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By Andrew Chung and John Kruzel, Reuters People hold flags outside the US Supreme Court, during oral arguments on whether states can ban certain gender transition medical treatments for young people. Photo: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP The US Supreme Court tackled a major transgender rights case, and its conservative justices asked tough questions of lawyers challenging the legality of a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Some of the conservative justices signalled support for Tennessee's position during arguments in the case. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. The arguments were ongoing. Democratic President Joe Biden's administration appealed a lower court's decision upholding Tennessee's prohibition on medical treatments such...

Diver Andreas Schmider Martínez with a glass sponge. Photo: Ian Hawes Follow Our Changing World on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts It's 10pm at night in one of the labs at Scott Base, New Zealand's Antarctic research station. Elsewhere people are winding down - reading books or watching a movie, getting ready to head to bed. But not Dr Jürgen Laudien. He's too excited about what tomorrow will bring: another chance to dive under the sea ice and unravel some of the mysteries of the giant glass sponges found on the seafloor. A deep dive into the life of a sponge Jürgen explains tomorrow's experiment: they will pump a non-toxic green dye into the sponges' barrel-like opening, so that they can visualise how the sponges move water around. A senior scientis...

France's Prime Minister Michel Barnier. Photo: AFP / Hans Lucas / Amaury Cornu As French Prime Minister Michel Barnier's government has fallen to a motion of no confidence just three months after coming to office, New Caledonia is among the major victims of France's ongoing political instability. New Caledonia's post-riots situation was already difficult, with an economy on its knees and an estimated €2.2 billion in damages because of the burning and looting that erupted on 13 May. Over 600 businesses have been destroyed, making thousands of people jobless, and forcing companies to shut down. Last week, several business leaders groups were complaining that even the packages promised were slow to arrive from Paris and that they needed "visibility" to start re-investing and rebuilding. Th...

By Elizabeth Pineau and Michel Rose, Reuters Prime Minister Michel Barnier was expected to tender his resignation. Photo: AFP / ALAIN JOCARD French lawmakers passed a no-confidence vote against the government on Wednesday, throwing the European Union's second-biggest economic power deeper into a crisis that threatens its capacity to legislate and tame a massive budget deficit. Far-right and left-wing lawmakers joined forces to back a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Michel Barnier, with a majority 331 votes in support of the motion. Barnier now has to tender his resignation and that of his government to President Emmanuel Macron, making his minority government's three-month tenure the shortest lived in France's Fifth Republic beginning in 1958. He is expected to do so on ...

By Lilit Marcus, CNN Ed Sheeran. Photo: Dia Dipasupil / Getty Images via AFP He has won multiple Grammys and racked up nine Billboard Top 10 Hits, but musician Ed Sheeran will soon add another trophy to his collection - becoming the first-ever Western artist to perform a concert in Bhutan. On 24 January 2025, the British singer-songwriter will perform at Changlimithang Stadium in Bhutan's capital of Thimphu. "Kuzuzampola!" Sheeran said in an Instagram post announcing the Bhutan concert. That means "hello" in the country's Dzongkha language. "I've heard wonderful, wonderful things about Bhutan," he added. A landlocked Buddhist monarchy of about 700,000 people, Bhutan began slowly opening to the world in the 1970s. Travellers who wish to visit are charged a $100-per-day fee as part of ...