logo
New Bridford Park equipment vandalised while under construction

New Bridford Park equipment vandalised while under construction

BBC News29-05-2025
New equipment at a park in West Bridgford has been vandalised while still under construction, a borough council has said.Wooden benches were graffitied and fencing was damaged in order to gain access to the site at Bridgford Park over the weekend of 24 and 25 May.Rushcliffe Borough Council said it was now increasing security patrols at the park while the work continued.Councillor Jonathan Wheeler, the authority's portfolio holder for leisure & wellbeing, said it was "exceptionally disheartening" that the features were vandalised before even being used.
"We have worked hard with Nottinghamshire Police to lower anti-social behaviour in the area in recent times including using CCTV to identify culprits."In the last 12 months police have also been engaging with young people that in some cases led to home visits to speak to parents and saw arrests of those who refused to curb their criminal behaviour," he said.Sgt Che Sands, from Nottinghamshire Police, said they took reports of vandalism at the park "very seriously" and they were working with the council to ensure high-visibility patrols were taking place routinely."Bridgford Park falls under a Public Spaces Protection Order, meaning any anti-social behaviour or criminal damage offences will be dealt with by either criminal or financial punishment regardless of age."We will not tolerate this kind of behaviour in West Bridgford and continue our work to clamp down on it," he said.The council has urged anyone with information on the vandalism to contact them.The authority said the new features were still due to open in the coming weeks following a £300,000 investment.They include a new climbing structure as well as a "balancing trim trail, social hammocks and inclusive equipment".
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Who is Nigel Farage's latest Reform recruit? From drink driving conviction to ‘chav shooting' post
Who is Nigel Farage's latest Reform recruit? From drink driving conviction to ‘chav shooting' post

The Independent

time20 minutes ago

  • The Independent

Who is Nigel Farage's latest Reform recruit? From drink driving conviction to ‘chav shooting' post

Welsh Senedd member Laura Anne Jones has defected from the Conservatives to Reform UK, becoming the party's highest-profile defection in Wales. Nigel Farage announced the news at the Royal Welsh Show, with Ms Jones – who was first elected in 2003 – saying she could longer justify Conservative policies on the doorstep. Standing alongside Mr Farage, she said: "I've just suddenly felt that the Conservative Party was unrecognisable to me. It wasn't the party that I joined over three decades ago." She said Reform, meanwhile, was "listening to the people of Great Britain". Ms Jones is the latest in a growing list of high-profile Tories to have defected to Reform, following former Conservative Party chairman Sir Jake Berry earlier this month, as well as Dame Andrea Jenkyns and former Wales secretary David Jones. Her defection means the Conservatives are down to 14 politicians in the Welsh Parliament, ahead of crunch elections next year. But who is Ms Jones? From waitressing to the Welsh Assembly Ms Jones was first elected to the then-National Assembly in 2003, becoming the joint-first Welsh Conservative female assembly member (AM). She had the backing of the Conservative Party despite a conviction for drink-driving in 2002, which saw her banned from driving for 12 months and fined £75. Jones said after the hearing: "I've never justified drink-driving and the decision is one I deserve. I've never done it on purpose." She had been earning £5 per hour as a waitress before she was elected. Ms Jones served one term, until 2007, before returning in 2020 after the death of Mohammad Asghar. She was re-elected in 2021, for South Wales East. She once used a racist slur in a WhatsApp chat Ms Jones hit the headlines last year when it emerged she had used a racist slur about Chinese people in a WhatsApp group chat. The Senedd member used the offensive term in an exchange about the Chinese-owned video app TikTok, writing: "No c****y spies for me!" She later apologised and issued a statement, saying the word was "unacceptable and I deeply regret using it". "I sincerely apologise for any offence this has caused," she added. She apologised for saying she wanted to shoot chavs In 2021, she was forced to apologise over old Facebook posts, in which she said she 'would like to do a spot of Chav shooting", and added it is "a shame that isn't legal." She also joked about shooting the then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, saying she would become the "perfect shot" if she had "ol' Red Ed to aim at." When she wrote the posts she was not an elected politician, although she had previously served as a member of the Senedd.

Teenager to run Reform-led county council with multimillion-pound budget
Teenager to run Reform-led county council with multimillion-pound budget

The Independent

time20 minutes ago

  • The Independent

Teenager to run Reform-led county council with multimillion-pound budget

Nigel Farage 's Reform UK party has put a teenager in charge of a major county council, overseeing hundreds of millions of pounds of public spending. George Finch, 19, took over temporarily after the previous council leader, also a member of Reform, resigned just weeks after being elected. Now he has been voted in as the leader of Warwickshire County Council, which has £1.5bn of assets and a budget of around £500m. Before the vote, Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, Preet Gill, criticised his position, saying the people of Warwickshire 'frankly deserve better'. 'This is not work experience,' she told the BBC. 'This is not about learning on the job.' Reform is the largest party on the council, but did not have an outright majority. The BBC reported that on Tuesday that Conservative members abstained from the final round of voting, leading to a tie with the Liberal Democrat nominee, Jerry Roodhouse, which was ultimately broken by the council's chairman, Reform's Edward Harris. As he voted to install Finch as leader, Mr Harris said he was "disappointed and excited at the same time". "It [the tie] is not something I take lightly at all, and something I would rather not have happened," he added. Last month, Reform's Rob Howard said it was with 'much regret' that he was quitting as the council's leader, citing health challenges which he said prevented him from 'carrying out the role to the level and standard that I would wish'. His resignation came in the wake of the chaos that followed Reform's success at the local elections, when it took hundreds of seats across England. One newly elected councillor resigned from the party just days after being elected. As she left, Donna Edmunds also called for the ousted Reform MP Rupert Lowe to establish a challenger party on the right of the party and said Mr Farage 'must never be prime minister '. Another councillor, Wayne Titley, who was elected in Staffordshire, quit after just two weeks in the wake of criticism over a Facebook post about small boats arriving in Britain. And another Reform councillor's failure to declare that he worked for the council forced a by-election to be announced in Durham just a week after the election. While the chaotic scenes appeared to do little to dent Reform in the opinion polls, a leading pollster has now suggested that support for the party has 'topped out', and that the momentum that was leading it to soar in the polls has ground to a halt. Conservative peer Robert Hayward told The Independent that the results of recent council by-elections, which Reform lost while defending seats, coupled with a small fall in the party's national polling figures, suggest that the march of Mr Farage to Downing Street at the next general election could be facing a setback.

AOC gets death threats and has HQ vandalized by anti-Israel supporters
AOC gets death threats and has HQ vandalized by anti-Israel supporters

The Independent

time20 minutes ago

  • The Independent

AOC gets death threats and has HQ vandalized by anti-Israel supporters

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has received multiple death threats and her head office was vandalized by anti-Israel supporters over the weekend. Ocasio-Cortez 's Bronx office was smeared in red paint Sunday and activists placed a placard on the building that read: 'AOC FUNDS GENOCIDE IN GAZA,' her campaign office said. 'Last night, our campaign office in the Bronx was vandalized and we are in the process of cleaning it up,' said campaign manager Oliver Hidalgo-Wohlleben in a post on X. 'In the past few days, we also have received multiple threats on the Congresswoman's life and we are treating this seriously with our security partners to make sure she, our staff, and volunteers are safe.' The New York Police Department said the incident was under investigation and no arrests have been made. The vandalism came days after Ocasio-Cortez voted against an amendment put forward by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Friday that would have stripped $500 million in funding for Israel's missile defense systems. Ocasio-Cortez has been a consistent voice against Israel's military offensive in Gaza and criticized Greene's amendment for doing 'nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of U.S. munitions' in the war-torn region. 'What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue,' Ocasio-Cortez added. The Democratic Socialists of America condemned the congresswoman's vote in a statement released Friday. 'The fact that Representative Ocasio-Cortez acknowledges that Israel is carrying out this genocide makes her support for military aid all the more disappointing and incongruous,' the group said. 'We urge the representative to continue voting against the Iron Dome, whether it is part of a larger defense spending bill or as a stand-alone bill.' Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid was among those who came to Ocasio-Cortez's defense. 'She has one of the strongest pro-Palestinian voting records in Congress. It's fair to debate strategy and disagreement over specific choices–but vandalizing her office and saying @AOC 'funds genocide' isn't just wrong,' Shahid wrote in a post on X. 'It's reckless, dishonest, misleading, and deeply unserious.'

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store