To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The clear-up of one of England's largest illegal waste tips has been completed - landing taxpayers with a £6m bill. The government has vowed to recoup the clearance costs for the Kidlington dump in Oxfordshire - and seven other sites - from the criminals responsible. In 2025, around 22,000 tonnes of domestic and commercial rubbish was dumped at the spot, between the River Cherwell and the A34. It is one of nearly 30 so-called supersites first uncovered by a BBC investigation .

Long before Donald Trump entered national politics, I wrote a book published by Oxford University Press making the historical case against popular constitutionalism and departmentalism -- an originalist defense of judicial finality. But that scholarly position does not mean President Trump is ignoring the rule of law or behaving like an authoritarian when he advances a theory of judicial review that other presidents and scholars have likewise advanced.

One million sign petition to keep PC Harper's killers in jail A petition to block the early release of PC Andrew Harper's killers has been signed by more than one million people. The police officer, from Wallingford, Oxfordshire, died in 2019 when he was dragged by a car as three teenagers fled the scene of a quad bike theft in Berkshire. Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers were sentenced to 13 years for his manslaughter in 2020 but could be released next year under plans to tackle prison overcrowding. The prime minister is looking at ways to keep them in jail . Thames Valley Police (TVP) Federation acknowledged the important milestone the petition had reached without fanfare due to the seventh anniversary of the officer's death on Saturday.

A couple who drugged men seeking sexual services in order to steal from them have been jailed for killing two men and poisoning others. Adina Mihai and Madalin Dumitru admitted the manslaughter of Gary Mouat, 36, from Oxfordshire, and Malcolm King, 80, from Gloucestershire, in 2025 and 2024 respectively. The pair also each admitted two further counts of administering poison to surviving victims on the first day of their trial in June. Mihai and Dumitru were both sentenced to 17 years in prison at Oxford Crown Court. Mihai, who posed as a sex worker, and her partner Dumitru, arranged to meet men paying for services she had advertised online at their homes.

Headlong's take on Karel Čapek's 1920 tale of romance and robots is rife with timely debates about tech's threat but at times the philosophical discussions drag on I f our world is currently thinking through the brave new future of generative AI and super intelligence, Karel Čapek's 1920 play RUR: Rossum's Universal Robots proves the notion of robot consciousness and rebellion is not a new anxiety. So does Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which Čapek's drama resembles in its philosophical debates and moral warnings, despite its futurism. Ella Road adapts Čapek's play for our times in this Headlong and Schwarzman Centre co-production, its science apparently informed by research from Oxford University academics, which gives it a cutting-edge, real-world underpinning. The stage is presented as the operations office for the company, also named RUR, which is creating humanoids by mixing human flesh and blood with code and data at its headquarters on an island (a lovely, lush foliage and scaffold design by Loren Elstein). Dom (Trevor Fox) is the company's boss - a "dom" in more ways than one as he is having a Secretary-style, S&M romance with his robot personal assistant, Sulla (Tiffany Gray).

'There's this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?': the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate - and think through - the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference? In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one. Gabriel was a cheerful but intense junior academic with a passion for Vipassana meditation and what his brother calls "enthusiastic" rock climbing. At the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow at St John's College, Gabriel taught courses on political theory and wrote papers on the moral contortions of "yuppie ethics" and the ethical blind spots of effective altruism. When he wasn't there, he did crisis work for the United Nations Development Programme in Sudan and Lebanon. DeepMind, meanwhile, was the world's leading AI research lab. In part, this was because it had the financial and computational backing of Google, which had bought the company in 2014 for $650m. In part, it was because DeepMind had recently shown it could put those resources to stunning use. In Seoul, in 2016, a DeepMind system called AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, a South Korean Go champion, in a five-game match. The victory was significant not least because of Go's legendary complexity; the game has more possible configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Thanks to the fuss around AlphaGo, Gabriel was aware of DeepMind.

Online social media provide a platform for people to discuss current events and exchange opinions with their peers. While interactions are predominantly positive, in recent years, there has been a lot of research to understand the conflicts in social networks and how they are based on different views and opinions. In this paper, we ask whether the conflicts in a network reveal a small and interpretable set of prevalent opinion ranges that explain the users' interactions. More precisely, we consider signed graphs, where the edge signs indicate positive and negative interactions of node pairs, and our goal is to infer opinion intervals that are consistent with the edge signs.

This position paper argues for two claims regarding AI testing and evaluation. First, to remain informative about deployment behaviour, evaluations need account for the possibility that AI systems understand their circumstances and reason strategically. Second, game-theoretic analysis can inform evaluation design by formalising and scrutinising the reasoning in evaluation-based safety cases. Drawing on examples from existing AI systems, a review of relevant research, and formal strategic analysis of a stylised evaluation scenario, we present evidence for these claims and motivate several research directions.

The claim that the AI community, or society at large, should'democratize AI' has attracted considerable critical attention and controversy. Two core problems have arisen and remain unsolved: conceptual disagreement persists about what democratizing AI means; normative disagreement persists over whether democratizing AI is ethically and politically desirable. We identify eight common AI democratization traps: democratization-skeptical arguments that seem plausible at first glance, but turn out to be misconceptions. We develop arguments about how to resist each trap. We conclude that, while AI democratization may well have drawbacks, we should be cautious about dismissing AI democratization prematurely and for the wrong reasons. We offer a constructive roadmap for developing alternative conceptual and normative approaches to democratizing AI that successfully avoid the traps.

News consumers around the world are now turning more to social media and video platforms than traditional outlets for information, a report has found. News consumers around the world are now turning more to social media and video platforms than traditional outlets for information, a report said Tuesday, warning that old-style business models are under threat. The year 2026 marks "a significant milestone: for the first time, social media and video network consumption is now ahead of other news sources as the most widely used source of news globally," at 54%, wrote Jim Egan, lead author of the report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The annual report from the institute, attached to the University of Oxford, is a closely-watched tracker of trends reshaping the news media. Researchers based their findings on online surveys of almost 100,000 people in 48 countries, run earlier this year by pollster YouGov. This year's edition found 54% of respondents said they got news from social media or video platforms in the week before the survey -- rising to 56% if AI chatbots like ChatGPT were included.