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“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” — Charles Dickens

"Erasing women and women-specific language and needs based on their sex is not only wrong, but also demeaning, regressive and constitutes one of the worst forms of violence that women and girls can experience," @UNSRVAW Reem Alsalem told the @UN Human Rights Council. #HRC59

Olympic women's events to be limited to biological females only from 2028 games bbc.in/4uRBmnR

Here it is, my annual reminder: don't spray spring dandelions with roundup. One flower can be visited by 100+ bees, and your chemical bullshit will kill all of them. If you hate dandelions so much, just pull them. Or leave them alone. It's not like they're going to shank you as you walk by.

Over the moon to find this STUNNING red tailed bumblebee queen yesterday, basking in the sunshine on our Crocus Especially happy because this particular species hasn’t been doing well over the last few years. Fingers crossed for a period of good weather for her now…

@MikeBales @PaulBurston I’m in!

I’m going to create a website called “Older Fans” where I just tell you which part of my body hurts today and what tiny task caused it!

Urgent Pod. Last Chance! Boost State Pension by £10,000s: a must listen if age 40 to 73. It’s about missing National Insurance years. Step-by-step help inc contracting out, pension credit, free years & more BBC.co.uk/sounds/brand/p… podcasts.APPLE.com/gb/podcast/the… open.SPOTIFY.com/show/6tsU1ycEN…

Namibia 🇳🇦 is the only country in the world with a female President, Vice President, and Speaker of the National Assembly. Happy International Women's Day 2026! #IWD2026 #InternationalWomensDay

@Morne61573303 @BasilTheGreat I’m born South African 😉

@MissusFC6 @BasilTheGreat How many Boer women and children did the British kill in the concentration camps?

🚨BREAKING: LEWIS HAMILTON SAYS HE WANTS AFRICANS TO TAKE BACK AFRICA AND KICK OUT EUROPEANS Sorry... WHAT? So it's RACIST if British people say we want to take Britain back for us but it's absolutely fine to say Africa for Africans

@Morne61573303 @BasilTheGreat No you are not well placed dear Morne. You can trace a closer link to Africa with Lewis Hamilton than you Jan Van Riebeeck lot who “discovered” the Cape of Good Hope.

@BasilTheGreat My family has lived in South Africa since 1671, so I think I'm well placed to tell Lewis to go fuck himself.

Donald Trump- “This isn’t Churchill we’re dealing with.” You’re right. It isn’t. Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939. For nearly two years before America entered the conflict after Pearl Harbor, Britain and the Commonwealth stood virtually alone against Hitler. London burned in the Blitz. Coventry was flattened. Families slept in Underground stations not knowing if their homes would survive the night. And it wasn’t just Britain. 2.5 million volunteers from the Indian subcontinent, the largest volunteer army in history. Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders. Hundreds of thousands from Africa and the Caribbean. They fought from 1939, in North Africa, in the Atlantic, in Italy, in Burma long before the United States entered the European war. When America did enter, it became decisive but after victory, Britain was financially exhausted. In 1946, we borrowed $3.75 billion from the United States and $1.19 billion from Canada to rebuild a country that had poured everything into defeating fascism. And we honoured that debt. With interest, Britain repaid around $7.5 billion to America and about $2 billion to Canada nearly $10 billion in total. The final payment was made in December 2006. Sixty years after the war ended, Britain was still paying back what it owed. So yes, this isn’t Churchill’s war. But Britain still remembers what standing first looks like.

This week, The Guardian reported on a survey by the Royal College of Psychiatrists claiming that ‘three in four women do not know that menopause causes mental illness.’ Read that sentence again. Menopause causes mental illness, apparently. And the silly women don’t even know about it. Give us all a goddamn break, please. It is hard to overstate how pathologising, misleading, and politically loaded that statement is. And it is even harder to ignore the fact that this message was not stumbled upon accidentally by a journalist. It was issued as a press-friendly finding by one of the most powerful psychiatric institutions in the UK. The Royal College of Psychiatrists. A disgusting and deliberate tactic to frame menopausal and perimenopausal women as mentally ill, and of course, unaware. As a psychologist who has spent years researching the psychiatric labelling of women and girls, and as the author of Sexy But Psycho, I find this framing deeply concerning. Because this is exactly how it happens. First, women’s normal physiological processes are reframed as psychiatric risk factors. Then women are told they are unaware, uninformed, or ignorant about their own bodies. Then the screening increases. Everyone celebrates more screening of women. Then the diagnoses increase. Then the prescribing increases. And before long, an entire life stage has been recoded as a mental health disorder waiting to happen. This is not a drill, ladies. This is not a drill.

This is why we #vaccinate UK woman was diagnosed with rabies after psychiatrist raised fears, inquest told - The Guardian #rabies apple.news/AWA4Cvxh6QQ-HQ…

American women don’t even have the autonomy of abortion. And we are to believe the United States is bringing liberation to Iranian women!?!

I do not support the Ayatollah's regime in Iran I utterly condemn the attack on Iran by the US and Israel There is NO contradiction whatsoever between these two statements

An Iranian man left this comment on my YouTube channel. This is without a doubt the single best explanation of the reality facing Iranian people today👇 "As an Iranian, I can tell you the situation is no longer just political—it's existential. We are trapped between two collapsing structures: one internal, one external. On one hand, we face a deeply dysfunctional government, led by the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic’s unelected institutions. Decades of economic mismanagement, suppression of dissent, and brutal ideological control have alienated multiple generations. No one believes in reform anymore—because every attempt has either been co-opted or crushed. But here's the paradox: We are also terrified of regime collapse—because we've watched the aftermath of Western intervention in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Each was promised freedom; each descended into chaos, civil war, or foreign occupation. So no, we don't trust the U.S. or Israel. Not because we support our regime—but because we know how imperial powers treat ‘liberated’ nations in the Middle East. Freedom, in their language, often means vacuum, fire, and permanent instability. Right now, many Iranians live with three truths at once: The Islamic Republic is morally and politically bankrupt. The alternatives offered by foreign actors are not liberation—they’re collapse. A bad government is survivable. No government is not. We are not silent because we agree. We are cautious because we’ve learned—too well—what happens when superpowers decide to "help." In a sentence: Iran is a nation held hostage by its own regime, but haunted by the fate of its neighbors. We are stuck in a house we hate, surrounded by fires we fear more."

There has been no harsher critic to U.S. military action in Iran than Pope Leo XIV: “War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.  The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. “Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.” “Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. “This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”

Bexleyheath, England. 1958. A girl is born into a house where sound never stops. Piano keys under her father's fingers. Folk music from her mother's record player. Brothers filling every room with instruments and noise. This isn't a family that tolerates creativity. This is a family that breathes it. By eleven, Catherine Bush is writing songs that make no sense for a child. Death. Longing. Gothic literature. Her melodies don't sound like the radio. They sound like something pulled from another century, another world. At fifteen, her brother passes a demo tape to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. He listens as a favor. What he hears stops him cold. This teenager from the suburbs has written something he's never encountered before. He pays for studio time himself. Gets her in front of EMI Records. At seventeen, she signs one of the biggest deals in music. Then EMI does something almost unthinkable. They don't rush her. They give her three years to grow, to write, to become who she needs to be. 1977. Kate reads Wuthering Heights. The ghost of Catherine Earnshaw crying out across the moors for Heathcliff. She doesn't just read it. She inhabits it. She writes a song from the ghost's perspective, her voice climbing into ranges most pop singers won't touch. Her label hates it. Too strange. Too theatrical. Radio will never play it. Kate is nineteen years old, completely unknown, and she draws a line: Release this song, or I won't release the album. A teenage girl threatening a major record label. In 1977, women didn't do this. You compromised. You smiled. You let men decide. EMI blinks first. January 1978. "Wuthering Heights" hits the airwaves. Radio hosts are baffled. Listeners are obsessed. Within weeks, it's number one. Kate Bush becomes the first British woman to top the charts with a song she wrote herself. Then, after one theatrical tour in 1979, she vanishes from the stage for 35 years. She retreats into her studio, releases music when she wants, refuses interviews, ignores industry pressure. Decades pass. She becomes a legend by disappearing. 2022. Stranger Things features "Running Up That Hill." Thirty-seven years after its release, it goes viral. At 63, Kate Bush becomes the oldest female artist to hit number one with her own song. The same woman. First and oldest. A ghost haunting her own industry. via the History Drop #KateBush #StrangerThings #FeministFriday

Clare Youngs, contemporary graphic designer and artist who works with collage, paper and fabric #womensart #BirdArtWeek

Robert De Niro: “We all love our country. I choke on that phrase. Can you love a country where our neighbors are shot down in the streets by masked government thugs? Can you love a country that denies healthcare for tens of millions of our fellow citizens? Can you love a country that trashes our economy to give tax breaks to its billionaire cronies? Can you love a country that pardons violent criminals and protects pedophiles? I feel betrayed by my country. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to return to the values that gave us our strength and humanity”