The number of UK nationals flown back from the Middle East since the start of the conflict with Iran reached 100,000 on Tuesday, Britain’s foreign secretary has said.

Yvette Cooper told parliament this is a third of the 300,000 who were in the region at the outset of hostilities, many of whom were stuck when airspace was closed. The figure included tourists and Gulf residents who have temporarily left.

Fellow MPs urged Cooper to help many British citizens who were still stuck in the region and those who were said to be struggling to get extensions for visas in the countries where they had gone on holiday before the US and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Cooper also provided an update on Britain’s part in discussions that could see an international coalition involved in opening the strait of Hormuz, adding that this was “separate from the conflict”.

“The focus at the moment is what the practical measure might be to ensure shipping can be restored as the conflict subsides and so Iran cannot continue with the long-term ability to hold hostage the global economy,” she said. Britain was in talks with European allies including Germany, Italy and France, as well as with the US and Gulf states.

“Because it is an international shipping lane, multiple nations need to be involved in planning the way forward. And our discussions will continue to reflect serious, expert military and commercial assessments about what is credible and feasible so that commercial shipping can return as soon as possible as the conflict subsides.”

The Conservative shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, pressed Cooper on what specific commitments Britain had made to Gulf states about helping them protect British bases and allies in the region.

“The way in which our friends and close security partners who host British armed forces have been subject to outrageous, unprovoked aggression has been painful to watch. Britain cannot stand by while our allies do the heavy lifting to protect us all,” said Patel.

Cooper replied that the UK was providing Gulf countries “with direct military defensive support”, with F35 and Typhoons in the region.

In a wide-ranging statement, she condemned the killing by Israeli forces of a Palestinian couple and their two children in the occupied West Bank, settler expansion in the same area and warned that Lebanon was “on the precipice of a widening conflict that risks disastrous humanitarian consequences”.

Calling for urgent diplomatic talks, she said that the UK was announcing a further £10m of humanitarian support to provide emergency medical care, shelter and other life saving assistance in Lebanon and the region.

The behaviour and comments of Donald Trump was cited by the Conservative MP and committee chair, Simon Hoare, who asked Cooper if she agreed with him that the US president was becoming “an increasingly unreliable and erratic partner”. He asked her if it was right for the UK to be strategically skeptical and questioning of his motives and pronouncement.

Cooper replied: “Our focus needs to be on the substance of that relationship and the real issues, not on rhetoric or statements.”

Myki cards will still be needed by Victorian public transport users until 2027 due to delays to the full rollout of tap-and-go technology, the state’s auditor general has revealed.

A report by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office (Vago) found a dispute between the state’s transport department and US-based firm Conduent had delayed the project by 18 months, adding $136.8m to its cost.

The longtime public transport campaigner Daniel Bowen said it was “frustrating” Victoria had “fallen so far behind the rest of Australia and a lot of jurisdictions around the world” when it came to contactless payments.

Conduent was awarded a $1.7bn 15-year contract in 2023 to upgrade the Myki system to allow contactless payments via a debit or credit card, smartphone or smartwatch. At the time, the then public transport minister Ben Carroll said the change would bring Victoria into the “21st century” – years after Sydney introduced similar technology in 2017.

However, by June 2024, the Department of Transport and Planning (DTP) and Conduent were in dispute over the contract and rollout schedule, leading to a six-month “standstill”, the auditor general’s report said.

The Vago report, tabled in parliament on Wednesday, found the department had been warned before signing the contract that Conduent’s delivery schedule was “overly optimistic and did not contain enough detail”.

“Ultimately, the schedule was proven to be unrealistic,” the report reads. “DTP did not address these known issues before signing the contract. It instead deferred this work … which contributed to disputes.”

The report also referred to the department’s slow handover of source code from the existing Myki system, which Conduent needed to run both the old and new systems during the rollout. According to Vago, there were “issues” over who owned the “intellectual property rights” for the code.

“Partly due to not receiving the source code, [Conduent’s] revised master schedule proposal asked to delay milestones in Phase 1 and Phase 2 by an average of 6.5 months,” the report reads.

The audit revealed the program’s revised timeline sets a target for tap-and-go payments to be enabled across the state for full-fare passengers by early 2026 (phase 2). By mid-2027, concession passengers and all regional areas can use the payments (phase 3).

The new system will be fully operational by mid-2028 – before the Myki system can be retired.

Vago said the program was on track with the revised timeline, but warned there were “upcoming challenges” that could cause more delays.

This included the department having “paused” a secondary contract, held by HCLTech and worth $34m, to develop a system so passengers can use concession fares with tap-and-go payments.

HCLTech told auditors the “risk of further delay has now materialised”, as it had not been given a date to resume work. It warned this would be “directly impacting phase three timelines”.

The transport department’s secretary, Jeroen Weimar, told the auditor the work was paused due to policy changes, including the introduction of free travel for under-18s through the new youth Myki.

Bowen, a former president of the Public Transport Users Association, said applying concessions to contactless systems remained a “complex” issue that other states have also yet to fully implement.

“Could we leapfrog Sydney and get it working before them? I wouldn’t be counting our chickens before they hatch, but it does seem like we’re in a reasonable position to make it work,” Bowen said.

But he said the government was being “cautious” with tap-and-go rollout, describing the 2009 move to the Myki system as a “disaster”.

“They don’t want to push it ahead too quickly because if it goes wrong they’ll have egg on their face,” Bowen said.

Despite the setbacks, some commuters have already begun testing the new technology.

On Monday, passengers on the Craigieburn, Upfield, Ballarat and Seymour lines became the first in the state to ditch their Myki cards as part of a trial.

Judith Leyster, an artist of the Dutch golden age, was thought to be about 21 when she painted her self-portrait in 1630. In the picture she presented to the world, Leyster exudes cheerful confidence. Clad in shimmering silks and a stiffly starched lace collar, she leans back in her chair, palette and brushes in hand, a painting by her side.

This work, completed in the year she was admitted to a painters’ guild in Haarlem, proclaimed her arrival as an established artist. It was one of the first self-portraits by an artist in the Dutch republic, a device most male painters did not adopt until years later.

While celebrated in her lifetime, Leyster was quickly forgotten after her death. A posthumous inventory attributed some of her paintings to “the wife of the deceased”, referring to her artist husband, Jan Miense Molenaer. Then she disappeared. Her works were attributed to Frans Hals, other male contemporaries, or, simply, “unknown master”. Those paintings under her name were little esteemed. In the 1970s a major US museum sold one; other institutions left her work unseen in their vaults.

Now the painter, who has been enjoying a revival for some time, is back in the spotlight, one of more than 40 female artists who worked in the Low Countries during the baroque period to be featured in a new exhibition.

Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750 opened this month at the the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts (MSK), after an earlier run in Washington DC. The exhibition seeks to restore women to one of the most feted periods of art history, best known for works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer and Anthony van Dyck. As MSK puts it in its slogan: “Old masters were women too.”

Co-curator Frederica Van Dam said the exhibition asked visitors to reflect on “why haven’t we seen artworks by women before? Why has no one ever questioned this”? The catalogue mentions 179 women who were active in the art economy of the Low Countries, which corresponds to the modern-day Netherlands and Flanders, in northern Belgium.

Many of them were admired in their lifetimes. Still-life paintings by Maria van Oosterwijck adorned palace walls throughout Europe. In 1697, the Russian tsar, Peter I visited the Amsterdam home of Johanna Koerten, who specialised in paper-cutting – using scored lines to make art on paper, a craft at the intersection of drawing, calligraphy and sculpture. Koerten was paid handsomely for her talents: a work of “woven silk in a rustic manner” made for the holy Roman empress is estimated to have earned her more than twice what Rembrandt made for The Night Watch.

The exhibition is part of growing rediscovery of women who were long absent from the tomes of art history, from Italian baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi and her near contemporary of the southern Netherlands, Michaelina Wautier, to the Belgian modernist Marthe Donas and American impressionist Mary Cassatt.

Women were written out of the story in the 19th century, when art history became a discipline. Art historians, mainly men, “decided what was good art, what was worth writing about,” Van Dam said. When women had a walk-on role, they were deemed imitators. That fate befell Rachel Ruysch. Although collectors had long sought her floral still lifes – admired for their astonishing attention to detail and refined brushstrokes – scholars dismissed her work as derivative.

The 19th century was also when painting became the apex of the art museum, overshadowing the applied arts that women excelled at, such as paper-cutting, calligraphy and lace-making. In the early modern era, lace commanded fabulous prices, although the poorer women, nuns and orphaned girls who usually made the exquisite fans, veils, aprons and tableware earned a pittance. These artists remained anonymous in their lifetimes, signing their name with an “X”, in contemporary records.

While many female artists will remain lost to history, some are being rediscovered. The painter Catrina Tieling had been almost entirely forgotten until 2025, when a Dutch art historian re-examined works long attributed to her brother, Lodewijk, and concluded they were in fact signed “CT”. The exhibition includes Catrina Tieling’s rustic scene of two shepherdesses resting beside a herd of cows, a rare example of an Italianate landscape by a woman.

It also charts some women’s life-changing and unconventional decisions. Louise Hollandine converted to Catholicism and entered a convent to maintain her artistic freedom. The daughter of exiled royalty, Hollandine had a gilded childhood in The Hague, becoming a talented portrait painter of friends and family.

But she fled her comfortable princess life in 1657 to become a French Benedictine nun, rather than marry her nephew, as sought by her family. At the convent, she switched to religious genre scenes, although many did not survive the French Revolution. The exhibition shows self-portraits of Hollandine in both lives. In the first, she is cool and poised, resplendent in rich silks and a big beribboned hat; in a later work, she makes an austere impression, wearing a cross and dressed in a black and white – but still lustrous – nun’s habit.

Van Dam hopes to see more research into female artists and efforts to make their work accessible. Through this exhibition, she said, “you get an impression of how valuable they were for the economic and artistic blossoming at the time”.