A ban on the mayor of Mansfield wearing ceremonial chains of office has been branded “plain silly” by a Coalition minister.

Local Government Minister Brandon Lewis defended use of the historic “bling”, accusing the Labour-dominated local council of “political correctness”.

Tony Egginton (pictured) became the Nottinghamshire town’s first elected mayor in 2002 after standing as an independent. But the leader of the council’s Labour group, Martin Lee, has insisted the council chairman should wear the ornate gold civic chains rather than the mayor, reportedly accusing Egginton of “parading around in bling”.

The chains have been locked in a safe until the dispute is resolved.

No holiday for using computers

Greece’s austerity drive has cost public sector workers a privilege they have enjoyed for more than two decades – six extra days of paid holiday every year if they use a computer.

The decision to scrap the bonus was a “small, yet symbolic” step in modernising an outdated civil service, said Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Administrative Reform Minister who has taken on the challenge of overhauling public institutions.

Bailed out twice by the eurozone and the IMF, Greece has started cancelling arcane benefits to cut state spending and reform a public sector widely seen as profligate and inefficient with a 600,000-strong workforce.

Allowances that have already gone include a bonus for showing up for work and one regulation letting unmarried daughters receive their dead father’s pension.

Researchers get Ig Nobel awards

Researchers who swallowed a parboiled shrew, discovered that dung beetles navigate by the stars and invented a machine to launch hijackers from airplanes were among the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes for comical scientific achievements.

The annual prizes, meant to entertain and encourage global research and innovation, are awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research as a whimsical counterpart to the Nobel Prizes, which will be announced next month.

Ig Nobel prizes this year also went to researchers who proved that people who think they are drunk also believe they are sexy, showed it would be possible to run across the surface of a pond if both the runner and the pond were on the moon, and explained in detail why onions make people cry.

Snapped making vulgar gesture

A magazine photograph that depicts Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-left challenger making a vulgar gesture stirred sharp criticism from his political rivals on Thursday, 10 days before the German election.

The photograph, on the front page of Friday’s edition of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung Magazine, shows Peer Steinbrueck making a gesture with his middle finger in response to a question referring to the gaffe-prone early months of his campaign.

Though Steinbrueck authorised the publication of the photo, it could damage his bid to oust Merkel as Chancellor by reinforcing a public image of him as arrogant and maladroit – especially among women voters, whose support he needs.