Royally paid

Staff at Windsor Castle were balloted in strike action over pay. What can you earn in the royal household, according to adverts on the British Monarchy website?
— Housekeeping assistant: £14,500 pa. Duties include ‘preparing rooms and cleaning upholstery’. Meals are provided, as is accommodation ‘for which there is a straight salary adjustment’.
— Telephone operator in Privy Purse and Treasurer’s Office: £20,500. 38 hours per week. Includes some bank holiday and weekend working.
— Ticket sales and information assistant for the summer opening of the Royal Collection: £8.80 per hour. Contract includes a minimum of 300 hours between June and September.

Suicide watch

French and German police tried to establish why a pilot appears to have crashed an airliner into an Alpine hillside, killing himself and 149 passengers and crew. Are pilots especially prone to suicide? They were outside the 50 most suicide-prone occupations recorded in a study published in Psychological Medicine in 2012. These were the most suicide-prone.

Suicides per 100,000 worker-years
Coal miners
81
Merchant seamen
68
Building labourers
59
Artists
43
Plasterers
42
Scaffolders
33

Hawking Hawking™

Stephen Hawking registered his name as a trademark — although one thing he won’t be able to sell under his own name is photosensitive coating materials, ‘Hawking’ already being a trademark in this area. How many trademarks were registered in 2012?

Asia
3.1 million
Europe
2 million
Latin America and Caribbean
602,000
North America
570,000
Oceania
150,000
Africa
149,000

Source: World Intellectual Property Organisation

Pro-death

According to the NatCen British Social Attitudes Survey, supporters of the death penalty — at 48% — are a minority for the first time. What do other countries think?

Japan (2010)
85%
Mexico (2007)
71%
US (2014)
63%
Russia (2014)
52%
France (2007)
45%
Finland (2006)
29%