UK News
'No hate element' behind HMO attacks, say PSNI
The attacks happened on Tuesday in the Templemore Avenue and Paxton Street areas.
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Thirty years on from the impassioned action of the road protests, the Newbury bypass soars above us on the old railway embankment. I can’t entirely accept it even now, having been part of the campaign. Today, walking in The Chase, the nature reserve that lies adjacent, the roar of traffic slips into a background hum, aided by other memories I’ve built up here.
Many of those have been with my dearest friend, Sarah. She volunteers as a “cow watcher” for the National Trust, and I’ve come with her as she checks their whereabouts and wellbeing. They are conservation grazers; keeping coarser scrub in check, spreading seed and poaching areas, and encouraging greater biodiversity and plantlife.
The reserve was once common land, with a sheepwash and blanket mill that gave this village its name, Woolton Hill. It was enclosed for hunting in 1819 and eventually became a National Trust property in 1944.
It’s also been my playground. I remember trees like spilled pencils after the great storms of 1987 and 1990, and later more felled trees when it was clipped by the Newbury bypass; I was pulled down from the branches, flicking cable ties into chainsaws to jam them up. Sarah and I recall devastating sewage spills that killed invertebrates, fish, lampreys and native crayfish.
But we also remember coming with our children, losing boots, falling (or simply lying down) in the streams; “welly walks” with grandparents, watching great spotted woodpecker chicks fledging from a hole in a Corsican pine, waiting for otters in the alder carr, and following silver-washed fritillary butterflies.
Sarah tracks the cattle on her app, via a collar round the neck of Colchis, one of six hardy black, red and white Shetland cows with upswept horns. We wade across a stream to find them grazing among wild daffodils and golden saxifrages.
Our circuit complete but our chat not yet done, we agree to meet at the garden centre cafe. Thanks to the brain fog I’ve been bemoaning, I head in error to the pub. When I eventually get to the garden centre, I follow the zigzag caterpillars of peaty-black mud from Sarah’s boots across the polished floor of the cafe. Apologising, I add my own, with a little jus of cow muck.
The papers are dominated by Donald Trump’s threats against Iran.
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Donald Trump has pulled back on his threats to launch devastating strikes on Iran, less than two hours before a deadline he set for Tehran to capitulate or else a “whole civilization will die.” Trump said he was holding off on his threatened attacks on Iranian bridges, power plants and other civilian targets, subject to Tehran agreeing to a two-week ceasefire and reopening the strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped during peacetime.
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said it had conditionally accepted a two-week ceasefire if attacks agains Iran are halted.
Iran’s foreign minister said passage through the strait of Hormuz will be allowed for the next two weeks under Iranian military management.
Iranian state media said negotiations with the US would be held in Islamabad to finalise details of an agreement, with the aim of “confirming Iran’s battlefield achievements”. Talks will begin on Friday 10 April and may be extended, state media reported. State media also reported that talks with the US do not amount to the end of the war.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shebaz Sharif, announced that Iran, the US and their allies had agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon. Sharif has been a key figure in attempting to reach a diplomatic solution between the two warring parties. In his statement, Sharif invited delegations to Islamabad on “Friday, 10th April 2026, to further negotiate for a conclusive agreement to settle all disputes”.
Trump said Iran had proposed a “workable” 10-point peace plan. According to Iranian state media, the proposal includes a number of conditions that the US has in the past rejected, among them controlled transit through the strait of Hormuz coordinated with Iranian armed forces and withdrawal of all US forces from regional bases. The Iranian proposal would also require the lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions, payment of full compensation to Iran and release of all frozen Iranian assets.
Iranian state media also said the 10-point plan for securing an end to the war would require Washington to accept its uranium enrichment program – a previous red line for the Trump administration.
Even as the ceasefire was proposed, missile alerts continued in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Israel.
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