A family judge says marriage and cohabitation should be put on the same legal footing when relationships break down – but a newspaper columnist says he is ‘utterly and sadly mistaken’. Sir Nicholas Mostyn’s comments were reportedly aimed at Sir Paul Coleridge – a former High Court judge who has spoken out in favour of traditional marriage. He also claimed that there was no evidence to prove marriage is more stable than a co-habiting relationship. However, columnist Sarah Vine said there was a ‘mountain of academic research proving beyond doubt that married couples are healthier, wealthier, happier and less likely to break-up than co-habiting ones. All these benefits also apply to the children of married parents’. Last year research from the Marriage Foundation said only one in eight children born to cohabiting couples will reach the age of 16 with their parents still together and unmarried

Thousands of dementia patients are hiding symptoms from loved ones and doctors because they are ashamed, a report warns. It compares the stigma to that of HIV and Aids in the 1980s and says that as many as a quarter of those suffering are refusing to speak out. Doctors say patients tell them how their friends ‘disappeared’ after they were diagnosed and in some cases how their own children have stopped visiting. A joint report led by the Medical Research Council warns that this ‘unacceptable stigma’ is denying patients vital help and resulting in them being ‘marginalised’ from the rest of society. Around 850,000 patients in Britain are thought to have dementia but only half have been given a proper diagnosis. The Government is urging GPs to improve their detection rates over concerns that victims and their families are struggling in silence.

A member of the public has taken the dramatic step of starting criminal proceedings against two doctors who were identified by a national newspaper as authorising the abortion of two babies because they were not the sex that the mother wanted. In two instances doctors were recorded offering to arrange abortions after being told that the mother did not want to go ahead with the pregnancy because of the sex of the unborn child. At the Pall Mall Medical Centre in Manchester, Dr Parabha Sivaraman was filmed giving consent for a woman to have an abortion purely on the grounds that the pre-born child was the ‘wrong gender’. The second was at the Calthorpe Clinic in Birmingham where Dr Raj Mohan was secretly filmed offering to arrange an abortion for a woman who said she wanted to abort her baby because it was a girl.

The UK has the highest rate of family breakdown in Western Europe, ‘alarming’ findings show. For the first time, the proportion of children living in single parent households has been found to be higher in the UK than all other Western European countries. According to the latest figures from Eurostat, the European Union’s official statistics body, almost one in four UK children were found to be living in single parent households in 2012. This means that the UK has jumped to pole position, having been placed between second and fifth in Western Europe since 2005. The average number of children living in single parent households in Europe as a whole is around one in six. Commenting on the findings Harry Benson, Research Director for the Marriage Foundation, said: ‘These figures are alarming.’ He stressed ‘that while most lone parents do an excellent job with fewer resources, not many will have chosen this lifestyle’.

Schools, universities, solicitors, estate agents and financial advisers are elements of a growing industry of ‘gatekeepers’ to the UK for foreign money launderers. Currently hundreds of law firms across the country are undergoing checks from their regulator into how much care they take to keep out the criminals, because an international anti-money-laundering body, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), will soon visit the UK. FATF has become increasingly concerned about the rising number of legal actions being taken in London by foreign nationals, who have become a huge source of earnings, particularly for big city law firms. Fraud experts say much of this action is funded by laundered money from Russia and former Soviet republics. Analysts expect the inspectors from the Solicitors Regulation Authority to run into stonewalling as lawyers claim professional client privilege to keep information about their clients secret. A similar exercise on UK banks found guidelines breached.

More than a million pensioners are still living in poverty, partly due to their failure to claim benefits, the charity Age UK has claimed. In a new report it said, 1.6m pensioners in the UK are living below the poverty line, and are ‘floundering’ on low incomes. It conceded that the numbers living in poverty had fallen since 2000, but said progress had now stalled. The government said it was trying to help pensioners claim their benefits. The report, called How We Can End Pensioner Poverty, said that many pensioners ‘had been walking a tightrope in recent years,’ as food and utility bills have risen. But the biggest cause of poverty is that people are missing out on £5.5bn worth of public support. Age UK said, ‘It is nothing short of a scandal that there are still so many vulnerable older people in the UK living in poverty.’

Nelson Mandela said, ‘No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.’ The UK prison and probation ombudsman said he is ‘troubled’ and ‘appalled’ by the rising rates of prison suicide (125 inmates killed themselves between January 2013 and August 2014. 26% of those were on remand awaiting trial. The chief inspector of prisons expressed concern about prisoners spending too long in their cells with nothing constructive to do and Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform called plans for a super-jail for children a ‘recipe for child abuse’. When all else fails prison is an opportunity to intervene and attempt to put right what has gone wrong. Prisons are a tool for society and across the country churches are running Alpha for Prisons. Men and women prisoners are being given the opportunity to know Jesus through participating in this specially adapted course followed by caring for ex-offenders to keep them from re-offending. See

British Ebola survivor Will Pooley is returning to Sierra Leone where he contracted the virus, despite being told he may not be immune to it. Being a nurse Mr Pooley said that returning to help the crisis in West Africa was the 'right thing to do'. No one has ever been recorded catching Ebola twice and it is thought Mr Pooley will have at least short term immunity against this strain of the disease but this has never been tested. He has said he will act as if he is not immune and take the same precautions as other British staff in Freetown, the capital. Mr Pooley is flying out to Sierra Leone on Sunday evening and will join a team from the King's Health Partners, a coalition of three NHS hospital trusts in London. ‘I chose to go before and it was the right thing to do then and it’s still the right thing to do now,’ he said.

A successful Christian school could face closure for failing to uphold ‘British values’. The school was warned after an inspection by schools regulator Ofsted, in the wake of new regulations introduced by the Government. Ofsted criticised the school for not promoting other faiths, and it was told to invite a leader from another religion, such as an Imam, to lead assemblies. It was then told that unless it could demonstrate how it was going to meet these new rules, it could ultimately be closed. The regulations state that academies, free schools and independent schools must ‘actively promote’ the rights defined in the Equality Act 2010. Details of the case are disclosed in a letter to the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan from The Christian Institute, which is providing legal backing for the school via its Legal Defence Fund. The Institute warns that the new rules are already having ‘disturbing consequences’.

A National Day of Prayer about abortion is held each year on 27th October, the anniversary of the passing of the Abortion Act. When the Act was passed 47 years ago assurances were given that abortion would be limited to a small number of exceptional cases. Now we have virtually abortion on demand. In 2013 202,577 babies were aborted in England, Wales and Scotland - on average, 555 each day. 98% of all abortions were ‘social abortions’ and more than one quarter of these were repeat abortions.