A copilot stabbed a captain in an apparent attempt to crash a jetliner as it was flying 174 people to Israel on Wednesday (Sep. 30). But passengers burst into the cockpit and wrestled with the attacker even as the plane descended sharply, witnesses and Israel's government said. The plane eventually made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. The shaken passengers from the FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv landed Wednesday evening in Israel on another flight, as onlookers cheered. Israel's emergency services said they treated three passengers with minor injuries.

It was not clear what motivated the attack, which led Israel to scramble warplanes amid concerns about a possible hijacking. In a CNN interview aired on Wednesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attacker was an Omani national and was being interrogated in Saudi Arabia, where he was arrested. Aviation experts were surprised the plane did not crash after a descent so extreme that most of the rudder was ripped off the tail.

Officials in the US state of Tennessee were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death for a 1995 murder after administering two doses of a lethal drug. A death penalty expert said it was an unprecedented failure, and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee halted any remaining executions for the rest of the year. Pike, 50, was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said. She was being treated at a hospital, but they said they hadn't been told about her condition.

She had been scheduled for execution on Wednesday morning for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start but some hours later the US Supreme Court overturned that stay, leading to the attempted execution on Wednesday evening.

Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, research has found, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose big white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists said. Swiss glaciers shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow. The reduction in ice volume falls just shy of the record set in 2022 and brings the total loss of glacier ice since 2021 to 19.4%.

The report, a collaboration between the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation, found the mean thickness of individual glaciers fell by between 2.5 metres and 4 metres in 2026. Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average from the heat-trapping effects of fossil fuel pollution and the destruction of nature, with Alpine regions experiencing some of the most dramatic changes.

Pakistan carried out airstrikes in two Afghan provinces overnight, both countries said Thursday (Oct. 1), with Afghanistan saying 9 women and children were killed and another 11 civilians were wounded in the bombings. Pakistan's Ministry of Information said its strikes were against militant hideouts in two locations and that "initial reports suggest" that 22 militants had been killed. The casualty claims from either side could not be independently verified.

The strikes come amid repeated cross-border clashes between the two countries, while Pakistan has repeatedly carried out airstrikes inside Afghanistan since tensions between the two countries spiraled dramatically earlier this year. The two neighbours have longstanding disputes over militant activity along their border. The UN Mission in Afghanistan has documented over 1,100 civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan from cross-border violence so far this year. Pakistan denies striking civilians, and says it targets militants who carry out attacks inside Pakistan. Afghanistan denies harbouring militants.