Not The BBC News: 10 October 2014

A primary school in Sussex has introduced unisex toilets in its new building. According to a letter from the head teacher, this was partly done to make any transgender children more comfortable when choosing a loo. However, parents have complained that the new toilets’ main effect has been to make many children feel uncomfortable about using them. 130 parents have signed a petition asking for the toilets to be re-segregated.

Bart Campolo, the (middle aged) son of well known preacher Tony Campolo, has recently rejected his Christian faith and now claims to be  a secular humanist. Some commentators have blamed it on his father’s emphasis on a ‘social’ gospel rather than an ‘evangelical’ approach. However, a more thoughtful article in Christianity Today commented on Bart’s decision to live as a Christian in the inner city for many years, and on his own stated reasons for giving up on Christianity (that he cannot believe in a God who allows so much suffering and evil); the conclusion is that Bart saw so much sin, sadness and injustice among marginalised and broken people that it eventually broke him too.

A homeless ex-military veteran in Las Vegas, who stood on street corners and aimed to make people smile even if they gave him no money, was approached by a man who took the veteran’s sign, wrote dollar signs on it, and started tearing it into pieces. The bemused veteran asked if he could keep the magic marker to make another sign, but was very pleased to have his sign returned to him, intact, with a considerable quantity of cash attached. The magician who set up the stunt organised a GoFundMe page for the veteran, which has now raised enough money to get the veteran temporary accommodation. A video of the stunt can be seen here: http://insider.foxnews.com/2014/10/09/viral-video-magician-does-amazing-trick-homeless-veteran-las-vegas

The Northern Irish Department of Justice has begun a public consultation on making abortion legal if the foetus has a lethal abnormality or where the baby was conceived by rape. Neither of these is currently a legal ground for abortion in Northern Ireland. A Christian group has responded by publishing stories told by people who were conceived through rape, including one whose mother was given the choice of aborting the baby or leaving home.

Stories of church leaders who have fallen into sin – usually adultery – are all too frequent. But at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, their pastor of 23 years stood in the pulpit and told them that he had used drugs; he had misused church funds; he had been HIV-positive since 2003; he had had full-blown AIDS since 2008; and he had slept with a number of church members. He was removed as pastor of the church in October 5^th, and is likely to face criminal charges, including failure to disclose his health condition to sexual partners.

In sport, the football season is less than two months old, and Watford FC have just appointed their fourth manager of the season. The first manager resigned at the end of August after rumours of unrest amongst the players (ironically, his last match was  a win against Huddersfield, who were already on their second manager of the season); the second manager resigned after a few weeks due to being admitted to hospital with chest pains; the third was a caretaker manager, promoted from another coaching position within the club; and the fourth was hired just eight days later.  Watford are currently third in their division.

The last in my series of Facebook tips is a way to save interesting posts to read later. It currently only works for shared links and place/entertainment pages, and only on a computer browser. If you see a shared link you want to save, click on the down arrow in the top right of the post and select ‘Save’; for place/entertainment pages, ‘Save’ is next to ‘Like’. To find it later, look at the top left of your news feed; where it says ‘News’, ‘Messages’ and ‘Events’, you’ll find a link that says, ‘Saved.’

And finally, this year’s Ig Nobel prizes for improbable research have been awarded. The prizes were first awarded in 1991 and were originally intended as a satirical parody on the Nobel prizes, recognisng research that “cannot or should not be reproduced.” This tradition is echoed by this year’s Ig Nobel prize for Economics, awarded to the Italian Government’s statistics unit for  “fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, and smuggling.” However, the prize has become increasingly respectable to the extent that many academic prize winners now turn up to collect their prizes. Other winners this year were (for Art) “measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam”; (Medicine) “treating uncontrollable nosebleeds using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork”; and (Neuroscience) “trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.”