The speaker of Britain's House of Commons dealt a potentially fatal blow to Prime Minister Theresa May's ailing Brexit deal, saying the government couldn't keep asking lawmakers to vote on the same deal they have already rejected twice. The government intended to try a third time to get lawmakers to back the deal, ideally before May joins EU leaders at a Brussels summit where she is set to ask the bloc to postpone Britain's departure.

May has warned opponents that a failure to approve her Brexit divorce deal would mean a long, and possibly indefinite, delay to Britain's departure from the EU. Speaker John Bercow scuttled May's plan, saying that centuries-old parliamentary rules prevent "the same proposition or substantially the same proposition" from being brought back repeatedly for votes in a session of Parliament.

The heir to the Saudi throne has not attended a series of high-profile ministerial and diplomatic meetings in Saudi Arabia over the last fortnight and is alleged to have been stripped of some of his financial and economic authority, according to UK newspaper the Guardian. One of the king's trusted advisers, Musaed al-Aiban, who was recently named as national security adviser, will informally oversee investment decisions on the king's behalf.

The move to restrict, if only temporarily, the responsibilities of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is understood to have been revealed to a group of senior ministers earlier last week by his father, King Salman. The king is said to have asked Bin Salman to be at the meeting, but he failed to attend.

A meteor explosion over the Bering Sea late last year unleashed 10 times as much energy as the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, scientists have revealed. The fireball tore across the sky off Russia's Kamchatka peninsula on 18 December and released energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT.

It was the largest air blast since another meteor hurtled into the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, in Russia's south-west, six years ago, and the second largest in the past 30 years. Unlike the Chelyabinsk meteor, which was captured on CCTV, mobile phones and car dashboard cameras, the December arrival from outer space went largely unnoticed at the time because it exploded in such a remote location.

The death toll in Mozambique from Cyclone Idai could reach 1,000, according to the country's President Filipe Nyusi. It made landfall close to the port city of Beira on March 14 with winds of up to 177 km/h (106 mph), but aid teams only reached the city three days later. As Dhaka Courier went to press this week, the official death toll in Mozambique stood at 84 following flooding and high winds, which have destroyed homes and ripped roofs from concrete buildings.

The cyclone has killed hundreds across southern Africa. In Zimbabwe, 98 people have died and 217 people are missing in the east and south, the government says. Malawi has also been badly hit. The flooding there, caused by the rains before the cyclone made landfall, led to at least 122 deaths, Reliefweb reports.