Couples could soon be allowed to get married at home, in pubs, on beaches or in forests under planned reforms to marriage laws in England and Wales.

The Government says it wants to modernise what it describes as “archaic” wedding rules, giving people more freedom over where and how they marry while potentially making ceremonies cheaper.

Under the proposals, civil weddings would no longer have to take place in pre-approved venues.

Instead, they could be held in any “dignified” setting, indoors or outdoors.

Ministers say the move could help bring down the average cost of a wedding. 

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “Giving couples more choice over where they marry could open up more affordable options, while keeping the lifelong commitment of marriage at the heart of every ceremony.”

Ministers say the move could help bring down the average cost of a wedding, currently estimated at around £20,000, making marriage more accessible to more couples.

The consultation paper, described as “the biggest shake-up of marriage law in almost 200 years”, also says weddings could be held on boats for the first time. (...)

Interfaith ceremonies involving more than one religion would be permitted for the first time, and non-religious belief groups such as humanists and pagans would also be able to conduct legally binding weddings.

Lake Tuz has gone from near-disaster to a beacon of hope for one of the planet’s most iconic pink birds. After years of extreme drying that decimated hatchlings, the salt lake on Turkey’s Central Anatolian plateau is now dotted with thousands of young flamingos being cared for by attentive parents — a dramatic sign that targeted conservation efforts are paying off.

Drone footage captured in June shows a dense cluster of juvenile birds learning to feed and avoid danger along the shimmering flats. The resurgence at Lake Tuz is being hailed by local conservationists as a major rebound for a site once at the center of climate alarm.

What the rebound looks like at Lake Tuz: new chicks, old habitat

Recent aerial video and field surveys document roughly 5,000 flamingo chicks scattered across shallow pools, accompanied by parents. The scene is notable because just a few years ago the same breeding grounds suffered catastrophic losses when the lake’s water vanished in critical nesting months.

Observers say the young birds are practicing foraging and predator awareness — essential behaviors that will determine whether they survive their first migratory season.

Why Lake Tuz is crucial for flamingos and birdwatchers

Lake Tuz — literally “salt lake” in Turkish — is one of Turkey’s most important wetlands.

It draws photographers, birders, and researchers who travel to see the seasonal color shifts and the broad, salt-crusted flats that provide nesting space and food for migratory species.

Breeding habitat: The lake’s shallow ponds and brine support the algae and invertebrates flamingos eat during chick rearing.

Geographic importance: Located on the Central Anatolia plateau about 90 miles southeast of Ankara, it sits within key Mediterranean migratory corridors.

Ecological uniqueness: Because Lake Tuz has no natural outlet, its water balance depends heavily on groundwater, spring rains, and a couple of inflowing streams.

What caused the dramatic declines — and how scientists tracked it

Lake Tuz’s troubles are tied to a mix of regional warming, reduced rainfall, and hydrological stress. Satellite images over the past two decades show dramatic shrinkage:Late 1980s: water covered nearly the entire basin.

Early 2000s: water coverage dropped substantially.

2016 and again in 2021: the lakebed largely dried out, triggering mass mortalities among newly hatched flamingos.NASA and other researchers have labeled the Mediterranean Basin, which includes central Turkey, as a warming “hotspot” because temperatures there have risen faster than the global average since pre-industrial times. That accelerated warming has made seasonal water supplies more unpredictable.

How conservation teams intervened to protect new generations

After the heavy losses in 2021, Turkey’s General Directorate for the Protection of Natural Assets implemented an emergency water-supply program for Lake Tuz. The measures focused on maintaining shallow, stable water levels in nesting areas during the vulnerable chick-rearing window.Pumped supplemental water into critical wetland zones where flamingos nest.

Monitored colonies with drones and field teams to gauge chick survival and adult behavior.

Coordinated with local ecology groups to keep human disturbance to a minimum during breeding season.

Bird conservation organizations, including the Bird’s Eye View and Ecology Association, have been active on the ground. President Fahri Tunç told Turkish media that this season’s chick numbers far exceed those of recent years and that the increase looks exponential compared with the immediate past.

When Eric Stallard, an actuary and academic, began looking into the incidence of dementia among elderly Americans, he was so stunned by his findings that he held off publishing his first paper on the subject for two and a half years while he double-checked his work. “I wanted to be absolutely certain,” he recalls, since the numbers defied all expectation. Instead of confirming the received wisdom that America faced an intensifying plague of the condition, they showed that the proportion of old people succumbing to it was in fact shrinking fast. “I was shocked by the declines,” he says.

Mr Stallard has been working for a decade to corroborate this revelation. His findings have, if anything, become even more striking. Last year he and some colleagues published research in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that, whereas 40 years ago three in every ten Americans aged 85-89 had dementia, by 2024 just one in ten had it (see chart 1). What is more, America is not the only beneficiary of this trend. Between 1988 and 2015 the share of older people being diagnosed with dementia fell by 13% a decade across six countries in North America and Europe, according to a study of almost 50,000 people by Frank Wolters of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, and colleagues.

Some smaller studies have also found big declines. Data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked three generations in an American town, show an average drop in new dementia cases of 20% per decade over almost 40 years between the late 1970s and early 2010s. Those who were entering their dotage when Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” was topping the charts (2013) were 44% less likely to have dementia than those who were doing so when Sting was urging Roxanne to switch off her red light (1978).

Whereas most earlier studies had simply pooled elderly people and then applied a statistical adjustment for age, Mr Stallard looked at narrow bands of ages to compare different cohorts of people over 50 years. By examining the changes between each successive cohort, he calculates that dementia rates have been declining by 2.5-3% for each calendar-year cohort. “In my view it was the Copernican revolution in the field,” he says, turning assumptions about dementia’s spread upside down. Similar cohort studies in various European countries and Japan have found comparable trends there, too.