangerous issue … to promote these policies against the gender perspective, which are in my opinion in breach of the constitution of our country.”

Milei’s decision also comes as Donald Trump – who has called his Argentine counterpart his “favourite president” – has begun his own crusade against gender and diversity policies. In the past week, Trump has said diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives were “dangerous, demeaning and immoral” and revoked orders aimed at preventing discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.

Genetic diversity in animals and plants has declined globally over the past three decades, an analysis of more than 600 species has found.

The research, published in the journal Nature, found declines in two-thirds of the populations studied, but noted that urgent conservation efforts could halt or even reverse genetic diversity losses.

Dozens of scientists internationally reviewed 882 studies that measured genetic diversity changes between 1985 and 2019 in 628 species of animals, plants, fungi and chromists (a type of organism), forming what they have called “the most comprehensive investigation” of changes in genetic diversity within species to date.

The study’s lead researcher, Assoc Prof Catherine Grueber of the University of Sydney, said within-species diversity – referring to the variation between individuals of the same species – enabled a population to better adapt to changes in its environment.

“If a new disease comes through, or there’s a heatwave, there may be some individuals in the population that have certain characteristics that enable them to tolerate those new conditions,” she said.

“Those characteristics will get passed on to the next generation, and the population will persist instead of going extinct.”

Maintaining genetic diversity in wild and domesticated species formed a key component of one of the goals adopted at the biodiversity conference Cop15 in 2022.

Many of the leading causes of genetic diversity loss were the same culprits as for declines in populations, Grueber said: “Things like habitat loss, climate change, invasive species, new diseases.”

The researchers found ecological disturbances in 65% of the populations they studied, including human harvesting or harassment and changes in land use. But they noted that genetic diversity loss occurred even when no disturbances were reported, suggesting a “background level of genetic diversity loss across species”.

“We think that this represents the more general biodiversity crisis that the planet is facing, and broader effects of ecological disruptions [such as] climate change,” Grueber said.

However, she highlighted several instances in which tailored conservation strategies have improved genetic diversity.

This included a project to establish new populations of golden bandicoots – a threatened species – in Western Australia. “By understanding where they were selecting the animals from … and monitoring those populations using genetic studies, they were able to show that they could maintain the genetic diversity of those populations through multiple generations,” Grueber said.

In the US, conservation biologists were able to preserve genetic variability in black-tailed prairie dogs by dusting them with insecticides, preventing fleas from spreading plague during an outbreak. “The populations were able to thrive, and by moving around more in the landscape, they were able to interbreed with other prairie dogs,” Grueber said.

In Scandinavia, arctic fox populations had declined due to the fur trade and now face stiff competition with red foxes for prey, but supplementary feeding and removal of red foxes has led to increases in genetic diversity there.

“It’s important that we preserve the genetic diversity of our natural systems,” Grueber said. “We have the methods to make it work.”

The meta-analysis included species from 141 countries, with more than 500 animal species included.

The actor Meryl Streep made a dramatic escape from the fires which killed 28 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures across Los Angeles earlier this month, her nephew has reported.

In an article for New York magazine, Abe Streep cited his aunt as an exemplar of the determination and resilience exhibited by so many LA residents.

The Oscar-winning actor, he wrote, received an order to evacuate on 8 January, the day after the onset of the Palisades and Eaton fires, but on attempting to leave “discovered that a large tree had fallen over in her driveway, blocking her only exit.

“Determined to make it out, she borrowed wire cutters from a neighbour, cut a car-size hole in the fence she shared with the neighbours on the other side, and drove through their yard to escape.”

Streep owns a home in Pasadena, close to the Eaton fire. It is not thought that the house burnt down.

Elsewhere in the article, Abe Streep spoke to his aunt’s Only Murders in the Building co-star, Martin Short, who also encountered difficulties escaping the house in the Palisades he bought in 1984.

Short reported that a drive to safety that would have normally taken five minutes took more than an hour, such was the gridlock and panic. Short said: “I will definitely stay in my home,” but reported that one of his sons lost his house.

Among the celebrities whose homes were destroyed in the fires are Anthony Hopkins, Mel Gibson, Billy Crystal, Paris Hilton and Eugene Levy.