Sorted for reading dependant on mood, starting with the good:

* A 14-year-old weightlifter has been recognised for her outstanding achievement. Let’s hope lots more women take up the sport.

*The atheist bus campaign has hit the big time.

* The Australian Medical Association is being bluntly realistic about the need for sex education.

Then the bad…

* Horrific accounts of forced marriage in Britain – and what is dreadfully noticeable is how almost all of the women who tell their stories here have sisters who didn’t escape.

* Ninety-nine per cent (99%!!!) of allegations of rape and sexual assault against London Metropolitan Police staff are dismissed. And guess who is doing the investigating?

* The Folger Shakespeare Library has an exhibition News Before Newspapers – about the really early days of the press. And if you can’t see the actual thing, there’s a pretty good online exhibition – hat-tip to Wynken de Worde.

* “Third-hand smoke” is dangerous – now I know why I instinctively recoil into the back corner of the lift when the smokers come in from their break. (Well yes, they do smell awful too.)

* But something nicer: traditional, fortified homes in China, made out of a packed mix of sand, earth, mud and pebbles bound together with glutinous rice and brown sugar”, some up to 600 years old, “tulou”, have made the World Heritage List, and if not yet safe are at least in line for preservation.

* An “ingenious new parasite” was found last year. It “makes the abdomens of infected ants swell and turn bright red. Birds mistake the ants for berries, gobble them up and spread the parasite’s eggs in their droppings.” (No it isn’t April 1, I checked – it was published in Systematic parasitology – although I can’t help feeling someone missed a trick there – the journal Nature surely would have loved it.)

Actually from last week, but I hadn’t got around to celebrating the Critical Mass legal victory. Once again we’ve had to rely on the judges to defend basic civil liberties – such as the right to cycle along a street with some other cyclists…

But there are growing concerns about cosmetics. If they aren’t safe for pregnant women, should they really be being spread around in such huge quantities?

And a fascinating piece about Google’s censorship dilemmas – having just been wrestling with a small such question myself, in preparing the Britblog roundup below, I’m feeling sympathetic. But it is a reminder of just what enormous powers one major multinational company (whatever its good intentions) is holding.

Good news from Scotland, where the scheme pioneered by Greens in Kirklees, to provide free insulation to every whose house needs it, has won the backing of MSPs – proposed by the Greens and backed by the SNP and Labour.

On a far smaller scale, but still worth plugging, on the model of freecycle in Camden a plant exchange – designed for all garden things, has begun. (Would have come in handy when I moved and had to dump compost worms in the garden, even though I knew they probably wouldn’t do terribly well.)

And worth plugging, a survivor’s account of domestic violence sets out its corrosive framework.

Is it any wonder that they ruined the world economic system.

My 24 hours.

Intelligent Finance, a branch of Halifax, send me a letter saying “oops, we’ve forgotten to send you your annual statement. Here it is, from November 2007.”

And the Cooperative Bank, trying to sort out a little snafu, has been ringing me non-stop for days. Or at least their machine has, and the first thing it does is ask me to enter my birth date – then presumably, if I did that, it would ask me for further private data.

Such a great thing to train your customers to do – give away their personal details to a machine call. Is the Coop actually employed by Phishing-R-Us, I wonder?

The last of the potatoes, and the tomatoes that I decided were never going to ripen. I combined them with some pork mince and onions for a baked green tomato hash, which wasn’t half bad – a real autumn dish.