Religious groups should fund their own presence in UK hospitals and save the NHS some £40m per year, the National Secular Society (NSS) suggests.

The organisation of non-believers says such money would be better spent on "much needed" nurses or cleaners.

The NSS claims even organ players in hospital chapels are on NHS payrolls.

NHS guidance notes all patients have a right to religious observance and that trusts should provide both faith representatives and places to pray.

However, the Catholic Church in Scotland said it agreed that spiritual carers should not be funded by the NHS.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7988476.stm

Therapists are still offering treatments for homosexuality despite there being no evidence that such methods work, research suggests.

A significant minority of mental health professionals had agreed to help at least one patient "reduce" their gay or lesbian feelings when asked to do so.

The survey, published in the journal BMC Psychiatry and conducted by London researchers, involved 1,400 therapists.

Many were acting with the "best of intentions", said the lead author.

Only 4% said they would attempt to change a client's sexual orientation, but when asked if they would help curb homosexual feelings some 17% - or one in six - said they had done so.

The incidence appeared to be as prevalent in recent years as decades earlier.

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Ameneh Bahrami is certain that one day she'll meet someone, fall in love and get married. But when her wedding day comes, her husband won't see her eyes, and she won't see her husband. Bahrami is blind, the victim of an acid attack by a spurned suitor.

If she gets her way, her attacker will suffer the same fate. The 31-year-old Iranian is demanding the ancient punishment of "an eye for an eye," and, in accordance with Islamic law, she wants to blind Majid Movahedi, the man who blinded her.

"I don't want to blind him for revenge," Bahrami said in her parents' Tehran apartment. "I'm doing this to prevent it from happening to someone else."

Bahrami says she first crossed paths with Movahedi in 2002, when they attended the same university.

Orphaned chimpanzee infants given special ‘mothering’ by humans are more advanced than the average child at nine months of age.

In the first study to examine the effect of different types of care for infant chimpanzees on cognition, researchers found chimpanzees who were given extra emotionally-based care were more cognitively advanced than human infants.

Humans overtake chimpanzees in development terms as they grow older but the study sends stark warnings that looking after just an infant’s physical needs is likely to result in a child who is maladjusted, unhappy and under-achieving.

he study was carried out by psychology expert Professor Kim Bard, of the Centre for the Study of Emotion at the University of Portsmouth.