内容摘要：Two of the yacht's guests used furniture drawers "as an improvised ladder" to escape their cabin, it adds.

Two of the yacht's guests used furniture drawers "as an improvised ladder" to escape their cabin, it adds.

Frozen, mountainous, and remote, it's home to hundreds of polar bears and a couple of sparse settlements.One of those is Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town, and just outside the settlement, in a decommissioned coal mine, is The Arctic World Archive (AWA) - an underground vault for data.

Customers pay to have their data stored on film and kept in the vault, for potentially hundreds of years."This is a place to make sure that information survives technology obsolescence, time and ageing. That's our mission," says founder Rune Bjerkestrand, leading the way inside.Switching on head-torches we descended a dark passageway and followed the old rail tracks 300 metres into the mountainside, until we reached the archive's metal door.

Inside the vault, stands a shipping container stacked with silver packets, each containing reels of film, on which the data is stored."It's a lot of memories, a lot of heritage," Mr Bjerkestrand says.

"It's anything from digitised art pieces, literature, music, motion picture, you name it."

Since the archive's launch eight years ago, more than 100 deposits have been made by institutions, companies and individuals, from 30-plus countries."They change their behaviour patterns and have trust issues. They don't want you to get close to them, because they feel that they can no longer trust anyone."

South Africa's illegal mining industry made global headlines last year following a standoff between police and miners at the Buffelsfontein gold mine, near the town of Stilfontein in the North West Province.The authorities had been trying to curb illegal mining, which the government said cost South Africa's economy $3.2bn (£2.6bn) in lost revenue last year.

They launched an operation called Vala Umgodi, or seal the hole, in December 2023, promising to take a tough stance on the gangs.As part of the operation, the police limited the amount of food and water that went down the Stilfontein mine to, as one minister put it, "smoke out" the illegal miners. Officials said the men were refusing to come out for fear of being arrested.