An Indian army helicopter carrying the country's military chief crashed Wednesday in southern Tamil Nadu state, the air force said.

It did not say whether Chief of Defense Staff Bipin Rawat was injured in the accident.

A major outage in Amazon's cloud computing network Tuesday severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for more than five hours, the latest sign of just how concentrated the business of keeping the internet running has become.

The incident at Amazon Web Services mostly affected the eastern U.S., but still impacted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazon's own massive e-commerce operation. That included The Associated Press, whose publishing system was inoperable for much of the day, greatly limiting its ability to publish its news report..

A Japanese billionaire and his producer rocketed to space Wednesday as the first self-paying space tourists in more than a decade.

Fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa and producer Yozo Hirano, who plans to film his mission, blasted off for the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft along with Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.

An Egyptian court has ordered the release pending trial of a rights activist who has been imprisoned for nearly two years in a case that has drawn significant international attention, a rights group said.

The court in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura postponed the trial of Patrick George Zaki until Feb. 1 to give prosecutors and defense lawyers time to prepare their arguments, said the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which represents Zaki.

An Israeli woman was stabbed and lightly wounded in a tense neighborhood in east Jerusalem on Wednesday. The suspect, a Palestinian female minor, fled the scene and was later arrested inside a nearby school, police said.

The Israeli woman was taken to the trauma unit of the nearby Hadassah Mt. Scopus Hospital, which said the 26-year-old was conscious and in stable condition.

The players race across the pitch on crutches, jostling for the soccer ball and passing it back and forth, their prosthetic legs lined up along the sidelines at a stadium in the Gaza Strip.

They are the first Palestinian national soccer team made up entirely of amputees — players drawn from a population of hundreds that has grown in recent years through several rounds of fighting between Israel and the territory's militant Hamas rulers.

Israel has announced the completion of an enhanced security barrier around the Gaza Strip designed to prevent militants from sneaking into the country.

The 65-kilometer (40-mile) barrier includes radar systems, maritime sensors and a network of underground sensors to detect militant tunnels. Existing fencing was replaced with a 6-meter (6.5-yard) high "smart fence" with sensors and cameras.

Center-left leader Olaf Scholz became Germany's ninth post-World War II chancellor Wednesday, opening a new era for the European Union's most populous nation and largest economy after Angela Merkel's 16-year tenure.

Scholz's government takes office with high hopes of modernizing Germany and combating climate change but faces the immediate challenge of handling the country's toughest phase yet of the coronavirus pandemic.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Wednesday that Australia will join the U.S. in a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Games over human rights concerns.

Morrison said it should come as no surprise that Australian officials would boycott the event after the nation's relationship with China had broken down in recent years.

Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin began a high-stakes video summit Tuesday in which the U.S. president was set to warn of painful sanctions and increased military support for Eastern Europe if Russia invades Ukraine.