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BBC news for West Midlands

AskTen - Ten things you may not have noticed last week!

1. Social media advertising to overtake television. Social media will leapfrog television and become the UK’s biggest advertising format within two years, according to eMarketer. It is predicted that more than a fifth of all advertising spend will be on social networks in 2020. Outlay on social networks will reach 20.2%, up from 16.1%, this year, overtaking broadcast television spending, which will decline from 19.6% to 17.8%. Daily Telegraph
    
2. Automation will put 66m people in peril says OECD. An automation revolution will put 66m people at risk of being replaced by machines in the coming years, says the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The influential economic think-tank found that the most vulnerable workers were less likely to be receiving help than those whose jobs were more secure. However, Britain was named as one of the countries that would be least affected by automation. The Guardian
    
3. The world's safest (and least safe) airlines. Last year was statistically the safest on record for air travel, according to the Aviation Safety Network (ASN). The ASN found there were 10 fatal commercial passenger and cargo air crashes which killed a total of 44 people, way down on the five-year average of 17 crashes with 495 deaths. Of the 409 airlines analysed the top twenty for safety included British Airways, with Qantas being the stand-out winner. Those rated one star (out of seven) for safety all hailed from either Afghanistan, Indonesia, Nepal or Suriname. The Independent
    
4. Milky Way ‘growing at 1,600ft per second. The Milky Way is expanding at 1,640ft per second, researchers say. A team from the Astrophysical Institute of the Canaries in Tenerife calculated the rate of growth by observing similar galaxies using a range of telescopes on Earth. The galaxy, which contains our solar system, will eventually merge with Andromeda. BBC
    
5. Gender pay gap revealed as deadline passes. Almost eight in ten firms and public-sector bodies pay men more than women, according to new figures. Midnight last night was the deadline for firms in the UK with 250 or more employees to publish data revealing the extent of the gap between what they pay women and what they pay men. Some 10,014 organisations filed details. The Guardian
    
6. Luxury space hotel to open in 2021. A private firm has unveiled plans to open the first ever luxury space hotel in 2021, with the first guests staying the following year. Orion Span says six people, including two crew, will spend 12 days at a time in the hotel, which will orbit the Earth. Guests will be able to watch an average of 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours and try out space experiments. National Geographic
    
7. Is the Queen related to the Prophet Muhammad? Historians are claiming the Queen is a descendant of the founder of Islam. After tracing her family tree back 43 generations, a Moroccan newspaper said Elizabeth II's bloodline runs through the Earl of Cambridge in the 14th century, across medieval Muslim Spain, to Fatima, the Prophet's daughter. A similar claim was made in 1986 by Burke's Peerage, a British authority on royal pedigrees. Daily Mail
    
8. New political party will break Westminster mould. A new political party aiming to "break the Westminster mould" has been secretly under development for more than a year by a network of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and donors. The centrist party, with access to up to £50m in funding, has been created by people frustrated by the tribal nature of politics, the polarisation caused by Brexit and the standard of political leadership on all sides. The Observer
    

The bottom line. The government has spent £800m on a borders system that is intended to log every entry into and departure from the UK. Yet the Home Office has lost track of more than 600,000 foreigners who should have left the country between 2015 and last year. The Economist

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