What happened
Nine universities have launched legal action against the government over a requirement that students quickly repay loans issued for certain courses. About 22,000 students in England have been told that funding they received was wrongly approved and must be returned.

Who said what
The dispute centres on weekend degree programmes that have been reclassified as distance learning. These types of courses are “not eligible for maintenance support”, said youth news site The Tab. Many affected students are close to graduating and were “shocked” to learn that their funding status had changed, said the BBC’s education editor Branwen Jeffreys.

Universities claim that the move has been taken with “minimal notice” and is causing “serious financial distress”. Bath Spa University vice-chancellor Georgina Andrews said it “punished those who are the most vulnerable”. National Union of Students vice president Alex Stanley said trust had been “broken” and urged ministers to halt the “immediate clawback”.

What next?
The courts will determine the legality of the reclassification. Meanwhile, regulators and ministers face pressure to shield students from unexpected financial hardship.

What happened
Australia’s wealthiest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to two rival mining families following a dispute over historic contract agreements dating from the 1960s.

After a more than 15-year legal battle, a Supreme Court judge has ruled that Rinehart (pictured above) must pay past and future royalties to the heirs of her father’s business partners Peter Wright and Don Rhodes.

Who said what
The “epic” Western Australian Supreme Court case had become a “titanic battle between two of the state’s richest mining clans”, said Kishor Napier-Raman in The Sydney Morning Herald. The legal fees alone are expected to cost “more than $100 million” (£53 million).

Though the “blockbuster” ruling will “hardly make a dent” in Rinehart’s estimated AUD$38 billion (£20.1 billion) fortune, it has “pitted family against family and siblings against each other”, said Andrea Mayes at ABC News. Rinehart’s two eldest children had also made a claim for a significant share of royalties and mining rights, which was dismissed.

What next?
The amount due to both companies will be established in a separate trial at a later date.

The golden oyster mushroom was brought to the US from Asia during the 2000s mostly because it “can grow quickly, which was a boon as it’s considered one of the most delicious mushrooms a forager can find”, said news site Vice. But what was once deemed a benefit has turned out to be a threat. The bright yellow mushroom’s ability to reproduce quickly has caused it to spread across the continent, making it notoriously invasive. The species has already been found in 25 states.

The fungus is “invisible for most of the year, living as mycelium, fungal strands within wood”, according to the BBC. In the spring it “sends out its fruiting body”, which is “what we would recognise as the mushroom itself”. The “huge yellow clusters cascade out of logs and trees, each mushroom itself producing millions of microscopic airborne spores”. Although the golden oyster mushroom “isn’t yet posing a significant risk to Western forests, it is taking hold in the Northeast and Midwest”, said climate site The Cool Down.

When the mushroom is present in a forest, the “fungal community composition significantly changes, and fungal species richness significantly decreases”, said a study published last year in the journal Current Biology. Trees colonised by the fungus have “about half the fungal biodiversity as trees without the golden oyster”, Aishwarya Veerabahu, a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the study, told the BBC.

To prevent the fungus from overtaking forests everywhere, “continued research, management efforts anchored in social theory and collaborative conversations about microbial endemism” will be necessary, said the study. “The cultivation of local species or development of sporeless mushroom strains could also mitigate risks.”