Caroline Loncq

🚨🇦🇱 BREAKING: Albanians tore down barriers at Kakome Beach in southern Albania, declaring that the country's beaches belong to the people, not oligarchs ✊️🇦🇱As opposition to the controversial Kushner-Trump resort project intensifies, public anger is spreading over the privatization of public land and protected coastal areas 🇦🇱 Albania Is Not For Sale #SaveAlbania #Albania #FlamingoRevolution

It's official 🪄 Season 2 of The Librarians: The Next Chapter premieres August 2, with Dominic Monaghan ("Lost", "The Lord of the Rings") joining the cast! #OliviaMorris #BlueyRobinson #JessicaGreen #CallumMcGowan #ChristianKane

From a mother who live inside Afghanistan:- "Imagine an 8-year-old girl being forced to wear a black burqa just to go outside, with her whole face covered, even her eyes hidden behind glasses and her hands in gloves. In 100°F heat, she still must be fully covered. This is women right for Afghan girl after age 8 . Banned from learning and living 💔 The world must hear and pay attention to Afghan women’s voices and their reality."

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated. His name is Qing Li. He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea. The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason. Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005. He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest. Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty. The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected. The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly. Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty. Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month. Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet. The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation. The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall. When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab. Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system. This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress. A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower. The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down. Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks. They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone. The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk. After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature. What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care. But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free. The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish. Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens. Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

Marcelo Bielsa: “Jugar cuatro tiempos en lugar de dos altera la concepción que culturalmente se había construido para interpretar el fútbol. No le agrega nada y le quita mucho. Cuando se dividió en cuatro no se pensó en el efecto que puede tener sobre lo que hizo que el fútbol sea un deporte que enamora, sino que se pensó en otro tipo de repercusiones que no las discuto ni las analizo. Antes de esta decisión el fútbol tenía una característica; ahora tiene otra. La gente se enamora del juego por sus características”.

Didn’t see this coming! I was name checked by @CountBinface at the Makerfield by-election as he was being interviewed by… LBC. LBC: Will you hold onto your deposit? Count Binface: If I do, I’ll invest it in my ‘What Happened to Sangita Myska Fund?’

Do you know why women in Iran receive lashes for singing? The logic behind Islamic laws is simple: men might get aroused by a woman’s voice. So I decided to test that logic and asked all men one question. Just listen. If you are a man, your answer will make you understand this injustice in a completely different way. @aspenideas

Go Scotland!

BREAKING: HELL YES! The European Parliament formally demands that Albania END Jared Kushner's corrupt resort development in a massive blow to the President's son-in-law. This is the nightmare scenario for Ivanka and her crooked husband... “The Flamingo Protest shows that citizens care about protecting the environment and joining the EU. We will stand with them, supporting their protest against Trump allies who exploit their natural heritage and supporting their journey towards the EU,” said Dutch MEP Tineke Strik of the Greens–European Free Alliance. Protests have swept Albania over the past month in opposition to the project, which includes a $1.4 billion development on an island and a $4.7 billion deal for a stretch of protected coastline. Because the development endangers wildlife including flamingos, the protests have been nicknamed "The Flamingo Revolution. The EU previously warned Albania that the ecological disruption could endanger their bid to join the Union, because it runs afoul of their environmental rules. This new move from the European Parliament is an escalation of that campaign to abort the project. The lawmakers adopted a resolution in their 2025 Commission Report on Albania which calls for an "immediate moratorium" on new permits as well as the termination of all construction in protected regions. While it doesn't specifically mention Kushner, the intent is clear. This is a response to his plutocratic endeavors. "Europe should pay close attention to what is happening in Albania. There is no better guarantee for the path toward accession to the European Union than a living, conscious people capable of mobilizing against predatory capitalism, in defense of justice, the commons and freedom," said Italian MEP Ilaria Salis. We stand with the proud, defiant people of Albania. They have every right to defend their beautiful country from the wicked tendrils of Donald Trump's family. Kushner wants to carve out yet another luxury playground for the war criminals, pedophiles, and sex traffickers of the Epstein Class. He must be stopped. Please ❤️ and share if you stand with Albania

Hydration breaks, in climate controlled stadia, are a disgrace

@10DowningStreet @AndyBurnhamGM @wesstreeting @UKLabour We don't want a leadership scrabble. What we want is a dignified transition in a year or two's time, that has AB set up to win the next election and gets shit done in the meantime. Think country, not party politics, please

Makerfield voters reflect as Burnham wins and political circus leaves town channel4.com/news/makerfiel…

Well done, Makerfield ❤️

“And, in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.” Paul McCartney (born #OTD in 1942) Happy 84th Birthday.

If you’re involved in the creation, production, distribution or exhibition of film and TV in the UK - directly or indirectly - @FilmTVCharity wants to hear from you! Fill in the anonymous 10-min survey and make your voice count: filmtvcharity.org.uk/research-impac…

5 days left. ⏳ The 2026 Looking Glass Survey closes soon. If you work in film, TV or cinema, your experience of this industry needs to be in this data. 10 mins. Anonymous. Drives real change. @filmtvcharity filmtvcharity.org.uk/research-impac…

🚨Shocking from Afghanistan: The Taliban’s new May 2026 decree has legalized child marriage. Girls as young as 9 can now be married off by their father or grandfather — her silence counted as “consent.” No minimum age. Girls treated as property with no escape. The bitter result? A wave of suicides and self-immolations among desperate Afghan girls. Over 30 cases in 2025 alone, many directly from forced child marriages, abuse, and hopelessness. Activists say 1–2 women and girls die by suicide every single day. Where is the world? Where is the UN? This is systematic destruction of Afghan girls — and the world watches in silence.

Putting aside this case, everybody should read this report by @nickwallis. The appalling, chaotic conditions he describes are all too familiar in the magistrates’ courts. This is how @DavidLammy wishes for serious crimes - carrying up to 2 years in prison - to be tried.

Never forget working with someone who had their asylum application denied twice after coming to the UK physically battered and a victim of FGM. I watched a video of her sister being murdered in a field and dad’s home burnt down after she fled to the UK. If it was left to the Home Office they would have willingly deported her back to be killed.

Afghan women are not silent. Afghan women are out of options And we need world for real action. Please hear our voice 🙏