The blaze broke out at the Billington Road bakery on May 4.

In an update issued at 2pm on May 6 the fire service confirmed crews have now left the scene.

Firefighters remained at the site as they worked to bring the incident under control and continue the investigation into the cause.

A spokesman for Warburtons said: “We can confirm there has been a fire at our Burnley bakery.

“Thankfully, everyone at site is safe and we are grateful for the hard work of the local fire service who remain on-site today.

“The fire is now under control and has [was] contained to one side of the building.

“When the site is safe, a full investigation will take place to determine the cause, and to assess the full extent of the damage.”

Production at the bakery was suspended and Warburtons increased output at its other UK sites to minimise disruption to supply.

The company said it is exploring options to scale up production across its 11 other UK bakeries.

At the height of the incident, 12 fire engines, specialist units, police, ambulance, and on-site staff were in attendance.

Lancashire Police and Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service have confirmed that the fire is not believed to be suspicious and remains under investigation.

Krums Sandwich Bar, on Greenwell Road, announced the news on social media.

The sandwich shop made The Northern Echo’s Best Sandwich Bar competition last year.

The business said the support it had received from its customers had meant a “great deal” throughout the years.

Writing on Facebook, Krums Sandwich Bar said: “We would like to inform you that, after much consideration, we have made the difficult decision to close our business permanently.

“This decision was not made lightly, but due to ongoing operational and personal circumstances, we are no longer able to continue.

“We want to sincerely thank everyone who supported us, visited us, and showed kindness throughout this journey. Your support has meant a great deal to us.

“We truly appreciate every customer and every memory shared with us.

“Thank you again, and we wish you all the best.”

Customers have been left devastated by the news, with one saying it was “such a shame”, with another adding: “That’s really sad.”

The 83-year-old had been observed earlier that day tearing pages from a magazine and placing them in her mouth

Changes are needed to the protocol used to dispose of used surgical gloves in care homes with dementia patients, a coroner has warned.

It follows the death of 83-year-old Margaret Wilson, who passed away on August 10, 2022, after choking on used surgical gloves she removed from a lidded pedal bin found in a bathroom in Oakridge Care Home. Ms Wilson had a diagnosis of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease and had been living in the care home in Ballynahinch since May 2022.

Earlier that day, Ms Wilson had been found tearing pages from a magazine and placing them in her mouth, with this being the first time she was observed placing foreign objects in her mouth. The 83-year-old was known for wandering the corridors of the care home and was known to be unsettled in the evenings, which is a recognised and common feature of dementia.

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On Thursday, May 7, 2026, in an inquest hearing at Belfast Laganside Court the coroner delivered her findings into Ms Wilson’s death.

The inquest heard from Ms Wilson’s son, Andrew Wilson, who described his mother as a “stalwart” who was “well known and well regarded.” He said the family were satisfied with her care at Oakridge Care Home, and were “generally content” with her placement there.

The coroner heard from Kelly Kilpatrick, the manager of Oakridge at the time, that staffing levels were determined in accordance with guidelines issued by the Regulation Quality Improvement Authority, otherwise known as RQIA.

On the evening of August 10, 2022, there were three staff on duty; one nurse and two healthcare assistants covering the first floor for the duration of the night shift, which began at 8pm.

Healthcare assistant Louise Wilson said she observed Ms Wilson pacing along the corridor shortly before commencing her shift, and became aware she was tearing pages from a magazine and placing them in her mouth. The coroner said Miss Wilson responded to this incident “appropriately,” by reporting the matter to Nurse Badza, who she was on duty with.

The coroner said “it is not clear what steps were taken immediately” by Mr Badza after becoming aware Ms Wilson had been eating pages from a magazine. Mr Badza documented the incident in evaluation sheets, but the coroner found there does not appear to have been a documented review or any assessment of the surrounding environment.

Mr Badza told the inquest there was no opportunity to amend Ms Wilson’s care plan to highlight any risks associated with her ingesting foreign objects, as she had no history of this until the day of her death.

The inquest heard that Nurse Badza later found Ms Wilson leaning on a railing outside the nurse’s station on the first floor of the care home, before he assisted her to a nearby chair, where she “quickly became unresponsive.”

The coroner found he appropriately sounded the emergency buzzer and shouted for assistance from colleagues, prompting the immediate attendance of two care assistants and the nurse on duty on the ground floor. He also contacted emergency services.

Ms Wilson was moved to the floor for CPR, with the coroner accepting that Miss Wilson tilted the deceased’s head back to check her airway and saw a blue item at the back of her throat. Miss Wilson then retrieved what transpired to be a pair of blue surgical gloves, which were used due to the manner in which they were rolled into one another.

Although it isn’t possible to determine exactly where Ms Wilson came by the used gloves, the coroner found “on balance” she is satisfied they were removed from a lidded pedal bin located in a bathroom on the first floor of the care home.

CPR efforts were sustained for a “considerable period of time” with a defibrillator also employed by care home staff. A “do not resuscitate” instruction had been placed on Ms Wilson’s file prior to her placement at Oakridge Care Home, and it was unclear whether this was still present.

However, the coroner found the resuscitation efforts deployed by staff were “appropriate, reasonable, and necessary” in what “cannot be considered a naturally occurring event.”

Following resuscitation efforts by both care home staff and paramedics, Ms Wilson’s life was sadly pronounced extinct at 11.20pm on August 10, 2022. The coroner found her death was the result of asphyxia caused by choking on surgical gloves.

Following Ms Wilson’s death, surgical gloves in Oakridge Care Home are now stored in secure cupboards along the corridors, which can only be opened by a magnetic key. The coroner commended taking this step to reduce risks, however, highlighted that the procedure for the disposal of used gloves “remains unchanged” and they continue to be discarded in pedal bins.

The coroner has called for changes to be made to this protocol, and intends to write to the relevant authorities to highlight this.

She said: “I acknowledge that this is compliant with the applicable regional protocol for waste disposal and is deemed necessary for infection control. However, it is wholly conceivable that such an incident could occur again in the future, whereby a resident in the care home could remove items from a bin and place them in their mouth, which could potentially lead to choking and possible death.

“I therefore intend to write to both the Department of Health and RQIA, including a copy of these findings, with a view to highlighting the risks associated with little pedal bins as a waste disposal system, particularly to patients suffering from dementia, and urge them to consider implementing and utilising a safer method of waste disposal in residential units where patients with dementia reside.”

The coroner closed the inquest by giving her condolences to Ms Wilson’s family.

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James Holder, 54, had gone back to the woman’s home, went to the toilet and then promptly fell asleep on her bed snoring.

The multi-millionaire fashion boss then woke up and beckoned the woman, who was trying to sleep in the lounge, into her bedroom and raped her.

Holder had denied charges of assault by penetration and rape and said what sexual activity took place between them was consensual.

A jury at Gloucester Crown Court, sitting in Cirencester, acquitted Holder of assault by penetration but found him guilty of rape after deliberating for four hours.

The defendant, of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, was remanded into custody ahead of sentencing at Bristol Crown Court today (May 7).

At Bristol Crown Court today, Recorder David Chidgey told Holder that he had committed a “despicable piece of sexual violence”, reports the BBC.

Holder appeared via video link from prison and was said to have shown no reaction when the sentence was given.

Holder’s victim said, in a statement read to the court, he had taken her “choice, dignity and body”.

She added: “What you did that day has followed me, it has cast shadows where there should be light.”

In his 1873 book On War, the great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that: “War is the realm of uncertainty.” He would have been at home in Washington this week where Clausewitz’s “fog of war” appears to have descended on the White House, at times obscuring reality.

On Tuesday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, briefed reporters that the US plan was to get the Strait of Hormuz “back to the way it was: anyone can use it, no mines in the water, nobody paying tolls”.

This was, of course, the way things were before the war actually started.

But uncertainty about what this war was actually all about has been a hallmark of the past two months. When the conflict began on the last day of February, the US said it was about preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Although the US president, Donald Trump, added a layer of complexity by saying it was also about regime change.

Trump’s closest ally, the Israeli prime minister, added another later by insisting this was also about getting rid of Iran’s ballistic missiles and launchers and neutralising its proxies in the region.

Christian Emery, an expert in international relations at University College London – who specialises in US-Iranian affairs – sees this lack of coherence about what the war is for as underscoring “that this entire enterprise has been a colossal strategic failure”.

As things stand it now appears possible that an interim deal could well open the Strait of Hormuz to allow the global economy to return to something like normal. But the main reasons the US and Israel launched the war are unlikely to be resolved any time soon and the episode has proved to Tehran – and the rest of the world – that Iran can use its geography to its strategic advantage whenever it chooses.

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For Bamo Nouri and Inderjeet Parmar, experts in international security at City St George’s Unversity of London – who have been regular contributors to our coverage of the conflict – the episode has been an object lesson in the limits of power. The US and Israel exercised considerable military superiority to Iran and have used it to devastating effect. But this is not how conflict works in the 21st century.

The US and Israel were chasing different outcomes so there was no strategic coherence to their war aims. And they underestimated Iran’s durability under pressure. Iran didn’t need to win, just to endure. “As the war progressed” they write, “the fantasy of decisive victory collapsed under the weight of economic, political and strategic reality”.

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Iran war has become a lesson in how power really works

Interestingly, the Trump administration is now saying that Operation Epic Fury finished about a month ago. US forces are now engaged in Project Freedom, a humanitarian operation to help ships stranded in the Strait of Hormuz to transit the waterway.

As Andrew Gawthorpe, an expert in US foreign policy from Leiden University, notes, this change of emphasis appeared to emerge as Republicans in Congress were insisting that the administration was legally obliged under the War Powers Act to seek authorisation for the conflict.

Gawthorpe believes the war’s unpopularity is allowing Congress to claw back some of the influence it had over the way the US uses its military.

À lire aussi :
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As we’ve noted before, the main theme of the past few weeks, since the US launched its blockade of Iranian ports to match Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, is which side can absorb more pain and pressure. US consumers are facing increased prices at the gas pumps which has fed through to a higher inflation rate generally.

But the headline US CPI increase of 3.3% last month is dwarfed by inflation in Iran which is reported to have hit 50%. It’s worth noting that it was inflation and the general economic malaise which kicked off the huge protests that wracked Iran in January.

More pressingly, Iran’s inability to export its oil thanks to the US blockade means that sooner of later it will need to close down its oil production. As engineers and oil production experts Nima Shokri and Martin J Blunt explain, this can be done, but it’s by no means easy and risks seriously damaging the wells.

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Shutting Iran’s oil wells may be straightforward – but the consequences are not

Global affair

They’ll be watching this all very closely in Beijing of course. The US president is due to visit Beijing next week to meet Xi Jinping for the first time since the two met on the sidelines of the Apec conference in South Korea last October.

So it was interesting to see that Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, visited Beijing this week to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. In normal times, China buys between 80% and 90% of Iran’s seaborne oil exports – and it has been very clear that it wants to see the Strait of Hormuz opened and “a complete cessation of fighting…without delay”.

But China-watcher Tom Harper of the University of East London, believes that Beijing can see advantages in the US getting bogged down in a fullscale war in the Middle East and might go as far as to offer military support to Tehran if that happens. While China has denied providing shoulder-launched Manpad missiles to Iran, Tehran is using its BeiDou satellite navigational system (a sort of Chinese GPS) to aim its missiles.

If you find these expert takes on an increasingly dangerous world useful, please consider supporting us with a donation.

Wang also said that China recognises Iran’s “legitimate right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy” – something it sees as a sovereignty issue. Which should all make for an interesting encounter between Trump and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping (if the trip goes ahead, that is).

À lire aussi :
China has played a key role in the Iran war – and will continue to do so

The surprise player in all this has been Pakistan, writes Natasha Lindstaedt, an international affairs expert at the University of Essex. But as Lindstaedt points out, Pakistan has a long diplomatic track record with both the US and Iran. In 1981, two years after Washington and Tehran severed relations in the wake of the revolution that brought the Islamic Republic into being, Pakistan established a dedicated section of its Washington embassy to handling Iranian affairs in the US.

Washington and Islamabad have had their ups and downs, but things have grown closer with Trump in the White House – and Pakistan has tried to do all the right things to court Trump, including nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize and joining his board of peace. Lindstaedt walks us through this intriguing ménage à trois.

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How Pakistan became the primary mediator between the US and Iran

There are some who suggest the World Seniors Snooker Championship should not be held at the Crucible, but Jimmy White tells those people: ‘Get a life.’

The Seniors event began on Wednesday night at the iconic theatre in Sheffield, just two days after Wu Yize won the World Snooker Championship in the same building.

It is a chance for players who have formerly walked out at the Crucible to do so again, while some who have never come close to gracing the venue in the World Championship have the opportunity to do so at Seniors level.

The World Seniors Championship has been held at the Crucible since 2019, but world number 31 Dave Gilbert is not on board with it.

The Angry Farmer feels the venue is snooker’s hallowed ground and should be kept for the pinnacle of the sport alone.

‘It’s a special place,’ he said. ‘It’s brilliant that it’s staying there, you know.

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‘It’s a travesty for any professional that doesn’t get to play there, it is a special place. I hate that they play the Seniors there. I think that’s shocking.

‘The only people that should play at the Crucible are people that go through this qualifying school or a top 16 professional. It’s not for hacking around in exhibitions. It’s the Mecca of snooker.

‘I’ve played all around the world, in Saudi and that, but to me they’re absolutely boring and rubbish.

‘I’m old, you see, so I’m not into it all the time, but the Crucible’s the one.

‘The aura about the place and how unique it is, you know. You find out, you either sink or swim and that’s it, you know what I mean?’

White has won the World Seniors Championship four times, more than any other player, and he has no sympathy for Gilbert’s point of view.

On how he would respond to the opinion, the Whirlwind told Metro: ‘Get a life! Listen, this is why we’re here. Why not?

‘It’s a World Championship, the World Seniors. I don’t know why people would say that. It don’t make any sense.’

Ken Doherty has been to two World Seniors finals, and along with White is playing in this year’s tournament again.

The Darlin of Dublin does understand where Gilbert is coming from but still feels the Crucible can host the Seniors as well as the elite professionals.

Not least because it allows fans to experience the theatre who could not get hold of tickets or possibly could not afford the ones on sale at the World Championship.

‘I know what he means, but listen, why not?’ Doherty told Metro. ‘I know it’s the home of the World Championship, but it can be the home of the World Seniors Championship as well.

‘It’s a special event, so why not? It’s hard to get tickets for the World Championship. It’s a little bit easier for this, but still, there’s been great crowds and the atmosphere is electric. No, I think it’s a great idea to have it here.’

White opened his Seniors campaign with a win over Daniel Ward on Thursday afternoon, saying ahead of the match of a return to the Crucible: ‘I’m absolutely buzzing.

‘This is why you play. The Seniors is a big event for us because the winner gets in the Champion of Champions.

‘Also, you’re playing in the Crucible Theatre. You know, I’m so lucky to still be playing.’

MORE: Why is Ronnie O’Sullivan playing in the World Seniors Snooker Championship?

MORE: Ding Junhui sends ‘our time’ message as China’s Wu Yize reigns at the Crucible

MORE: Shaun Murphy has message for UK snooker hopefuls as rise of China accelerates

The theatre has been closed since April 2025

A theatre that was forced to close because of reinforced autoclave aerated concrete (RAAC) being found in the building is set to reopen this month. Key Theatre in Peterborough has confirmed its reopening following essential roof works carried out over the last year.

According to Landmark Theatres, the company which runs the theatre, a small number of “unforeseen” issues have resulted in a short delay to the reopening of the main auditorium. The theatre is now set to officially reopen on Friday, May 22.

Due to the delay, a number of schedules performances have been affected including Physic Sally, on Friday, May 8, Tom Brace Saws Himself in Half on Saturday, May 9, High School Musical on Saturday, May 16, Country Hits Live on Sunday, May 17 and The Comedy Network on Thursday, May 21. All customers are due to be contacted via email to advise of any changes. The Studio Theatre and the Chalkboard cafe remain open during the work.

RAAC deteriorates over time, which leads to structural and safety issues with the building. The improvements aim to safeguard the building and enhance the experience for future audiences, artists and the wider community.

Head of Content and Business Development at Landmark Theatres Natalie Phillips said: “While this revised timeline reflects the complexities of completing major building works within a live performance venue, the Key Theatre looks forward to celebrating its return as a vibrant cultural hub for audiences, artists and the wider community

“As the team works to reschedule performances or arrange refunds, phone lines are expected to be exceptionally busy. Customers are kindly asked for patience during this time, with reassurance that every effort is being made to contact anyone affected as quickly as possible”.

The pleated shorts would be a great addition to your summer wardrobe

If you are not a fan of wearing denim shorts throughout the summer, there are plenty of alternative options that might be more comfortable. Tesco’s clothing brand F&F has lots of skirts and shorts in stock for the new season that you might prefer to regular denim.

The brand has just launched the F&F Pure Linen Pleated Shorts in Blue, which could be worn with the matching F&F Pure Linen Button Front Cropped Waistcoat in Blue. The two items together could be a great option for a summer party or can easily be styled with other pieces in your wardrobe.

The shorts have been “designed with pleated accents and belt loops” and have side pockets for extra utility. The pleated shorts cost £22.50 while the waistcoat is being sold for £19.50.

The smart shorts were shared to the Tesco F&F Instagram page, which currently has 890K followers. The post was captioned: “Something blue. The three -piece suit your wardrobe needs this season. Waistcoat, £19.50. Shorts, £22.50. Blazer, £42.00. #FandFClothing #StyleItOut.”

If you want to get your hands on the pleated shorts or the waistcoat, you can go to the Tesco website to browse all of its clothes. You can also go in person to a Tesco store with a clothing department.

If these shorts are not quite inline with your style, Boden has some other choices for the summer. There are these Crochet Shorts, which would look cute with a plain vest top, or these Islington Linen Shorts that reviews say are “great”.

New Look also has plenty of options in stock. There are these Stone Crinkle Texture Drawstring Shorts, which come in a range of different colours, or Light Yellow Crinkled Drawstring Beach Shorts that would be easy to slip over a swimsuit.