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.

'My donated Brummie accent gives me confidence' A man who appealed for help to no longer sound like a character from Star Wars says he has found his calling. Christian Wilson, from Bromsgrove, has verbal dyspraxia - a difficulty in placing muscles in the correct position to produce speech. He uses text-to-speech software in order to communicate, but said he wanted to sound like a man from Birmingham. The 24-year-old's dream was made possible in 2024 when he selected two voice donors that blended a Birmingham accent and a Warwickshire accent, which he hoped would help him sound more like his father. Since May, Wilson has worked at Worcestershire County Council as a SEND Peer Advocate.

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.

A new AI-powered avatar of Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne could make its first UK appearance in Birmingham. Osbourne's wife Sharon and son Jack announced plans for the hyper-real version of the Birmingham-born singer at an expo in the US last week. Talking to Ed James on BBC Radio WM, she said that plans for the avatar were brilliant. I've seen the tests that they've done of Ozzy and you can see every pore on his face, his beard's coming through, it's that detailed, she said. Osbourne died in July aged 76, less than three weeks after he had performed at Villa Park with Black Sabbath.

West Midlands Police has admitted it overstated the evidence used to make the decision to ban Israeli fans from a match in Birmingham. Craig Guildford, its former chief constable, retired earlier this month after damning criticism of the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the Europa League match against Aston Villa, last November. In newly released documents, the force also said we did not engage early enough with the local Jewish community, and indicated there was now a ban on AI use after its evidence included a match that did not take place. Furthermore, it said its operations would have lasted four days, involved multiple forces, and cost more than £5m, if 2,500 away fans had attended. The documents were released ahead of a public meeting on Tuesday, at which Police and Crime Commissioner for the West Midlands, Simon Foster, will discuss at his accountability and governance board, the decision to ban the Maccabi fans.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says she has lost confidence in West Midlands Police's chief constable after Israeli football fans were banned from a match against Aston Villa. Mahmood told MPs a damning review from the policing watchdog over the intelligence that led to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being banned showed a failure of leadership. The force has apologised saying it did not deliberately distort evidence that was used by Birmingham's Safety Advisory Group for the 6 November game . Chief Constable Craig Guildford remains in post, but faces a meeting on 27 January to be questioned by Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster who has the authority to sack him. Mahmood told the Commons on Wednesday she intended to restore the power for home secretaries to dismiss chief constables who fail their communities.

Warnings of disruption and protests have come from police as more than 700 officers prepare to mount an operation in Birmingham for Aston Villa's Uefa Europa League match against Maccabi Tel Aviv. Officers will be keeping the public safe and to tackle any crime and disorder on Thursday, West Midlands Police said, with police horses, dogs, the force's drone unit, and road policing officers out in the city. Planned protests include one by supporters of Palestine, who want the match to be called off. Last month, a decision to ban Tel Aviv fans from the event became the focus of parliamentary-level debate . The Israeli club later said supporters would not travel to Birmingham for safety reasons.

Unscrupulous foreign firms are using AI-generated images and false back stories to pose as family-run UK businesses to lure in shoppers. Customers say they feel completely ripped off after believing they were buying from independent boutiques in England but were delivered cheap clothes and jewellery, mass-shipped from warehouses in east Asia. Among the websites is C'est La Vie, a shop purporting to be run by couple Eileen and Patrick for 29 years and based in Birmingham's historic Jewellery Quarter - but with a returns address in China. Consumer guide Which? said the growing use of AI tools was making it possible for fraudsters to mislead the public on an unprecedented scale. Another website appearing to use AI-generated images is Mabel & Daisy, a seemingly quintessential, mother and daughter-owned clothing firm, which claims to be based in Bristol but has an address in Hong Kong.

Software that can see opponents through walls. Aimbots that can lock onto other players automatically. Tools that can boost characters' stats to the max. The world of online game cheats is expansive--with some cheat websites advertising hacks for dozens of PC games--and it's being driven by an underground economy that's allegedly raking in millions every year. Over the last two years, a group of computer scientists has been analyzing and mapping the online cheat marketplace, observing what behaviors get people banned from games, and probing the effectiveness of anti-cheat systems created by games developers.

This study presents a deep learning-based framework for predicting emergency department (ED) boarding counts six hours in advance using only operational and contextual data, without patient-level information. Data from ED tracking systems, inpatient census, weather, holidays, and local events were aggregated hourly and processed with comprehensive feature engineering. The mean ED boarding count was 28.7 (standard deviation = 11.2). Multiple deep learning models, including ResNetPlus, TSTPlus, and TSiTPlus, were trained and optimized using Optuna, with TSTPlus achieving the best results (mean absolute error = 4.30, mean squared error = 29.47, R2 = 0.79). The framework accurately forecasted boarding counts, including during extreme periods, and demonstrated that broader input features improve predictive accuracy. This approach supports proactive hospital management and offers a practical method for mitigating ED overcrowding.