2 . Michael Jackson had Bubbles, a chimpanzee(黑猩猩). Justin Bieber had Og Mally, a capuchin(卷尾猴), until it was seized by German customs officials and put in a zoo. Rihanna has been photographed bottle-feeding a baby monkey on holiday. The stars would find few fans in the British government, which on December 12, 2020 placed new restrictions on keeping primates(灵长目动物)as pets. Somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 marmoserts, lemurs, tamarins and other little species of primates are kept in private ownership in Britain, the government says, often bored to misery.

One of the benefits of cutting loose from the European continent is that Britain can fully express its passion for animals. Politicians are only too happy to work for it, for pet-friendly policies are cheap and popular. In the previous election, the Tory Party promised to help reunite missing pets with their owners by making it compulsory to put chips into the bodies of cats and dogs, and to deal with animal smuggling(走私). The Labour Party promised to ban the live-boiling of lobsters in restaurants.

Yet, Britain’s animal welfare laws are already among the most comprehensive in the world, according to the Animal Protection Index.

Wild animals in traveling circuses were banned by law last year, but a decreasing public appetite for parades of elephants and tigers balanced on chairs had already put an end to the business. By the time the ban came into force, only two licensed animal circuses were left in Britain. Members of Parliament are moved by the sad loss of pets because of motor accidents. James Daly has proposed Gizmo’s Law, named after a cat, the victim of a hit-and-run accident, which was burned without its owner’s knowledge. The law requires that dead animals be brought back from the roadside to scan them for microchips, so that they can be reunited with their brokenhearted owners rather than being burned without their names being known. A draft bill in 2018 proposed criminalizing drivers who failed to stop after striking a cat. Hit-and-runs on dogs, pigs, goats and humans are already illegal.

3 . Homeowners Hermine Ricketts and her husband, Tom Carroll, held a ceremonial planting of vegetables in their garden on the day when a Florida law went into effect that removed local bans across the state on vegetable gardens at residential properties. It was one of the rules that had forced the couple, who lived in Miami Shores, to uproot(根除) all the vegetables in the garden that Ricketts had kept for almost twenty years.

Ricketts had her vegetable garden in her front yard because it faced south and her backyard was mostly in the shade. The retired architect said she gardened for the food and also for the peace it brought her.

“This is a peach tree that I planted, and around it, I had kale, and in between the kale, I had some cabbages,” Ricketts said then.

But then a zoning ordinance(条例) was tightened by Miami Shores Village to forbid vegetables in front yards on the ground, saying that they were unpleasant to look at. Village officials told Ricketts to uproot all her vegetables or she would face a $50 daily fine according to the ban.

And she fought back, joining up with the Institute for Justice, a national law firm, to challenge the ban.

It took six years, but they won. The Florida Legislature passed a bill protecting vegetable gardens, and Governor Ron DeSantis signed it. “After nearly six years of fighting... I will once again be able to legally plant vegetables in my front yard,” Ricketts said in a statement. “I’m grateful to the Legislature and the Governor for standing up to protect my freedom to grow healthy food on my own property.”

She complained that the fight even had to happen. “We had kept a beautiful, nutritious garden for many years before the Village went out of its way to ban it and then scared us with ruinous fines,” she said.

“Gardening is wonderful,” Ricketts added gladly. “I feel victory.... I have no words.”

4 . We’ve all been there, trying our best to do our bit to help save the planet, when a really essential item that you had to order online arrives in such an unbelievable amount of packaging that it makes you feel like it’s an unprepared game of passing the parcel.

It’s made even worse by the fact that some of the packaging can’t be recycled. In fact, 10 million tonnes of packaging waste are produced in the UK every year. A lot of this ends up in landfill, two-thirds of which could have instead been recovered.

The good news, however, is that how packaging waste is managed is in for a BIG shake-up in line with the “polluter pays principle”. By placing the main point of duty to pay on brand owners, they will be encouraged to choose more sustainable packaging options which are recyclable and reusable as much as possible. Otherwise, they will have to pay higher fees.

This is a system known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) — meaning that those who have control over packaging design decisions will be encouraged to do the right thing for the planet at the beginning and consider what happens at the end of the packaging’s life from the start.

What this means is that instead of local authorities picking up the bill for household waste management, companies will have instead to pay for managing your household packaging waste as well as the form businesses, and they will be met with the associated little costs too.

And, as an added bonus, the new EPR laws on packaging will also mean that producers are required to put clear mandatory (强制性的) labelling on packaging, for example, this could be “RECYCLE” or “DO NOT RECYCLE”. Of course, we hope that the “DO NOT RECYCLE” category labelling is the minority. It is aimed that by 2030, 78% of packaging will be recycled in the UK.

5 . Are you the only child in your family? If so, do you enjoy it or do you want more siblings（兄弟姐妹）?

On May 31, a key meeting of the Communist Party of China unveiled a policy that would allow all couples to have up to three children.

The move is expected to maximize the population's role in driving economic and social growth, since this is a critical time for China to transform the world's most populous country into a powerhouse（强国）with a quality workforce, according to the National Health Commission.

The three-child policy is also expected to prevent the decline in the nation's birthrate and address the challenge of a rapidly aging population, China Daily reported.

China's annual number of newborns has fallen for four years in a row. The country's total birthrate—the average number of children born to each woman—stood at 1.3 in 2020. The number is below the rate of 2.1 that would maintain a stable population, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The declining birthrate has also brought a sharp increase in the proportion of the population aged 60 or above, rising from 10.3 percent to 18.7 percent in the past decade. An increasingly elderly population will increase the cost of labor and the pressure on the social security net. It also means there will be a lack of young labor force. Therefore, it's not good for economic growth, according to Chen Youhua, a professor at Nanjing University.

In fact, the new birth policy is a step to further relax the family planning policy. The one-child policy was introduced in the 1970s and aimed to control the fast-growing population. Then in 2013, China allowed couples to have a second child if either parent was an only child, and in 2016, all couples were allowed to have two children.

However, not all people have shown their support for this latest policy. Many couples complained about the rising costs of raising a child. A netizen named Qinfeng commented, "High cost of education and both the physical and mental exhaustion stopped me from having more than one child." Also, many women are reluctant（不情愿的）to give birth because that could mean sacrificing their career prospects, according to Mu Guangzong, a professor at Peking University.

In that case, Mu noted that it is better to implement supporting measures with the three-child policy, such as more preferential（优惠的）policies for couples that would ease their parental burden.

6 . John Lubbock, a British member of the Parliament (议会), led to the first law to safeguard Britain's heritage-the Ancient Monuments Bill. How did it happen?

By the late 1800s more and more people were visiting Stonehenge for a day out. But the visitors left behind rubbish and leftover food. It encouraged rats that made holes at the stones' foundations, weakening them They also cut pieces off the stones for souvenirs and carved pictures into them, says architectural critic Jonathan Glancey. It was the same for other pre-historic remains, which were disappearing fast Threats also included farmers and landowners as the ancient stones got in the way of working on the fields and were a free source of building materials.

Shocked and angry, Lubbock took up the fight. When he heard Britain's largest ancient stone circle at Avebury in Wiltshire was up for sale in 1871, he persuaded its owners to sell it to him and the stone circle was saved.

"Lubbock aroused national attention for ancient monuments "says Glancey." he did for heritage what Darwin did for natural history."

But Lubbock couldn't buy every threatened site. He knew laws were needed and tabled the Ancient Monuments Bill. It proposed government powers to take any pre-historic site under threat away from uncaring owners.

For eight years he tried and failed to get the bill through parliament finally in 1882, it was voted into law. It had however been watered down; people had to willingly give their ancient monuments to the government. But what it did do was plant the idea that the state could preserve Britain s heritage better than private owners.