Residents of an Oxfordshire village have voted to become independent from the UK in a symbolic referendum held in protest at plans to house more than 1,000 migrants at a former military base. Villagers in Piddington, near Bicester, voted on Tuesday over Home Office proposals to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers at nearby MoD Bicester. The 350 residents were invited to cast their ballot in a small box outside the village hall, the community hub of Piddington. The referendum was organised by the local parish council and out of 312 votes cast, 285 voted to leave, there were 26 no votes, and one ballot paper was spoiled. Delivering the result, Susannah Parden, vice chair of the parish council said: We are Piddington the village that roars. Following the result, council chair Tim McNally said: This is an example of democracy in operation.

Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas, whose films included The Last Emperor and Sexy Beast, has died aged 77. The British filmmaker passed away peacefully surrounded by family and loved ones at his home in Oxfordshire on Friday, his publicist said in a statement. Thomas built an international reputation over a career spanning five decades, working with directors including David Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, Julien Temple and Nicolas Roeg and backing independent films alongside mainstream successes. He best known work, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, won nine Academy Awards, including best picture, and earned Thomas an Oscar as producer in 1988. Thomas repeatedly collaborated with Bertolucci, also producing The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers.

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. This time we're chatting with E.M. about the promise of AI and making human connection easier, speech recognition and supporting linguistic diversity, making useful technologies that have a purpose, Mozilla Data Collective, under-represented cultures in datasets, accidental monocultures with technology, negative uses of datasets, AI literacy, the instability of LLMs and more E.M. Lewis-Jong is a Founder, Impact Entrepreneur and HCI researcher working at the intersection of community technology, open data, and inclusive AI. They are the Founder and CEO of the Mozilla Data Collective, a community-led platform for ethical creation, curation, and control of AI training datasets; built on the principle that people should be able to share their data on their own terms. They previously served as a VP at Mozilla Foundation, and the Director for Mozilla's Common Voice, an open-source platform enabling communities worldwide to preserve, revitalise, and contribute their languages to the future of speech tech. E.M. holds an MA in Modern History from the University of Oxford and is expecting a PhD in Informatics and Engineering at the University of Sussex, with research focused on controllability in conversational and voice AI for adolescents.

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.