This is our Afghan authentic dress. Afghan women wear such colorful and modest attires. The black burqa never has been part of the Afghan culture.

At @10DowningStreet to demand a rethink on floating bus stops. Andrew here, used to be able to get the bus to M&S, Hyacinth to hospital and her knitting shop. Now it’s not possible because SoS @Heidi_Labour prioritise fit young cyclists who can’t wait over blind and disabled people. @Number10cat

Two up, one down! 😁 2 juvenile Blue Tits (top) just after being fed by their hard working parent (bottom) in my Somerset garden yesterday. 😍 Have you started seeing baby birds in your garden? 😊🐦

I stand with the brave women of Afghanistan who face guns, bullets, beatings and arrest, simply for saying no to forced hijab. I tried to cover my face. I couldn't breathe behind that piece of cloth for even a few seconds. A total humiliation. And the Taliban is demanding Afghan women wear it for a lifetime. To every Western politician who calls the burqa Afghan "culture" you’re better listen to Women, Afghanistan, and Iran, who lived under Islamic regimes. You're sitting in a parliament in a free country, with a salary and a vote and a podium calling this culture. This is a total betrayal to us who are wounded but unbowed to our oppressors. Stop legitimizing Taliban. Be the voice of women of Afghanistan. Who wants to end this Apartheid regime. #LetUsTalk

I've just put up this metal sign right outside Thames Water's HQ. I loathe the behaviour of many of the water companies. I am not alone. #Thameswater And yes, I did fit the sign wearing my jacket and tie. @Feargal_Sharkey @ChrisGPackham @AndyBurnhamGM @BBCOxford @rdgchronicle @OxTweets

Hello @Brentwood_BC. Are you aware that Croudace Homes have been illegally felling mature trees in Shenfield? What are you going to do about it? It is illegal to do this during breeding season.

The Somerset Farmhouse of 1 North Street, Williton were approached by a "food influencer" that wanted to charge them £2,000 for a review. They put out a video of Sally eating a sausage roll instead 😆. Lets make Sally and the Somerset Farmhouse famous for free.

"Southern Water apologises after Winchester milestone removed." So there's a mile stone on the Andover Road just outside Winchester, it's been there for 100s of years, guess who digs it up and then dumps it along with a load of other building waste in the local landfill? Yep, step forward Southern Water. hampshirechronicle.co.uk/new…

Utterly disgusted to see Croudace Homes wilfully clearing mature trees and hedgerows in Shenfield during the height of the breeding season. Century old oaks hosting nesting birds and other wildlife have been felled. We need to place more value on our natural environment.

Up to 22 Swift nests were destroyed during demolition works carried out by Northeast Demolition UK on behalf of Hill Group and Clarion Housing. Conservationists have described this as a significant wildlife crime. Surrey Police had been warned that Swifts were actively nesting.

This was the oldest working cinema in the UK. Glenbrook Property bought it, shut it down and are letting it rot. We’ve had more than 2 years of politicians watching it rot. Flatpack Festivals have proposed an alternative rescue plan. Will our new council leaders broker it?

Wtf! This is heartbreaking and pure eco vandalism. We need to name and shame @Hill_Group_UK @MoleValleyDC and @SurreyPolice for this. 👇 A building that was a noted nesting site for swifts, among the UK’s most at-risk birds, has been demolished during the nesting season, highlighting significant weaknesses in the protection of wildlife from development, campaigners say. Contractors for the housebuilder Hill Group carried out the demolition of Regent House near Dorking station in Surrey over the last few weeks, during the nesting season which runs from 1 March to 31 August. Footage captured last week shows swifts attempting to return to nests in the building, which was known to be home to one of the largest populations of the birds in the Mole Valley area in Surrey. They approach and then repeatedly turn away because their nests are no longer there. The building was a known habitat for nesting swifts. Volunteers for Swift Protection Association Reigate have recorded very intense low-level flying involving as many as 40 birds using about 20 sites in the eaves of the building in early spring and summer for several years. Demolition and construction work are heavily restricted during the nesting season under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. It is an offence to intentionally or recklessly damage or destroy the nest of any wild bird while it is in use or being built, or to disturb dependent young. Annie Griffin of Banstead Swifts, a volunteer group that monitors and tries to stabilise swift populations, said residents raised the alarm with Surrey police wildlife officers in early May, shortly after the swifts returned from migration and were observed nesting in the building. Mole Valley district council (MVDC) was also told about the birds’ presence. Despite this, demolition proceeded during peak nesting season,” said Griffin. “Conservationists are now describing the incident as a significant wildlife crime, raising broader concerns about the enforcement of environmental protections during development across England.” Regent House was demolished as part of a development of 126 flats by Clarion housing association. An impact assessment carried out for the developers by the Arbtech environmental consultancy said demolition and construction should take place outside the nesting season. If a different timeframe could not be avoided, it said, an ecological expert would have to undertake a thorough inspection before the start of any work and all active nests would have to be retained until the young had fledged. The Guardian asked Hill Group and Clarion if such an ecological inspection had taken place in the last few weeks, but they declined to answer. They also refused to say the timeframe for the demolition could not be avoided. theguardian.com/environment/…

There are 3 billion fewer birds in North America than there were in 1970. This data is from a 2019 Science paper that combined 48 years of citizen-science bird counts with continent-wide weather radar tracking nighttime migration. The losses are concentrated in the birds people see most often: grassland birds (down 53%, 700 million gone), forest birds (1 billion gone), and shorebirds (down 37%). Even common species (blackbirds, swallows, warblers) are vanishing. Habitat loss is the biggest reason, but the rest of the list is short and largely fixable for the average person. 1. Pesticides killing the insects birds eat. 2. Outdoor cats kill an estimated 2.4 billion US birds annually. 3. Window collisions killing roughly a billion more. Lawn chemicals. 4. Light pollution disrupting migration. What you can do, ranked by impact: keep cats indoors, treat your windows for bird strikes, plant native trees and shrubs, stop spraying pesticides, leave the leaves and seed heads through winter, and turn off outdoor lights at night during spring and fall migration. No one person killed 3 billion birds, obviously, but your yard can be a part of the solution that rebuilds their numbers.

We have reached a strange place, where you can drain a river, poison a coastline, and lean on people with no rights, and still be thanked for saving the planet, so long as the damage happens somewhere you will never have to look. Follow the virtuous plate home, one item at a time, and watch the halo slip off it. The avocado came from Michoacán, where the cartels run the orchards, divert the rivers, and murder the people who object. The almonds in the milk came from California, drawn out of a drought and an emptying aquifer, pollinated by bees trucked three thousand miles across a continent and worked to exhaustion in a fortnight. The salad was grown under a sea of plastic in Almería, by migrant workers on thirty euros a day in forty-five-degree heat, on groundwater so poisoned the region now has to import its own. The peppers were grown beside a Spanish lagoon that has died so many times they had to give it the legal rights of a person just to defend it in court. The cashews were shelled by hand by people whose fingers were burned by the acid in the husk. The cotton bag it all came home in helped drain the fourth largest lake on earth into a salt desert. Every item crossed thousands of miles, from somewhere left drier, poorer, and more poisoned for having grown it. And the person carrying that bag home walks past a field ten miles up the road, where a cow stands in the rain turning grass nobody can eat into food, dropping dung that feeds the soil it stands on, on land that has looked more or less the same for a thousand years, and thinks, with total sincerity: there it is. The thing destroying the planet. A cow. Burping in a meadow. It is one of the strangest acts of misdirection of the age. We built a supply chain that strips deserts, drains rivers, flattens forests and runs on people with no rights, and we taught ourselves to feel virtuous about it, purely because the alternative was an animal we could see, standing in a field we could walk to. The cow you can point at gets the blame. The catastrophe you cannot see gets a halo and a sticker that says plant-based. Heal the planet, they say, with the asparagus flown in from a drought.

The news of Scotland mandating swift bricks has gone viral on various big mainstream accounts. If only everyone who liked the post below emailed Housing Secretary Steve Reed telling him to go back to his original support and mandate. Just like Scotland AND Gibraltar !

Angry doesn’t even begin to cover it.. Today at Snettisham beach protected area for ground nesting birds including Little Ringed Plover, Oystercatcher, Ringed Plover…... Signage EVERYWHERE asking for dogs on leads. 📸 Derek Bromage - Snettisham Village Facebook Page.

If you see this photo, please leave a comment! 😊 This is a Swift, a very difficult bird to photograph at the best of times, but even tougher when low-flying, so I was thrilled to get this pic! 😀😍 Have you seen Swifts this spring yet? 🐦

Members of the Women Courage Movement in Afghanistan continue to raise their voices despite threats, writing on walls against child marriage. Child marriage is a violation of human dignity and a threat to the future of children. The world must not stay silent. Where is the UN?

Penrhos has so many surprises, from the flash of red of the endangered red squirrel, the sighting of a Mistle thrush ,the rare butchers broom and viola odorata ,the bats we rarely see but they have been detected at dusk! Penrhos is Home to so many species,the ecologist for the consultancy wanted to know where the rare plants were you’d have thought he would have known! As he was for the destruction of penrhos !