Just over 166,000 people in the West Midlands who are blind or partially sighted are being invited to join RNIB's Talking Books service. The service which provides 4,000 audio books every single day to people with sight loss, is now entirely free for all blind and partially sighted people. RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People), the sight loss charity which runs the service, made the announcement on the 80th anniversary of Talking Books.

A poll of a cross-section of UK residents found more people would encourage a young person to become an engineer than a doctor, accountant or banker. A new Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ poll of a representative cross-section of 1,000 members of the public found that 86% would encourage a young person to become an engineer.

Always respected and always observed but many people of non-British extraction was said to have felt ignored with their very minimum – at best – presence during Remembrance Sunday. With it almost common knowledge that up to one third of British troops fighting in the trenches during the first world war said to have come from the Caribbean, Africa and India that didn’t translate to the faces marching down the Mall during the last ceremony – or, indeed, any previously.

As part of the delivery of a two year Leonardo Transfer of Innovation project, a team from West Midlands based housing association, the Accord Group, has been helping communities across Europe to have a say on everything from redesigning public squares to developing revitalisation strategies for towns and districts.

A campaign targeting areas of high unemployment helped almost 450 unemployed Birmingham residents into work at the city's spectacular Grand Central development.The £150 million shopping centre opened to great fanfare last month, creating 1,000 new full-time jobs and figures released today show that many of those jobs went to people from Birmingham's high unemployment priority wards*.