Female bishops

The Reverend Libby Lane was ordained as Bishop of Stockport, the Church of England’s first female bishop.
— By the time the first 32 female C of E vicars were ordained in 1994, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts had had a female bishop, Barbara Harris, for five years.
— Yet the first Anglican woman priest was ordained half a century earlier. Florence Li Tim-Oi had been deacon at Macao Protestant Chapel in the early 1940s. When the war prevented a priest travelling from Japanese-occupied territory to administer communion, Li Tim-Oi was ordained by the Bishop of Victoria on 25 January 1944.

The managing director of Visa said that within ten years it would be ‘peculiar’ to pay for purchases by cash rather than contactless card. How well is the business doing in persuading us to give up cash?

Expensive schools

Institut le Rosey, whose fees of £80,000 a year are said to make it the world’s most-expensive school, launched a recruitment drive in London to attract pupils to its campus on Lake Geneva. Other options:

To fix a hole

The RAC reported that councils paid out £3.2 million in compensation claims to motorists whose cars had been damaged by potholes. Is it cheaper to pay the compensation or to repair the roads?
— The far from disinterested Asphalt Industries Alliance (AIA) says councils filled 2 million potholes in 2013, at an average cost of £70 in London and £52 in the rest of England and Wales. The total spent was £106 billion. However, the AIA claims there is a 12-year backlog, and in order to mend all potholes, councils would have to spend about £1.3 billion — suggesting it would take 400 years before the savings in avoided claims exceeded the repair costs (and that assumes, improbably, that the repairs would last all that time).