A British mountaineer and her American companion who were stranded in the Himalayas for three days without food have described the long silence between them after the bulk of their equipment plunged into a ravine.

Fay Manners, 37, and Michelle Dvorak, 31, had been climbing the Chaukhamba mountain in northern India, when they issued an SOS message on Thursday, with nothing further being heard from them.

The pair reported that they had lost their tent and climbing equipment after the items were dragged into a ravine by a rockfall.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Manners described the moment their gear vanished.

“There was a big, big, long sense of silence between us,” she said. “There weren’t too many words to begin with, to be honest, it was more just the gaze that we had between us, the look of just disappointment and disbelief.

“I think we were in silence for probably at least two or three minutes before we said anything. I think we both knew what was to come.”

The rescue operation took 80 hours and involved the Indian air force and army, the Indian news agency Ians reported.

Manners, originally from Bedford, told Radio 4 the ledge they were stranded on was big enough only to sit. She said: “It was really small. We could both sit up on the ledge but we couldn’t lay down, so it was a pretty tiny space.

“The hardest thing is we still have other equipment, and so you have to fit both your bodies and your sleeping bag on there, but you also have to fit all your other equipment. And once you’ve already lost a lot of your kit down the mountain, then you get pretty anxious about the rest of the kit that you have as well.”

Dvorak told the programme that a rescue helicopter had initially failed to spot them.

She said: “We were waving around, waving our hands around and hoping to get their attention, but they were just a bit too far away, and we were on a pretty steep and vertical face, and I think everything looked a bit the same to them from their vantage point.”

After two nights in freezing conditions, Manners said the pair decided to abseil to a more accessible point.

“We’d already had two evenings on the wall where I didn’t have any of my warm clothing because it was in the equipment bag, so I was particularly cold, and I just knew that I couldn’t spend another night pretty much shivering all night.

“So at that point, I was like, we really just have to try and get ourselves out of this situation and go down. I think I prefer to go down without the right equipment and give ourselves some sort of hope of survival, rather than just sit another night and freeze.”

They were reportedly airlifted by an Indian air force helicopter to a helipad at Joshimath, a town 21 miles south-east of Chaukhamba, at 7am local time on Sunday.

A French climbing party assisted with the rescue after the group helped them descend to the altitude from which they were airlifted, according to the air force.

A critically endangered orchid has received a late reprieve after a local environmental group threatened legal action against the Victorian government, prompting officials to cancel a planned burn of its habitat.

The bald-tip beard orchid – a species with fewer than 10 plants remaining in the Australian wild – was thought extinct until rediscovered in 1968 at a site near Whroo, in central Victoria, where the last surviving wild population has persisted.

That site was included in a 183 hectare area scheduled for controlled burns by state government agency Forest Fire Management Victoria, along with two further burns nearby in areas designated as potential orchid habitat.

But on Tuesday – after questions from Guardian Australia and a legal letter from a local conservation group – a planned fuel reduction burn at the site containing the orchids was officially removed from the schedule.

When asked, Forest Fire Management Victoria did not explain why burns were originally planned in an area containing the last known population of a critically endangered orchid.

Instead, a spokesperson for the agency said specialist staff assessed biodiversity values at each potential burn site and developed plans to protect them.

“We have experts in both fire ecology and threatened species working together to inform how and when we conduct planned burns to minimise any unintended impacts and maximise the benefit to precious threatened species,” they said.

Sue McKinnon, the president of Kinglake Friends of the Forest, said the group’s lawyer had sent a letter on Friday, asking the Victorian environment department to cancel burns in the orchid’s habitat. It stated the group’s intention to seek an urgent interim injunction under the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

“We’re determined to save this orchid,” she said, which included taking legal action if required. The orchid’s federal recovery plan said prescribed burning had been excluded from the immediate area of the orchid population since 1980.

The species, listed as critically endangered in Victoria and endangered federally, produced flowers with reddish-brown stripes and a “beard” atop a ruler-length stem.

The consultant ecologist Karl Just, who surveyed the area near Whroo, said the planned burns would have had a “high likelihood of causing a species extinction”.

The two other locations – including areas mapped as potential orchid habitat – remained part of the fuel management program, scheduled for autumn 2025.

Curtin University’s Prof Kingsley Dixon, who has studied native orchids for about 45 years, said beard orchids were particularly sensitive to disturbance and could vanish quickly.

A precautionary approach and careful science should be applied when dealing with critically endangered orchids, including in relation to planned burns, he said.

Dixon said orchids were the “most treasured and most charismatic” plant family in Australia with the “highest number of threatened species”.

“Excessive clearing, fragmentation, weeds, pests, disease, fire, put them all together and we’ve essentially corralled orchids into ever smaller areas.”

Japan is celebrated for its exceptional levels of customer service. But the behaviour of a growing number of customers and clients leaves a lot to be desired.

The rise of the abusive consumer has prompted authorities in Tokyo to introduce the country’s first ordinance – a locally approved regulation – to protect service industry staff from kasuhara – the Japanese abbreviated form of “customer harassment”.

While the Tokyo ordinance, which will go into effect in April, does not carry penalties, experts hope the move will highlight a growing social problem and, perhaps, encourage people to think twice before taking out their frustrations on staff.

A union survey this year found that almost one in two workers in the service sector – which accounts for 75% of employees in Japan – had been subjected to customer meltdowns, ranging from verbal abuse and excessive demands to violence and doxing on social media.

In one instance, an assistant manager at a supermarket in Tokyo received a call from a shopper claiming that the tofu he had bought at the store had gone off, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. When the employee visited the shopper’s home to check, he found that the tofu – a product with a short shelf life – had been bought a fortnight earlier.

Not wanting to alienate the shopper, the employee tried to remain diplomatic but was then ordered by the customer to prostrate himself and apologise.

Outbreaks of rage have crept into local government offices, with one female employee at a Tokyo ward office recounting how an elderly resident accused her of wishing she would die and invited her to drop dead instead.

“It seems that people feel they can say whatever they want when dealing with public servants because they are paying tax,” the official told the Asahi. “ I wish they could understand that employees are human beings too.”

The labour ministry is reportedly considering tightening the law further to address kasuhara across a wide range of sectors, including public transport, restaurants and call centres.

The Tokyo metropolitan assembly approved the ordinance last week under pressure from unions and industry representatives, which warned that the scourge of the disgruntled customer was spreading to other parts of the country.

Three other prefectures are considering similar measures, while some municipalities and firms now give employees the option of displaying only their given names on their ID badges. A Tokyo department store this year said it would ban troublesome customers and call the police in serious cases, while other firms, including Nintendo, have said they will not engage with abusive people.

The ordinance states that “no person shall engage in customer harassment anywhere” and that “society as a whole should try to prevent abuse”, but it recognises the value to businesses of legitimate feedback.

Writing on the Nippon.com website, Hiromi Ikeuchi, a professor of sociology at Kansai University, attributed the rise of kasuhara to several factors, including the tendency to regard customers as “gods” in the battle to stay profitable in an increasingly tough business environment – an approach that has shifted the power balance from firms to their customers.

“As Japanese society as a whole became more consumer-oriented, the tables were turned, giving some consumers an unconscious bias that has caused them to expect to be treated like gods, as well as having certain expectations of staff,” Ikeuchi wrote.

Kasuhara is one of several forms of harassment Japan has been forced to confront in recent years, along with matahara (maternity harassment), pawahara (power harassment) and jenhara (gender harassment).

The destruction of global forests increased in 2023, and is higher than when 140 countries promised three years ago to halt deforestation by the end of the decade, an analysis shows.

The rising demolition of the forests puts ambitions to halt the climate crisis and stem the huge worldwide losses of wildlife even further from reach, the researchers warn.

Almost 6.4m hectares (16m acres) of forest were razed in 2023, according to the report. Even more forest – 62.6m ha – was degraded as road building, logging and forest fires took their toll. There were spikes in deforestation in Indonesia and Bolivia, driven by political changes and continued demand for commodities including beef, soy, palm oil, paper and nickel in rich countries.

The researchers said attempts at voluntary cuts on deforestation were not working and strong regulation and more funding for forest protection were needed.

The report highlighted a bright spot in the Brazilian Amazon, where President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s new government cut deforestation by 62% in its first year.

“The bottom line is that, globally, deforestation has gotten worse, not better, since the beginning of the decade,” said Ivan Palmegiani, a consultant at the research group Climate Focus and lead author of the report.

“We’re only six years away from a critical global deadline to end deforestation, and forests continue to be chopped down, degraded, and set ablaze at alarming rates,” he said. “Righting the course is possible if all countries make it a priority, and especially if industrialised countries seriously reconsider their excessive consumption levels and support forest countries.”

Erin D Matson, a senior consultant at Climate Focus and co-author of the report, said: “When the right conditions are in place, countries see major progress. The next year, if economic or political conditions change, forest loss can come roaring back. We’re seeing this effect in the spiking deforestation in Indonesia and Bolivia. Ultimately, to meet global forest protection targets, we must make forest protection immune to political and economic whims.”

Most countries backed the 2030 zero deforestation pledge at the UN Cop26 climate summit in 2021. The 2024 forest declaration assessment, produced by a coalition of research and civil society organisations, assessed progress towards the goal using a baseline of the average deforestation between 2018 and 2020. It found progress was significantly off track, with the level of deforestation in 2023 almost 50% higher than steady progress towards zero would require.

Matson said: “Indonesia’s deforestation alone spiked by 57% in one year. This was in large part attributable to surging global demand for things like paper and mined metals like nickel.

“But it’s also clear that the Indonesian government took its foot off the gas. It experienced the steepest drop in deforestation of any tropical country from 2015-17 and 2020-22, so we have to hope that this setback is only temporary.” In 2023, Indonesia produced half the world’s nickel, a metal used in many green technologies.

“Brazil gives us an example of positive progress [in the Amazon] but deforestation in the Cerrado [tropical savanna] increased 68% year over year,” she said.

The country has also been ravaged by forest fires that are being made more likely and intense by the climate crisis. The report found that about 45m ha have burned in the past five years.

Other countries that made progress towards the 2030 deforestation target included Australia, Colombia, Paraguay, Venezuela and Vietnam. Outside the tropics, temperate forests in North America and Latin America recorded the greatest absolute levels of deforestation.

The researchers said funding for forest protection, strengthening the land rights of Indigenous people and reducing demand for commodities produced via deforestation were needed.

The EU has proposed ambitious regulations that would ban the sales of products linked to deforestation, such as coffee, chocolate, leather and furniture. However, on 3 October, the European Commission proposed a one-year delay “to phase in the system” after protests from countries including Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and Ivory Coast.

Matson said: “This pushback is largely driven by political pressures, and it’s a shame. We can’t rely on voluntary efforts – they have made very little progress over the last decade.”

An experienced vet has been reprimanded for taking home a patient’s cat that she was told to euthanise and charging nearly £500 for the animal’s care in Suffolk.

Janine Parody decided against putting down the ill eight-month-old feline named Shadow in 2021 and, contrary to the owner’s wishes, treated him.

The vet, who had an “exceptional” reputation, told a disciplinary tribunal that she had put down three or four animals that morning and could not face euthanising another.

Parody, who worked at a surgery in Framlingham, Suffolk, said she had deemed the pet to be “happy” and curable.

She sedated the male cat and castrated it without obtaining consent from the owner, before replacing its microchip and taking it home, the tribunal heard.

The owner told the hearing that she “grieved for his little soul” before she was eventually told the truth and was asked to pay £480 for the treatment.

Referring to Shadow, Parody told the tribunal: “The drug Pentoject had already been drawn up. Upon entering the room I was greeted by a sweet young cat, which appeared healthy apart from his skin condition.

“I had already done back-to-back euthanasias that morning … and upon seeing a happy young cat, I just could not face another euthanasia.”

Parody added that despite having been a vet for 10 years, “euthanasias are never easy”.

A Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons tribunal reprimanded the vet for “disgraceful” professional conduct.

It ruled she had made a “series of very poor decisions”, although it recognised that at the time the vet was working under “extraordinarily stressful circumstances” because of the pandemic.

Parody, who has subsequently moved to a practice in Hereford, was described by colleagues at Castle Veterinary Group as an “exceptional vet” who was “very fair”.

In December 2021, a woman who regularly rescued cats and who was referred to at the tribunal only as SM took ownership of Shadow.

The owner decided to have him put down as he was “very sick” with methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacteria which causes lesions on the skin.

SM consulted other vets and Shadow was scheduled to be put down by Parody five days before Christmas.

Parody consulted a dermatologist after a colleague raised a question over whether cats with MRSA could be treated. Two days later, she shaved Shadow, castrated him and directed a colleague to remove his microchip.

The owner was eventually told Shadow had not been put down and was “shocked and elated”. SM was told she would have to pay £480 to have it returned and she accepted.

Two months later, Shadow’s condition deteriorated and he was put down. Parody resigned and an investigation was launched.

The panel noted that owing to confused communications the vet had wrongly believed the cat did not have an owner, but it said in its ruling that she “should be under no illusion of how serious it is to have a finding of disgraceful conduct in a professional respect made against her”.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is reportedly refusing calls about storm recovery from Kamala Harris, more than a week after Hurricane Helene hit the state and two days before intensifying Hurricane Milton is expected to hit the south-west of the state.

Citing a DeSantis aide, NBC News reported on Monday that the Republican governor was dodging the Democratic presidential nominee’s calls because they “seemed political”.

“Kamala was trying to reach out, and we didn’t answer,” the DeSantis aide told the outlet. DeSantis does not appear to have spoken to Joe Biden, either, to the aide’s knowledge.

The Florida governor has, however, been in touch with the Fema director, Deanne Criswell.

Last week, DeSantis said Biden had called him, but he was flying at the time so could not take the call. A source familiar with the planning for Biden’s trip to north Florida to survey Helene’s damage said that the Biden team had invited DeSantis to the event but their schedules conflicted.

The response to Hurricane Helene has become an intense political issue one month before the presidential election. The White House and local Democratic leaders have appealed for an end to misinformation about the storm and the response to it.

Both Trump and Vice-President Harris have made trips to some of the affected states. Republicans have linked the disaster relief effort to immigration, including false claims that Fema had spent disaster funds on immigration relief. The White House and the agency itself have disputed that characterization.

At a White House briefing on Monday, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, reiterated that the government would mount “a robust federal response” to the oncoming storm.

“Anything else, I would have to leave it to the governor, to his actions, to how he wants to move forward. In this, that is for him,” Jean-Pierre added.

The White House press secretary added that “misinformation, disinformation, is a problem across the board … Whether it’s the election or what we’re seeing with Hurricane Helene or with Hurricane Milton on its way.”

After Helene hit, DeSantis told reporters that the federal government should focus on North Carolina.

“Florida, we have it handled,” DeSantis said. “We have what we need … Most of the effort should be in western North Carolina right now because you still have active rescues that need to take place.”

DeSantis also sent Florida resources to North Carolina, including members of the Florida national guard and officials from several state agencies.

Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is facing condemnation following several conspiratorial comments amid the devastation of Hurricane Helene that seemed to suggest she believed the US government can control the weather.

In a post last week shared with her 1.2 million X followers, the US House representative from Georgia wrote: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Greene does not specify to whom “they” is referring, but she has a history of promoting conspiracy theories around the federal government and other groups.

She appeared to double down on these comments with a post on Saturday, sharing a clip from a 2013 CBS News broadcast about experimental efforts to induce rain and lightning using lasers. “CBS, nine years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather,” Greene wrote, apparently mistaking the year of the broadcast.

Greene, who is no stranger to misinformation including once raising the idea of Jewish space lasers being behind wildfire outbreaks, was met with a wave of criticism for her blatantly false statements.

The US government’s top disaster relief official condemned on Sunday false claims made about Helene and its relief efforts, stating that such conspiracy theories, including those made by Donald Trump as he seeks a second presidency, are causing fear in people who need assistance and “demoralizing” the workers who are providing assistance.

“It’s frankly ridiculous, and just plain false. This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” said Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people, and that’s what we’re here to do.”

Shawn Harris, who is running for Greene’s congressional seat, condemned the incumbent’s comments.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy theories are sickening, but she does it to distract from her failed effort to block crucial funding for Fema as Hurricane Helene was making landfall,” Harris wrote in a post on X.

Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and popular internet personality, seemed to poke fun at Greene’s comments while also factchecking her false claims.

He suggested on X that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true – but added: “I can assure you that the Hurricane Helene weather modification theory is not one of them.

“I would know, too.”

In an email to his supporters, the Republican US senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina also seemed to condemn conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene, though he did not specify the rightwing source of the theories.

“The destruction caused by Helene is incomprehensible and has left many communities in western North Carolina absolutely devastated. The last thing that the victims of Helene need right now is political posturing, finger-pointing, or conspiracy theories that only hurt the response effort,” the email stated.

In an opinion piece on Saturday by its editorial board, North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer criticized Trump because of his falsehoods over the government response to Helene, saying the state’s affected parts were “not a political football” and “not a campaign opportunity”.

Criticism of Greene’s conspiracy theories even made it to the sports world, with the tennis legend Martina Navratilova using her platform to call out not only Greene as well as Trump’s running mate in November’s election, JD Vance. Vance had praised Greene at a rally just hours after she posted her conspiracies.

“Marj is even more stupid than we thought possible,” Navratilova wrote on X. “And Vance is not stupid – he is just a cowardly sycophant. Which is actually worse.”

Greene is also facing criticism for her hypocrisy of peddling conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene while she was photographed in attendance at the University of Alabama’s home football game against the University of Georgia with Trump on 28 September. She reportedly left her state of Georgia to attend the game in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while Helene devastated communities across the state she was elected to represent.

Tim Bradley quite rightly wonders why heat pumps are so expensive in the UK (Letters, 1 October). He can’t be alone. The simple answer surely must be price gouging, partly due to the heat pump grant.

I received two quotes from the same supplier for the same house, one with a £5,000 grant and another with the new higher £7,500 grant. The first quote, shared with me on 27 Sept 2023, came to £3,700 on top of the £5,000 grant – a total of £8,700. The second, which I received on 26 August 2024, was a strangely specific £5,585.42 on top of the £7,500 grant – a total of £13,085.42. A 50% rise even when the grant increased by 50%!

I want to go green and get a heat pump, but when even with an enlarged grant prices can be double or even quadruple the cost of a new boiler, it makes absolutely no sense. Something must be done to change the market, as currently this shiny green transition is just a grubby and tarnished money grab.
Adam Halawi
Brighton, East Sussex

Donald Trump’s supporters have threatened the consultancy firm Deloitte with the loss of lucrative government contracts if he returns to the White House after the election in November because one of its employees leaked critical comments about his presidential performance made by his running mate JD Vance.

The Republican nominee’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, led the warnings of retribution after the Washington Post published correspondence that showed Vance expressing negative views about the Trump administration long after he claimed he had become a supporter. The correspondence also showed Vance forecasting – accurately – that the former president would lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Ethics experts seized on the threats to punish Deloitte for the actions of an individual employee and warned that it might be a harbinger of how a second Trump administration would use its power over the federal government.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” the senior director of ethics at the non-partisan Campaign Legal Centre, Kedric Payne, told the Washington Post. “You can’t imagine that if one employee out of thousands made a statement that offended an official, that then the government contracts would be in jeopardy.”

The Post did not name the individual to whom Vance had expressed the anti-Trump messages privately on social media but merely reported that their recipient had shared them with the paper.

However, in a post on X, Trump Jr – who was instrumental in persuading his father to install Vance as his running mate – revealed the correspondent to be a consultant working at Deloitte. He suggested that the company’s contracts with the US government should be annulled.

“An executive at @Deloitte … decided to interfere in the election & leak private convos with JD Vance to help Kamala Harris,” the former president’s son said.

“Deloitte also gets $2B in govt contracts. Maybe it’s time for the GOP to end Deloitte’s taxpayer funded gravy train?”

Trump Jr tagged the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, in his message and attached a screen shot of Deloitte’s contracts with the government and the employee’s company profile.

The post, which has received more than 2 million views and been retweeted 13,000 times, was circulated by Vance’s spokesperson, William Martin, and followed up by the rightwing news site, Breitbart. The site ran a story naming the Deloitte employee in question, focusing on his job.

Jason Miller, an advisor to Donald Trump Sr, reacted to the post by writing that the employee “FAFO”, short for “fucked around and found out”.

Trump Jr followed up his original 27 September post with another two days later, saying: “We’re not forgetting this.” That was shared by Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator for Montana, who called the matter “outrageous” and demanded that Deloitte “immediately and publicly respond to this scandal”.

Trump Jr justified his comments about the firm’s government contract in a statement to the Washington Post, saying the employee “had a right to leak the communications, Washington Post had a right to print them and … I have a right to speak my mind about where my tax dollars go”.

Vance’s messages examined by the Post – reported to have been triggered by an essay the Deloitte employee had written about the relationship between Catholicism and politics – reveal a far more negative view of Trump’s presidency as it approached the end of its term than he has previously acknowledged.

In February 2020, he wrote: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”

“I think Trump will probably lose,” Vance wrote in June 2020 in a forecast of the outcome for that year’s election, which he subsequently falsely claimed was stolen by the Democrats, echoing the former president.

Vance has previously admitted to being a former critic of Trump, who he labeled around the time of his 2016 election triumph as “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler”. But Vance claims he was won over by Trump’s performance as president.