A satellite designed by British scientists to measure how fast Earth’s polar ice caps are melting crashed shortly after its launch from a Russian missile site on Saturday. CryoSat, the £100 million brainchild of United Kingdom climate expert Duncan Wingham, was supposed to survey the thinning of Earth’s ice caps from space. Instead it plummeted into the Arctic Ocean at around 4.15pm.

It seemed as though a signal was given at dusk and they came out like the stars. Strolling vendors who had been selling boxes of paper handkerchiefs, car air fresheners and dusty packets of biscuits suddenly had armfuls of yellow and the colour was spreading to the market stalls. And so it moved up the streets.

The secretive group of intellectuals who award the Nobel Prize for literature have delayed their decision for at least a week amid reports of a split over honouring the controversial Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk. For the first time in at least 10 years, the literature prize was announced neither in the run-up to, nor in the same week as the four other main Nobel awards — medicine, physics, chemistry and peace.

It was once a street so rich and central to black America that Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue was known simply as ”Sweet Auburn”. It was the site of America’s first black-owned daily paper and first black radio station. It was here Martin Luther King was born. It was here King preached freedom from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Sunni leaders on Saturday failed to agree on a boycott of this week’s referendum on a new Constitution, a move that would have exacerbated Iraq’s political and security crisis. However, they said they hoped that those voters who do participate will vote no.

Caked in thick grey dust and using only candlelight and the cries of the injured as their guide, tens of thousands of rescuers continued a desperate effort on Saturday night to save thousands of people buried in rubble after a huge earthquake flattened towns and villages across Pakistan and northern India.