17/03/2017 South Today - Oxford

Good evening. for the news where you are.

A gang of men who stole more than three million pounds' worth

of jewellery from shops right across Britain including Oxford,

Bicester Village and Milton Keynes, have today been jailed for a total

The men cycled to raids to avoid their cars being picked up

on number plate recognition systems and left traps so that the police

Armed with sledgehammers, they smash their way

into Goldsmith's jewellery shop in Oxford's Clarendon centre.

Caught on CCTV on New Year's Eve 2015, stuffing expensive

Suspects carried umbrellas to protect their identities,

and this man in the high visibility jacket used a wheelie bin to carry

This Romanian crime gang targeted 11 jewellery stores across the country.

Today they've been sentenced at Stoke on Trent Crown Court

to a total of 47 years for conspiring to commit burglaries.

The gang used delay tactics to prevent the police from getting

Here they set up metal cables between the lampposts

and at the other end of Queens Street.

The barricade prevented police from reaching the Clarendon Centre

It's a tactic they used across the country in raids netting

The gang launched their spree in Milton Keynes in November 2015

targeting the Fraser Hart jewellers in Centre MK.

They started a fire and padlocked a chain across the road to delay

They also carried out a burglary on the Mont Blanc store

That level of criminality, how highly organised,

military precision of how they actually executed,

sophistication and planning around it, clearly not acceptable

within the United Kingdom and I think the sentencing

reflects the severity of the crimes themselves.

The burglars cycled to some of the jobs to avoid being

Today they're beginning prison sentences ranging from six and half

One further man is due to be sentenced later this month.

An ex-Formula One motor racing driver from Oxfordshire has failed

to get a driving ban for speeding overturned.

Susie Wolff, who drove for Williams between 2012 and 2015,

was caught doing 35 miles per hour in a 30 zone in a South

Oxford Crown Court heard she already had nine points on her licence.

She was banned for six months last November.

More than 3,000 people have signed a petition calling

for a trunk road to be built around Aylesbury.

At the moment, many commuters have to drive

Residents say the problem is getting worse as more homes

Traffic, often a daily nightmare for drivers across Aylesbury.

You never know how long it's going to take you to get to work.

Some days it's 20 minutes, a journey which should take 20

minutes can take you up to two hours.

Kevin says commuters are having to travel through rather

Any hiccups, like a burst watermain on the A41 last week,

More than 30,000 homes are planned for Aylesbury

over the next 16 years, and that means more cars.

A relief road has already been built in the west, paid

Another one in the east would depend on new houses there too.

Kevin started an online petition a week ago.

So, just tell me exactly where you want the trunk road to be.

The A41 dual carriageway to the south of town,

needs be extended all the way around to the north of the town

over Bierton, around the north of the town,

skirting the new developments and then joining back up with the A41.

The reality is, it's only through the link road

because a trunk road would cost far, far more money and we

So we're doing what's deliverable, what's affordable, and actually

One councillor says an answer can't come quick enough.

She says the area's been gridlocked four times in the past three weeks.

I don't know if it's realistic or optimistic, but it's

definitely something that needs to be looked at.

There's got to be some highway improvements.

With no solution on the horizon, drivers and other residents

Scientists have developed a machine that can lip read with more

Researchers at Oxford University used lip movements from thousands

of hours of BBC news programmes, to develop the software.

Here's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones.

At the Action for Hearing Loss charity, Edward is trying

to have a conversation with a colleague.

With lots of noise coming into the office from the street,

his lip-reading skills come in useful.

But in Oxford, research is under way to teach computers

It's involved training an artificial intelligence system using thousands

So lip-reading is a very difficult problem because there are visual

For example pat, bat and mat are visually identical.

By endlessly watching clips of Breakfast, Newsnight and other

BBC News programmes, the computer teaches

What the system does is learn things that occur together.

So in this case they're the mouth shapes and the characters,

and what the likely upcoming characters are, given

This would help people with when they're watching

subtitles on television, this will help people when they're

out and about in very noisy environments.

Right now the technology only works on full sentences in recorded clips.

The next stage is to make it work live.

But first the computer is going to be watching

The weather's next, starting with the regional forecast

From everyone here have a great weekend, goodnight.

We saw a few bright spells today but sunshine in short supply over the

weekend I'm afraid. It's a very cloudy picture over the next few

days and certainly through this evening we are cloudy and windy too.

Through the course of the night the cloud thickens, the winds will pick

up Thomas were strong westerly wind overnight but temperatures not too

bad at all, thoughs not dropping below eight Celsius. Breezy and mild

with a lot of cloud around through the day but it should stay mainly

dry and top temperatures tomorrow 13 Celsius, 55 Fahrenheit. Looking

is cloudy and windy, Sunday has the is cloudy and windy, Sunday has the

it is rather breezy. Now for the national outlook.

It was quite a wet day across many northern and western parts of the

UK. This was the view in Lancashire not so long ago. For the weekend we

are looking to see further rain, all coming from the