To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. More than 10 years ago, the West Midlands was dubbed the gun crime capital of England and Wales. It was an area suffering from high-profile shootings. Gun fights between rival gangs were happening regularly. Figures at the time reflected that notoriety - there were more firearms offences per head in the West Midlands Police force area than anywhere else.

An artificial intelligence trial identified almost 19,000 potential driving offences in Birmingham and Wolverhampton in just two weeks. West Midlands mayor Richard Parker called the findings shocking saying the number of drivers putting themselves and others at risk was far higher than we expected. The trial used AI-powered cameras outside Ladywood and Fallings Park fire stations in March to identify potential seatbelt and mobile phone offences. The images they captured included a front-seat passenger holding a small child on their lap without a seatbelt and a driver holding a mobile phone with both hands. Dozens of images showed children travelling without age-appropriate restraints.

Sara Kahsai grew up in Sudan but moved to Birmingham, England, in 2022 after marrying a bus driver from the city. But as she settled into married life and her new home, she was coming to terms with a life-changing discovery. Sara realised she was a victim-survivor of Female Genital Mutiliation (FGM), a procedure she had endured as a young girl. She was floored by the revelation and, not least, the excruciating pain she was now beginning to fully understand. The shock was massive, she said.

Ministers have announced where 70,000 social and affordable homes will be built in England over the next 10 years, in a bid to address the housing crisis. Funding has been granted to Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, North East England, and Liverpool, as well as £6bn for London. It is the first part of a wider plan to build 300,000 social and affordable homes across the nation, under the government's £39bn social housebuilding programme. Housing charities welcomed the news but said it was still not enough to meet demand, while the Conservatives said it was an unfunded spending commitment. Of the new homes announced on Monday, 60% would be for social rent - which means the cost of the unit is about half that of market rents and there are strict criteria for who can apply for it.

Fires across England and Wales have prompted a national government alert warning people not to light anything that could spark a wildfire. The warning on Friday evening came as it was revealed 19 homes were destroyed and a further 18 damaged in a huge fire in Stourbridge, West Midlands, that spread rapidly through grass and woodland on Thursday before damaging homes. Prime Minister Andy Burnham told members of the public to take the warning seriously, adding it was triggered at the request of firefighters. West Midlands Fire Service chief fire officer Simon Tuhill said the Stourbridge blaze was one of the most significant incidents the service had ever dealt with. It was one of several fires being dealt with across England and Wales on Friday.

'Houses burn and train derails on hottest day' and'Britain on fire' Image caption, A striking photo of homes ablaze under the headline Houses burn and train derails on hottest day dominates the front of the Times. Perhaps unusually, it is a headline that encompasses three separate stories from Thursday - the fires that raged across the West Midlands. It opens its coverage of the hottest day of the year saying: Wildfires caused apocalyptic scenes last night as they engulfed homes. Image caption, A similar photo of the houses on fire is also splashed across the front of today's Daily Mirror beside the headline Britain on fire. It also runs an inset on the train derailment near Lewes as part of its coverage of what it calls Heatwave devastation.

To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A child and three firefighters were among those taken to hospital as several fires raged across the West Midlands, destroying homes and forcing dozens of residents to evacuate from their houses. As the UK recorded its hottest day of the year, fire services in the region said they experienced extreme levels of demand on Thursday. A huge blaze near Stourbridge Golf Course saw about 100 firefighters battling the fire which spread rapidly through dry grass and woodland, setting alight six homes. Elsewhere in the region four homes were destroyed by fire in Stoke-on-Trent, a woman was seriously injured in a blaze in Castle Vale, Birmingham, and a major incident was declared because of a fire in Warwickshire.

This is a month to look out for some powerful new books, with authors taking on challenges of all sorts and imagining whole new worlds. There are fresh ways to think about a cancer diagnosis, a book tackling the real inner world of hormones, in which we are all hormonal all the time, plus a major re-envisioning of the natural world where we abandon the shallows of competition for the depth and intricacies of connection and togetherness. It's quite hard going to get an up-to-date grip on human evolution, even for the best-briefed adult, so a book with sophisticated text and excellent illustrations and diagrams can only be a good thing. Especially if it is curated and edited by Alice Roberts, biological anthropologist, palaeopathologist, broadcaster - and professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham, UK. She worked with a generous-sized international team of experts in many fields of human evolution, including archaeology, palaeontology, anthropology and cognitive science.

Conditional density estimation (CDE) - recovering the full conditional distribution of a response given tabular covariates - is essential in settings with heteroscedasticity, multimodality, or asymmetric uncertainty. Recent tabular foundation models, such as TabPFN and TabICL, naturally produce predictive distributions, but their effectiveness as general-purpose CDE methods has not been systematically evaluated, unlike their performance for point prediction, which is well studied. We benchmark three tabular foundation model variants against a diverse set of parametric, tree-based, and neural CDE baselines on 39 real-world datasets, across training sizes from 50 to 20,000, using six metrics covering density accuracy, calibration, and computation time. Across all sample sizes, foundation models achieve the best CDE loss, log-likelihood, and CRPS on the large majority of datasets tested. Calibration is competitive at small sample sizes but, for some metrics and datasets, lags behind task-specific neural baselines at larger sample sizes, suggesting that post-hoc recalibration may be a valuable complement. In a photometric redshift case study using SDSS DR18, TabPFN exposed to 50,000 training galaxies outperforms all baselines trained on the full 500,000-galaxy dataset. Taken together, these results establish tabular foundation models as strong off-the-shelf conditional density estimators.

Major leap towards reanimation after death as mammal's brain preserved A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place and minimal damage. Could our brains one day be preserved in a way that locks in our thoughts, feelings and perceptions? An entire mammalian brain has been successfully preserved using a technique that will now be offered to people who are terminally ill. The intention is to preserve all the neural information thought necessary to one day reconstruct the mind of the person it once belonged to. "They would need to donate their brain and body for scientific research," says Borys Wróbel at Nectome in San Francisco, California, a research company focused on memory preservation.