11/01/2017 Midlands Today

Hundreds of jobs have been saved at an engineering firm in Coventry.

Covpress, which makes body panels for Jaguar Land Rover and Renault,

had been in administration since September.

But today they were taken over by the industrial

A bright day for 740 workers in Coventry who have faced

It is a relief, really, to realise that we have been taken over,

and we can only go one way, that's forward.

Covpress, major supplier for the likes of jaguar Land Rover, went

into administration four months ago, despite doubling its turnover to

?100 million in the space of three years.

Now, industrial group Liberty House has saved it.

There were lots of smiling faces today.

Maybe today we allowed employees today to spend a lot of time on

their iPhones tweeting their friends, because generally, there is

This woman was particularly relieved.

She and her partner both work here and have a three-year-old son.

The past six months have been really worrying.

everyone is worried about their job security.

Today, there is more of a positive atmosphere about the factory.

The workforce is very committed to the business,

and it's good to see that all that success will be realised.

To give you an idea of the impact this company has, just about every

Jaguar Land Rover car made in the Midlands

has a part on it made here at this company.

Not only that, they make gas meters, panels for

recycling companies, all sorts of things.

The Chief Executive of the Global Liberty Industries Group has

travelled to the company's bases in Dubai and Poland this week alone.

Why then did they decide to buy Covpress?

Acquiring this has given us a real high-quality window

It is a key supplier, and I'm reliably told this business is

part of a core platform for Jaguar Land Rover, meaning we are a

but also the UK automotive supply chain.

A year ago, they saved 1,000 jobs, snapping up 17

engineering businesses in the Midlands,

among them this one, 920 Engineering in Leamington spa.

You know you have your mortgage and your family, you can't plan

You are just hanging on in there hoping

someone will buy you out, and thankfully Liberty did.

I have been here 40 years, and I think

they will invest money, so

hopefully, we are on the right track.

Back in Coventry, there are now plans to expand.

Welcome news for workers at the newly-named

An ambulance technician is recovering after being viciously

assaulted by a patient he was trying to help.

Bob Burness was treating an unconscious man who'd been found

in a stairwell in West Bromwich, when he was set upon.

He spoke to our reporter Nicola Beckford to raise awareness

of the rising number of attacks on ambulance staff.

Ambulance technician Bob Burness thought he was on a routine call

out, but it ended up with him being the one taken to hospital.

He just went straight into a physical assault

and head-butted me straight in the face.

I was too close to move out of the way, so he

This caused a significant nosebleed and watering of the eyes,

and a bit of disorientation.

Bob joined the Ambulance Service in 2008.

It's not the first time he's been attacked.

I've been scratched, bitten, pushed downstairs.

It's happened to most of my colleagues at some point.

Psychologically, it's by far nowhere near the worst.

When you get somebody with an infectious disease

spitting in your face and you have three or four months of blood

tests to see if you have got something, that tends to play with

This is where the attack took place last Tuesday.

It's an area that Bob Burness says is low-risk, which goes

to show that attacks like like these,

ambulance staff have been increasing.

Between April and September 2014, there were 325 verbal and

Last year, during the same period, there

The man who assaulted Bob Burness was sentenced

to 12 weeks in prison and a ?250 fine, a sentence the Ambulance

I don't think it is actually a deterrent.

I think overall, the stance on this is that we want tougher sentencing

for people that assault our emergency service staff, because

overall, they're there to help you, not to hinder you.

Bob's now recovered from the attack and is back at work.

He says it's an outrage that staff are at

risk of being assaulted by the very public they're trying to help.

A 54-year old woman's been arrested on suspicion of murder,

after a man's body was found in the Henley Green

Paramedics were called to Henley Road in the early

hours of the morning, following reports that a 50-year-old

Police are appealing for anyone with information to contact them.

A couple who stole clothes valued at more than ?100,000 have been

Ionut and Mirela Vasile were arrested after stealing

high-end clothes from Harvey Nichols in Birmingham in December 2015.

CCTV footage then showed them shoplifting goods

from stores in Manchester, Edinburgh, London,

The Metropolitan Police in London have apologised to a Birmingham DJ

who was pulled over in his Bentley and told it was a fact that

black men in gangster clothes commit crimes.

27-year-old Deejay was stopped by officers near Leicester Square.

The whole incident was captured on a camera set up in the DJ's car.

To just judge on the way someone looks, the way I think he was

judging me as if, you're black, anything you wear is going to be

Can you explain to me what a gangster is?

I don't know what a gangster looks like.

They could come in suits, could come in anything.

I don't know what kind of image he has

got in his head to portray me as a gangster without even speaking

The Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, or ARRC, is based at Imjin Barracks

It's the largest headquarters on land which NATO can put

And today its role became even more significant -

it took on the responsibility of commanding NATO troops

Symbolising the transfer of responsibility...

It was a simple ceremony, but of major significance for the soldiers

The NATO Response Force pennant flag was handed

from Spain to the commander of Allied Rapid Reaction Corps.

Should NATO now deploy anywhere in the world,

the ARRC will command and control those operations on the ground.

There was general acknowledgement today that we still live

in uncertain times with a fast and ever-changing global threat.

The task for the ARRC in 2017 will be tackling that

threat and to identify where it comes from.

It's well-publicised Russia and Nato have different views

There is clearly an element of a threat there.

We will continue to act as a deterrent for that.

You know, in terms of humanitarian crises and the unknown.

That is the beauty of having response force, you

can sit here and be prepared to command and control

There is huge experience in counterinsurgency operations in

places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.

Cyber attacks are a growing threat, but at the extreme

there is war and in the current climate it is an area the ARCC says

Like anything you need to practice these things.

What we are doing this year and did a little bit last year is

train in that style, so we do that training we do not practice

The ARCC is made of 21 different nations, many from the EU, but its

role and that of the UK within Nato is not affected by the Brexit vote.

We are decidedly not stepping back from our responsibilities to

The occasion today demonstrates we're taking the

lead in a high-readiness joint task force.

The control room is quiet but on stand-by and

preparation and training continues to evolve to tackle an

Some football news and Birmingham City have re-signed

midfielder Craig Gardner from West Bromwich Albion on loan.

The 30-year-old previously spent 18 months with the club he followed

as a boy when he first signed for Blues from Aston Villa in 2010.

A permanent move on a three-year contract is expected

Finally, high winds have been causing havoc for motorists in parts

In the Staffordshire Moorlands, this driver nearly lost his van

after gusts lifted the vehicle off the road.

The wind pinned the van to a bank near Leek,

I'll leave you with the forecast from Rebecca.

Good evening. It was certainly a blustery day with wind getting to

about 54 mph across the Staffordshire Moorlands. Those were

the strongest but we had damaged just about anywhere. Things steadily

calmed down a little bit. At the moment plenty of clear spells but

all change tomorrow. It is turning into something a little wintry.

Weather warnings are in place for snow. Covering Warwickshire,

Herefordshire and Worcestershire where we could get snow to low

levels causing travel disruption. Tonight with a clear spells,

temperatures falling away. Across the Staffordshire Moorlands we could

see some snow and elsewhere largely clear, but a cold night with

temperatures between two and four, the wind-macro keeping it up a

little bit. This weather system is coming from the West. -- the wind

keeping it up a little bit. As it bumps into cold air it starts to

fall as snow. Plenty of rain tomorrow. A blustery day. Across the

North Midlands we might escape it but Winter flurries further north.

In the south, that is turning to snow, temperatures not doing well at

all. On Friday we could get more snow in the rush hour. More

information on start to the weekend. Time for the

national weather prospects if you are on the move.

Good evening, a lot going on with the weather in the next few days,

numerous weather warnings in for so buried in mind if you have travel

plans. Lots of isobars on the chart overnight which means it will be

windy for all. The strongest winds in Scotland, lots of wintry showers

with snow getting down to increasingly low levels and some

wintry showers in Northern Ireland and northern England. A cold night

for Northern England, particularly in more rural spots, frosty and I

see for some and some of the snow really blowing around over higher

ground in Scotland. Strong wind and further snow to take us into

tomorrow. It may well make for some tricky travelling conditions. The

forecast for tomorrow in the southern half of the UK's quite

tricky. We have got mild air bumping into colder air. The boundary

between the two, it will be an ugly mix of rain, sleet and snow

developing. Mild air comes in behind the weather front but the rain ahead

of that will be mixing with the cold