Elon Musk spent more than $250m (£196m) helping Donald Trump win this year’s US election, Sky News’ US partner NBC News reports.

Part of this was said to include a late blitz of advertising from a super PAC into which Mr Musk poured $20m (£15.7m) that claimed Mr Trump did not support a federal abortion ban.

Previously, Mr Trump took credit for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.

That was only a fraction of Mr Musk’s reported total contribution to the Trump campaign.

He also financed America PAC, a super PAC that reported spending $238m (£186.7m) supporting the president-elect’s race.

The latest campaign finance report shows the billionaire donated $120m (£94m) in the final weeks of the race alone.

This money was said to have been heavily spent on canvassing, text messages, and digital advertising.

America PAC also ran the controversial $1m (£0.78m) cash giveaway to get voters to sign up for the group’s conservative-leaning petition.

America PAC is one of several major political action committees in the US.

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Such groups can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in support of political candidates, on the condition that they do not coordinate with their campaigns or give money to them.

Mr Musk is one of Mr Trump’s top donors this election but also one of his most visible, regularly appearing alongside him on the campaign trail, and at Mar-a-Lago.

Mr Trump selected him to advise on government inefficiencies in a new role in his administration.

A woman who went missing while looking for her cat was likely swallowed by a sinkhole, authorities have said.

Elizabeth Pollard vanished after leaving with her granddaughter to search for her pet on Monday evening in Pennsylvania, but her family alerted authorities when she had not returned by the early hours of Tuesday.

The 64-year-old’s vehicle was found with her unharmed five-year-old granddaughter inside around two hours later near a freshly opened sinkhole above a long-closed, crumbling mine.

But police say the search operation has now turned into a recovery effort, after two treacherous days of digging through mud and rock produced no signs of life.

Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Trooper Steve Limani said authorities no longer believed they would find Ms Pollard alive, but that work to find her remains continued.

“Unless it’s a miracle, most likely this is a recovery,” he said.

There has been no signs of any form of life or anything to make rescuers think they should continue the search effort, he said, noting that oxygen levels below ground were insufficient.

“We feel like we failed. It’s tough.”

He praised the crews who went into the abandoned mine to help remove material during the search for Ms Pollard in the village of Marguerite, around 40 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Authorities had said earlier that the roof of the mine had collapsed in several places and was not stable.

“We did get, you know, where we wanted, where we thought that she was at. We’ve been to that spot,” Pleasant Unity Fire chief John Bacha, the incident’s operations officer, said.

“What happened at that point, I don’t know, maybe the slurry of mud pushed her in one direction. There were several different seams of that mine, shafts that all came together where this happened.”

Geological engineer Paul Santi, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, said the chances of Ms Pollard surviving if she slipped into the sinkhole were “pretty small.”

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“I would be surprised if she came through this OK,” he said.

“It would require that she wasn’t killed by the fall, she wasn’t killed by the rock, that there was an air pocket and she’s able to survive in it.”

Sinkholes occur regularly in the area because of subsidence from coal mining activity.

Mr Limani said the searchers met with Ms Pollard’s family before announcing the shift from rescue to recovery.

“I think they get it,” he said.

Ms Pollard’s son, Axel Hayes, described her as a happy woman who at one point owned 10 cats. She and her husband adopted Mr Hayes and his twin brother when they were infants.

He called her “a great person overall, a great mother” who “never really did anybody wrong.”

Taylor Swift landed the biggest book launch of the year with the publication of her official Era’s Tour book – but fans were quick to notice multiple errors.

Over 800,000 copies (814,000 to be precise) flew off shelves in the US over Thanksgiving weekend, according to Circana, which tracks the print market.

The huge number of sales came despite Swift selling the book exclusively through American supermarket chain Target, snubbing the likes of Amazon and other retailers or using a traditional book publisher.

Swift posted on social media to announce the book, which coincides with the end of the mammoth Eras Tour on 8 December.

The 152-date tour has spanned five continents and grossed over $1bn (£785m), becoming the highest grossing tour ever, according to data from Pollstar in 2023.

The ‘errors book’?

But eagle-eyed Swifties were left disappointed when they found the $40 (£31) book was littered with errors, including spelling mistakes and blurry imagery.

One fan posted on TikTok to say she was “blown away” by the “amount of grammatical errors she saw” when flicking through the book, which she said she had queued up at 5am to buy.

“I saw so many [errors], in fact, I am seriously questioning if this book was actually edited,” she said.

“When I am reading through things, if there are certain grammar mistakes or sentence structures that are really distracting, it really takes me out of the reading experience.”

Others on X dubbed it the “errors book” with one video appearing to show the book printed upside down and back to front.

Another user listed eight typos, including misspelt song titles and missing punctuation.

Despite the mistakes, one fan claimed the misprints will make the books “more valuable” while another said they would rather “a few cute errors” if it meant Swift was fully in control over its publishing.

Representatives for Target and Swift did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press.

The sales of the book meant it was the second-biggest nonfiction book launch ever in the US, second to the first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs, A Promised Land, which sold 816,000 copies in its first week on shelves in 2020, according to Circana.

The website notes that Mr Obama’s memoir was available through all major outlets, and Circana’s tracking for the Eras Tour Book accounts only for its first weekend sales.