Four arrested on suspicion of arson over Rivington moorland wildfire
Four people have been arrested on suspicion of arson after a large wildfire in Rivington. Moorland was ablaze near Sheep House Lane and Rivington Road at about 20:45 BST on Tuesday and fire crews put it out, Lancashire Police said.The force has launched a joint investigation into how the blaze started with Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service.A man, 19, a woman,18, and a 17-year-old girl have been held on suspicion of criminal damage (arson not endangering life) and have since been bailed. A 19-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of the same offence and remains in custody.
Anyone with information about the fire is urged to contact police, who are also appealing for dashcam footage from the area.
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Daily Mail
39 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Subpostmistress remembers 'terror' of supporting her young children during the Horizon IT scandal on new Mail podcast
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The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
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Compton and Hudson take a subtler approach, arranging the women in a circle, supervised by a trained therapist, and waiting to see what emerges. It is a risky strategy. The flow of the conversation is faltering, interrupted by nervousness about how their words will be used, suspicion about the directors' intentions – and a sudden, uncomfortable request for the most difficult conversations to continue without the cameras rolling. The film includes all this uncertainty: they debate whether they should proceed before realising their desire to talk about the justice system's failures mostly outweighs their concerns about sharing chapters from their complicated pasts. 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'I was worried they could edit our voices and create a narrative that we weren't hoping for,' she says. 'I was thinking, 'We're trusting them with a level of vulnerability that we're not comfortable with. What are these people going to do with it?'' Gradually she was reassured and slowly began to reveal some of the childhood events that catapulted her into prison – family breakdown, domestic violence, a move to a women's refuge, then later into a residential children's home at the age of 12. Her problems escalated when she got caught up in county lines dealing, as a child exploited by criminal gangs to move and supply drugs. 'I was introduced to selling drugs, which I was very good at, and it was the first time that I started to feel a sense of worth,' she finally reveals on camera. She is dismayed to remember how little support she received as a child. 'The system saw me as a bad girl … as somebody who asked for all of this,' she says in the film. 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'The officers see horrific things, but they're not trained counsellors – they're not mental health trained, they're not sex-trafficking trained, they're not domestic violence trained. They've got a regime they have to run by.' She hopes the film might persuade viewers that there needs to be a revolution in the way that female offenders are treated. It is almost 20 years since the seminal Corston report on vulnerable women in the criminal justice system called for a radically different strategy, but many of the report's key recommendations have yet to be implemented. Hudson and Compton struggled for several years to raise funding to finish their film. Now they feel happy that it is being released at a time when there is some emerging optimism about the possibility of change. 'The simple truth is that we are sending too many women to prison,' the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said earlier this year. 'We need to do things differently.' 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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
What to know after anti-immigrant violence flares in a Northern Ireland town
Police in Northern Ireland say 17 officers were injured during a second night of anti-immigrant violence in the town of Ballymena, where rioters threw bricks, bottles, petrol bombs and fireworks and set several vehicles and houses on fire. Police used water cannon and fired rubber bullets to disperse a crowd of several hundred people. The Police Service of Northern Ireland said Wednesday that the violence died down by about 1 a.m. Five people were arrested on suspicion of 'riotous behavior.' What sparked the violence Violence erupted Monday after a peaceful march to show support for the family of the victim of an alleged sexual assault on the weekend. Two 14-year-old boys have been charged. The suspects have not been identified because of their age. They were supported in court by a Romanian interpreter. After the march, a crowd of mostly young people set several houses on fire and pelted police with projectiles. The Police Service of Northern Ireland said 15 officers were injured that night. There were similar scenes after dark on Tuesday, as well as small pockets of disorder in several other Northern Ireland towns. Police said agitators on social media were helping fuel what Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson called 'racist thuggery.' The town's history Some politicians said immigration had strained the town of about 30,000 some 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Belfast, long known as a bastion of hardline pro-British Loyalism. Jim Allister, leader of the conservative party Traditional Unionist Voice, said 'unchecked migration, which is beyond what the town can cope with, is a source of past and future tensions.' Some Romanians in Ballymena told Britain's PA news agency they had lived in the town for years and were shocked by the violence. Several houses in the Clonavon Terrace area that was the focus of the violence put up signs identifying their residents as British or Filipino in an apparent attempt to avoid being targeted. Henderson said there was no evidence that Loyalist paramilitaries, who still hold sway over Protestant communities, were behind the disorder. Past Northern Ireland history Northern Ireland has a long history of street disorder stretching back to tensions between the British unionist and Irish nationalist communities. Though three decades of violence known as 'the Troubles' largely ended after a 1998 peace accord, tensions remain between those — largely Protestants — who see themselves as British and Irish nationalists, who are mostly Catholic. In Belfast, 'peace walls' still separate working-class Protestant and Catholic areas. Street rioters sporadically clash with police, and recently immigrants have become a target. Anti-immigrant violence erupted in Northern Ireland as well as England last year after three girls were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the northwest England town of Southport. Authorities said online misinformation wrongly identifying the U.K.-born teenage attacker as a migrant played a part. Government appeals for calm Police condemned the latest violence and said they would call in officers from England and Wales to bolster their response if needed. All the parties in Northern Ireland's power-sharing government issued a joint statement appealing for calm and urging people to reject 'the divisive agenda being pursued by a minority of destructive, bad faith actors." On the alleged sexual assault, the statement added that 'it is paramount that the justice process is now allowed to take its course so that this heinous crime can be robustly investigated. Those weaponizing the situation in order to sow racial tensions do not care about seeing justice and have nothing to offer their communities but division and disorder.'
