An armed gang in southern Italy posed as police and blew up an armoured van in a bid to carry out a raid, in what local media referred to as a scene out of the “wild west”.

Footage from the incident on a motorway in Italy’s region of Puglia shows the group wearing balaclavas and armed with Kalashnikov rifles during the attack on Monday morning.

The heist took place shortly after dawn on the 613 motorway connecting Lecce and Brindisi, when the armed group arrived on the scene in an Alfa Romeo Stelvio, a Jeep Compass and Kia Sportage – all of which had fake emergency lights on, local media reports.

They then set a vehicle on fire, forcing the armoured van to stop.

The gang then used an explosive on the van, resulting in a huge plume of smoke.

According to some reports, the number of armoured vehicles blocked was actually two and they were carrying millions of euros – but this hasn’t been confirmed.

Video taken by witnesses shows at least six masked people, some of whom appeared to be in white suits.

As they later sought to escape, the armed group opened fire against the Carabinieri – Italy’s national law enforcement agency – which had intervened.

The heist, however, appears to have been unsuccessful.

Two people have reportedly been arrested.

The men’s curling team made history in 2025 as they won four of the five Grand Slams on offer, a feat never before achieved, and begin their Olympic campaign on Wednesday

Honesty is Team Mouat’s secret weapon as they vie for Olympic gold in Milan Cortina.

The men’s curling team made history in 2025 as they won four of the five Grand Slams on offer, a feat never before achieved.

Crucially, they regained their world champions title in that same year and moved their place at the top of the world rankings out of sight of any challengers.

Bobby Lammie, skip Bruce Mouat’s second, is the quietest member of the team and noted a confidence change that has allowed the team to soar.

He said: “I think one key area would be just being open and honest with each other, and always kind of looking for that extra edge and any way we can improve.

“We’re not afraid to tell each other if we think something’s lacking, whether that’s team dynamics or shot-making or technique or anything like that.

“We’re always open to helping each other and always open to feedback also. We are a team that all have our input, and we all try and do everything together.

“So, finding the balance for that and finding the rules for each person and finding how to get the best out of them and what makes them tick, is something that we’ve worked very hard on over the years.”

Losing out on gold at the 2022 Winter Olympics was not the turning point for Team Mouat; it was missing a medal entirely at the 2024 World Championships.

The men’s curling rink led by Mouat were beaten by long-time rivals Team Edin of Sweden in Beijing four years ago, losing by a point in an extra end.

However, it was a semi-final defeat at the 2024 worlds, followed by a loss in the bronze medal match, that forced a rethink and has seen the team become undisputedly the best in the world.

“It wasn’t a bad week,” Grant Hardie, Team Mouat’s vice-skip, said. “Even the semi-final against Canada, we were in a great position in the sixth end, with hammer, and we gave up a steal of three.

“The ice conditions changed quite a lot, and the other team picked up on it a lot quicker than we did, and we let that game kind of get away from us.

“Then, in the bronze medal game again, we were in complete control, we played really well. Well, Bruce played really well; he kind of kept us in the game for most of it.

“And he had a shot to win that he makes nine times out of 10, it was very unlike him to miss that shot.”

How each of the quartet reacted to the defeat speaks to their character. Hardie, an engineering graduate, immediately sought out British Curling’s performance director, Nigel Holl, to talk through how to avoid feeling the disappointment again.

The team’s cheerleader, Hammy McMillan Jr, Hardie’s cousin and son of a two-time Olympian, also called Hammy, was quick to reassure Mouat that he had won the side more games than he had lost them.

After the summer break, the team reconvened at the National Curling Academy in Stirling, prepared to have difficult conversations.

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The National Curling Academy was opened in 2017 in part thanks to UK Sport funding, and sees all members of the performance programme train alongside each other on the ice and in the gym.

The plan paid off and now it is about taking all that they have learnt and earning the one major title missing from their collection in Milan Cortina.

“There’s definitely one thing missing, maybe two if we’re counting both the mixed doubles and the men’s,” said Mouat, who’s journey to the Games has been powered by the National Lottery and as a member of UK Sport’s World Class Programme, has access to cutting-edge performance support.

“But I’m very happy with what I’ve done in my curling career so far. I would love to come away with a couple more medals and hopefully the right colour in Cortina.

“If I don’t, then I’ll move on, but I’m going to be going and working my ass off to try and make sure we do.”

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Two boys, aged 12 and 13, have been stabbed at a school in Brent, northwest London, and officers are searching for a teenage suspect, the Metropolitan Police say.

Officers were called to Kingsbury High School in Bacon Lane at 12.40pm on Tuesday to reports that a 13-year-old boy had been stabbed.

There, they found a 12-year-old boy who had also been stabbed.

They were both taken to hospital by the London Ambulance Service, the Metropolitan Police said.

Officers said they had identified a suspect – a teenage boy – and were urgently hunting for him.

Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams, who leads policing in northwest London, said: “We recognise that this incident will cause considerable concern within the community.

“We want to reassure local students, parents and local residents that we have deployed significant resources to the area and are doing everything we can to locate the suspect.”

The mums forced to become legal experts for their kids PLUS Noel will ‘have it out’ on the red carpet

Hello,

The minefield of legalese and red tape that meets parents applying for special education needs support is, frankly, unjust.

The countless hours spent scribbling away and researching, the late night form-filling and the stressful waits for a decision pile further pressure on families already struggling with children in need of additional support.

My colleague Ethan Davies has been speaking to mothers whose applications for more help were refused by Manchester Council’s children’s services. They say they were expected to become experts in SEN law while waiting up to a year for an independent tribunal to make a decision.

A group of mums who all protested outside Manchester Town Hall last autumn, claim Manchester council’s children’s services team have:

• Denied an eight-year-old boy an education and health care plan (EHCP) after he was diagnosed with autism, and his school and parents asked for one.
• Refused to assess a nine-year-old girl with autism after she was signed off school for months due to ‘major burnout’.
• Failed to keep a long-standing volunteering placement for a teenage boy, instead offering ‘to take him out for a burger’.
• An eight-year-old girl was out-of-school for 13 months due to delays in sourcing a place – only for new school staff to say ‘they cannot keep her safe’.

Catriona Moore, of the Independent Provider of Special Education Advice, says these examples highlight a national culture within local authorities.

“It’s all in the law, but we have a situation where the law is widely not applied so parents have to become knowledgeable to find out what their children are entitled to,” she says.

“The tribunal appeals have gone up and up. It’s at record levels now, and absurdly high numbers of appeals go in favour of the parents and against local authorities.

“A 12 or 13 month wait has become the norm. The tribunal is absolutely swamped.”

You can read the full details here.

A win for families

Some good news now. A Manchester Evening News campaign to secure funding for homeless children’s travel has been successful.

Mayor Andy Burnham has committed to giving 8,000 homeless children in temporary accommodation free school travel.

Under current government transport rules, youngsters are only eligible for free travel if they live more than two miles from class (three miles for over-8s) and no ‘suitable school’ is nearer. But it’s almost-impossible to be further than two miles from a school in the city.

Fatou Tall’s daughters Bousso and Nabou spend hours on the bus every day, commuting from Royton to Harpurhey via the 409 and 81. They’re often out of the house for more than 12 hours a day, with her ‘oldest always coming back with a headache’, Fatou said in January.

A huge weight has now been lifted from Fatou’s shoulders. “Having extra money to spare will mean a great deal because it will make us more stable. The kids can concentrate and focus on their education,” she says.

Ethan Davies has been leading the campaign and has all the details here.

Hope, fear and flat whites

Sadiq Khan was in Levenshulme yesterday, on the campaign trail with Labour’s Gorton and Denton candidate Angeliki Stogia. The London mayor enjoyed a flat white at Grounded CIC while explaining that this byelection is a choice between “hope and fear”.

Ms Stogia meanwhile, insisted to our man on the ground Stephen Topping that the Peter Mandelson scandal has not come up on the doorstep. Rather, she said, people are worried about the cost of living, the NHS, fly tipping and investment in communities.

One scandal that DID come up, at least in the conversations I’ve been having across the constituency, is the reason we’re having a byelection in the first place.

Certainly in Denton – where retiring MP Andrew Gwynne had his constituency office – the reasons for his departure are well known. And as George Lythgoe explains here, the fallout from the Trigger Me Timbers scandal is ongoing.

How to make millions

Hospitals across England emit pollutants on a mass scale as part of their day-to-day operations. But Manchester’s hospitals are being hailed as groundbreaking examples of change that could stand to make the NHS millions.

Standing on the wind-battered roof of Wythenshawe Hospital this week, surrounded by solar panels, one energy minister said loudly over the noise of an extractor fan: “With things like these solar panels, they can make very short term gains on it.

“With the investments that have been made so far, they’re saving about £250,000 a year. I heard from the trust they have been able to disconnect some parts of the campus in some parts of their estate from gas, and have been able to see real savings.”

Greater Manchester will receive £4.8m as part of a £74m national investment, to clean up their energy usage and cut bills.

Our health reporter Helena Vesty has the story here.

‘We’ll have it out on the red carpet’

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He hasn’t written a song for two years – but Noel Gallagher has been named Songwriter of the Year. Even Noel thinks it’s a bit daft but says he assumes organisers at The BRITs were ‘desperate’ to get a Mancunian on stage during the event at Coop Live in a couple of weeks.

“I’m not sure how I’ve got away with that one but I’ll take it,” he told talkSPORT. “To be honest I think they were just desperate to get someone from Oasis up there because it’s Manchester. Our kid said he’s not going.”

Noel said he understands The Brits is “all based on record sales”. “We sold a million records last year.

“Didn’t even get off the couch and I’m not sure there’s a songwriter that can match that. But you know, if anybody’s got a problem with it, meet me there. We’ll have it out on the red carpet.”

Weather etc

Wednesday: Light rain showers and light winds. 11C.

Roads: A56 Deansgate northbound closed due to new road layout from St Marys Gate to A6 Victoria Bridge Street until November 14, 2026.

When we moved into our house, there was a shed in the garden. Its timbers were rotten, the floor had long since disappeared into the ground, there was no door, the window had fallen out and various creatures had moved in.

I decided to rebuild it out of a material that has been used around the world for hundreds of years, but is less commonly seen in modern buildings: straw bales. A year later, and the “work shed” is now nearly finished.

As sustainability assessment lead at Sheffield University’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, I wanted to make sure my garden office had the lowest possible embodied carbon (a term used to describe the amount of carbon contained, or “embodied” in the materials used to make a product), and low energy use once it was up and running.

That meant the office would need to be very well insulated to avoid using lots of energy to heat it, and made of materials with low carbon content.

Due to its structure, straw is a fantastic insulating material. It’s also cheap, easy to work with, and since the straw absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it grows, straw buildings act as carbon stores. If we use this in a building, the carbon remains stored for the lifetime of the building, and can even be returned to the soil at the end of life.

My first real involvement with straw building was through the design of a low carbon cold room in Kenya, working with energy efficiency experts from the Energy Saving Trust and Solar Cooling Engineering, and architects from Switzerland and Kenya. A cold room is an easy-to-build and cheap alternative to a large fridge, enabling farmers in developing countries to store produce at a market, improving incomes and reducing food waste.

This cold room is now operating at Homa Bay market on the shores of Lake Victoria, Kenya. It has cement-free foundations, solar panels and batteries, water storage, low energy cooling units, a timber structure and straw bale walls. The project showed me that straw bale structures can provide good insulation without the environmental impact of expanded polystyrene.

Natural materials like mud, earth and dung, as well as fibrous materials such as straw were used to build homes for centuries.

Straw bale housing history

Straw in bale form has been used for buildings since the 1800s. After the invention of mechanical baler in the US, straw bales were used to construct homes in places where timber and stone were hard to find.

Some of these early buildings still exist, but most straw bale houses in the US were built since the 1970s. These buildings offer warm comfortable homes and were the inspiration for a new wave of UK straw bale builders in the 1990s.

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Straw works well for single or two-storey buildings, but requires careful design to avoid water leaking into it. Provided the bale buildings are protected from rain splash at the bottom and have an overhanging roof at the top, water isn’t really a problem. Fire requires oxygen and fuel, so a compressed straw bale is fire resistant, and straw bale buildings have met all fire, planning, and building regulations, and even achieved Passivhaus – extremely high standards of insulation, thermal performance and energy use.

My new garden office has 40cm thick walls and double glazed windows, it’s clad on the outside with reclaimed timber (some of which came from the original shed) and the roof, windows, doors and underfloor insulation are all secondhand. The final step is cladding the inside.

Here I’ve adopted another traditional building practice and used cob. Cob is a mixture of clay, water, sand and chopped straw. After digging the clay from our garden and mixing it, I’ve applied the cob by hand, via an incredibly messy but very satisfying process.

I know that the lifetime greenhouse gas emissions of my shed will be about 20 tonnes lower than they would have been if I had used expanded foam insulation and plasterboard.

People who live in straw bale houses talk about how the irregular shape and natural materials of straw bale buildings also have a positive impact on them, and say that buildings like my shed create a connection with the builder particular to the use of natural materials.

This concept, known as biophilic design, is challenging to quantify but I look forward to finding how it feels to sit inside it.

Ukraine is gathering support from European governments to oppose FIFA’s moves to end Russia’s ban from international football.

Ukrainian sports minister Matvii Bidnyi told Sky News that allowing Russia back into World Cups would be legitimising Vladimir Putin’s aggression.

European football leaders are gathering for their annual congress in Brussels today, four years after booting out Russian teams at the start of the all-out war on Ukraine.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino is set to attend the UEFA Congress, a week after telling Sky News: “This ban has not achieved anything, it has just created more frustration and hatred.”

Responding to the football boss, Mr Bidnyi said: “It’s a very strange position… nothing changed. This condemnation of all of the world, of the sports community, is very important for international pressure on the aggressor.”

While stopping Russia playing at World Cups is a symbol of the country’s isolation and pariah status, it has not ended the conflict and killing.

“If we start to make our policy softer… what sign do you make for the world?” Mr Bidnyi said.

“The ban, it’s an important part of international efforts to stop the aggressor… it’s a crime and you want to justify, you want to legitimise this crime.”

Mr Bidnyi wants a statement opposing football sanctions on Russia being lifted – as was secured last year from 28 European governments, including the UK, calling on the Paralympics to restore their ban.

‘Irresponsible and infantile’

“I think we are close to it,” he told Sky News. “And I would think it would (have) a big resonance.”

The Ukrainian government would welcome a first visit to the country by Mr Infantino since the war started.

“His actions look irresponsible and infantile,” Mr Bidnyi said, citing children being killed playing football or seriously injured after Russian strikes.

Read more from Sky News:
FIFA: Trump deserves peace prize
Paralympics in dispute with UK

The ban was imposed because European rivals were refusing to play Russian teams or host their matches on neutral integrity – as FIFA and UEFA came under pressure from politicians to apply sporting sanctions.

Within FIFA there is discussion about why they should have to cut ties with Russia when governments advocating for the ban on teams still allow trading with the country with non-sanctioned products.

“It’s wrong, but we can see now it’s become less and less,” Mr Bidnyi said.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy last week criticised the International Olympic Committee and FIFA for moving towards restoring Russian teams, arguing “if anything the situation in Ukraine has got worse” since the original bans were imposed.

LONDON (AP) — Keir Starmer fights another day.

After indirect fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein files sparked a dramatic day of crisis that threatened to topple him, the U.K. prime minister was saved by a pugnacious fightback and hesitation among his rivals inside the governing Labour Party about the consequences of a leadership coup.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said Tuesday that Labour lawmakers had “looked over the precipice … and they didn’t like what they saw.”

“And they thought the right thing was to unite behind Keir,” Miliband told the BBC.

He might have added: For now.

Mandelson blowback

Starmer’s authority over his center-left party has been battered by aftershocks from the publication of files related to Epstein — a man he never met and whose sexual misconduct hasn’t implicated him.

But it was Starmer’s decision to appoint veteran Labour politician Peter Mandelson, a friend of Epstein, as U.K. ambassador to Washington in 2024 that has led many to question the leader’s judgment and call for his resignation.

Starmer has apologized, saying Mandelson had lied about the extent of his ties to the convicted sex offender. And he vowed to fight for his job.

“I will never walk away from the mandate I was given to change this country,” Starmer said Tuesday as he visited a community center in southern England. “I will never walk away from the people that I’m charged with fighting for and I will never walk away from the country that I love.”

Starmer’s risky decision to appoint Mandelson – who brought extensive contacts and trade expertise but a history of questionable ethical judgment – backfired when emails were published in September showing that Mandelson had maintained a friendship with Epstein after the financier’s 2008 conviction for sex offenses involving a minor.

Starmer fired Mandelson, but a new trove of Epstein files released last month by the U.S. government contained more revelations. Mandelson is now facing a police investigation for potential misconduct in public office over documents suggesting that he passed sensitive government information to Epstein. He’s not accused of any sexual offenses.

Simmering discontent

The Mandelson scandal may be the final straw that finishes Starmer’s premiership. But it follows discontent that has built since he led Labour to a landslide election victory 19 months ago.

Some of Starmer’s problems stem from a turbulent world and a gloomy economic backdrop. He has won praise for rallying international support for Ukraine and persuading U.S. President Donald Trump to sign a trade deal easing tariffs on U.K. goods. But at home, he has struggled to bring down inflation, boost economic growth and ease the cost of living.

Despite a huge parliamentary majority that should allow the government easily to implement its plans, Starmer has been forced to make multiple U-turns on contentious policies including welfare cuts and mandatory digital ID cards.

Starmer has been through two chiefs of staff, four directors of communications and multiple lower-level staff changes in Downing Street. The prime minister’s powerful chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, resigned Sunday over the decision to appoint Mandelson. Communications director Tim Allan left the next day.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar then held a news conference on Monday and called for Starmer to resign. If other senior party figures had followed, the pressure would have been impossible for Starmer to resist.

But none did. Instead, Starmer’s Cabinet and parliamentary colleagues posted apparently choreographed messages of support. They included former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Health Secretary Wes Streeting, considered the two most likely challengers for the top job.

Then, came a highly charged meeting with Labour members of Parliament, where Starmer impressed many with his sense of resolve. Lawmakers in the room said that the mood, initially skeptical, became supportive.

“It was clear he was up for the fight,” said Chris Curtis, one of more than 200 Labour lawmakers elected in the 2024 Starmer landslide.

Temporary reprieve

Starmer appears to have more political lives than Larry the cat, who has outlasted five prime ministers during 15 years as “chief mouser” in Downing Street.

But his respite is likely to be temporary. Many Labour lawmakers remain worried about their reelection chances if the party’s dire opinion poll ratings don’t improve.

Some female party members feel particularly disappointed by Mandelson’s appointment. The Labour leader of Wales, First Minister Eluned Morgan, called revelations about Mandelson “deeply troubling, not least because, once again, the voices of women and girls were ignored.

“That failure must be acknowledged and confronted honestly,” she said, while offering support for Starmer.

Labour faces potential electoral setbacks at a Feb. 26 special election in what was once a party stronghold in northwest England, and in May’s elections for legislatures in Scotland and Wales and local councils in England.

And rivals are still plotting. The Guardian reported that an “Angela for leader” website backing Rayner briefly went live last month by accident. Streeting, whose genial relationship with Mandelson is now a weakness, released messages he’d exchanged with Mandelson before and after the ambassadorial appointment, seemingly in an attempt to show the men weren’t close friends.

The exchanges include implicit criticism of Starmer, with Streeting writing that the government had “No growth strategy at all.”

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said that Starmer had “bought himself some time” and challengers were “keeping their powder dry” for the moment.

“It’s very difficult to image after the shellacking that the party will presumably face in May, him continuing to lead the party much beyond this summer,” Bale said.

Though in British politics, nothing is impossible.

“There are problems with the other candidates,” Bale said. “It’s never an ideal situation for any party to be choosing a prime minister in midterm, and it may be that the Labour Party decides, better the devil you know. I suspect that Keir Starmer will go, but who knows?”

In 18th- and 19th-century Ireland, it was common for courting couples to exchange gifts to mark their developing relationships. Many of these items are familiar gifts today: books, cards, items of clothing, jewellery and sweet treats. Others, however, are less familiar. In fact, some of the gifts exchanged by couples in the past might give many today the dreaded ick – especially those items of the hairier variety.

While you might be familiar with the tradition of mourning hairwork jewellery that was made and worn to remember deceased loved ones in the Victorian era, hairy tokens were traditionally a gift exchanged between couples in love. In my new book, Pious and Promiscuous: Life, Love and Family in Presbyterian Ulster, I explore the tradition of gift-giving among courting couples in Ulster – from hairy tokens to food and clothing. The book reveals for the first time the personal stories that shaped the rituals of Presbyterian family life in 18th- and 19th-century Ulster.

Gift-givers thought deeply about what to gift that special someone. Items exchanged in courtship were carefully chosen because different gifts had different meanings. Whereas shirts were understood to symbolise friendship, items like gloves – which covered the hands and fingers – were associated with marriage.

Those on the receiving end also had to consider whether or not to accept these tokens. Accepting a gift from a would-be suitor indicated that the receiver shared their romantic interest. Refusing a gift communicated the opposite. The tradition of gift-giving could also be used to break off relationships. When a relationship failed, people were expected to return any gifts that they had received.

The most special token that a person could gift was their hair. As a physical piece of a person that would outlast their human life, a lock of hair symbolised immortal love. Locks of hair were generally gifted by women to men and sometimes at the request of their male suitors.

Men might write to their beloveds and request that they enclose a lock of hair in their next letter as a token with which to remember them. Locks of hair could be tied into neat plaits and fashioned with a ribbon, enabling the lock to keep its shape. Hair could also be pressed into jewellery or placed in the back of miniatures.

The recipients of these hairy tokens would engage with them both physically and sensorially. Locks of hair could be rubbed, stroked, sniffed and gazed upon as the recipient thought about the person who had sent it. Given their size, these little hairy tokens could also be secreted inside of clothes and worn next to the heart, or placed under a pillow and slept upon, enabling the recipient to dream of its hairy bestower.

A hairy fetish

Some people appear to have had a real appetite, perhaps even a fetish, for hairy gifts and tokens. Robert James Tennent (1803–80), a middle-class man who came of age in 19th-century Belfast, is one such example. Catalogued among his papers at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast, is an extraordinary archive of hairy treasures, each seemingly representing a woman with whom he had some sort of romantic connection.

What makes Tennent’s collection so intriguing is its size. It contains 14 locks of hair, each wrapped individually in a small handmade envelope. At one time the collection may have been even larger. Among the items is an envelope, now empty, bearing the label “Hair”, which possibly held a lock of hair that has since been lost.

The hair itself varies dramatically in colour, condition and care: wisps of fine blonde hair; neatly tied plaits of brown hair, fashioned with pink string; and unshapen masses of dark hair streaked with grey. The collection also contains a broken ring.

In 2022, I published a paper on Tennent’s hairy treasures in which I theorised that he kept and curated the collection as a trophy cabinet of his past romantic (and sexual) adventures. I argued that the collection served the purpose of a handmade and homemade pornographic archive that Tennent could revisit to transport himself back to pleasured memories and experiences.

Evidence for this view is inscribed in the collection itself. Twelve of the locks are labelled, telling us the name of the woman to whom the hair belonged. We can identify ten women in total. Eleven of the locks are also dated, recording the day, month and year that they were received by Tennent. The collection was assembled between 1818 and 1827, when Tennent was between 15 and 24 years of age.

Tennent’s archiving efforts betray his philandering lifestyle when a younger, unmarried man. There is a considerable overlap in the dates that the different locks of hair were collected. In fact, at least two locks of hair were received into his collection at the same time that Tennent was courting his future wife, Eliza McCracken. The pair were involved in a rather bumpy courtship from 1826, eventually marrying in 1830.

Whereas item nine in the collection labelled “Hair of Lucretia Belfast” is dated December 13 1826, item 15, belonging to Ellen Lepper, is dated June 26 1827. A lock of McCracken’s hair is also included in Tennent’s collection; a partly unrolled plait of brown hair bears the label: “Eliza, Where is the Bosom friend dearer than all.”

That Tennent returned to these tokens to revisit his bachelorhood is suggested by the physical state of some of the items too. A lock of hair attributed to Miss Catharine Louise Lawless (dated November 10/11 1820), may have once been tied into a neat little plait. It is likely that the plait has come undone overtime due to excessive touch.

So, if you find yourself stumped, browsing the shelves this Valentine’s Day for the perfect gift for your other half, perhaps the answer lies atop of your head. Hairy tokens might not suit everyone’s taste today, but they remind us that love and how we express it has always been intensely personal.

From locks of hair twisted into plaits and encased in jewellery to chocolate hearts and handwritten love notes, the tokens we give carry meaning and memory. Love and affection, then as now, is an expression of our intimate sides and can occasionally be a little hairy.

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The retail chain, which has been in Darlington since August 1922, will close in April 2026. No exact date has yet been announced.

It was reported last month that closing down signs appeared on windows of the store, with items now 20% off full price (exclusions apply).

The chain announced on Friday, January 30 it would be closing, after staff were told earlier in the week.

Darlington Borough Council previously said the announcement was “disappointing” for town centre shoppers.

It is the second time the retailer has announced the closure of the town centre store, after previously publicising its intention to close in 2024, before the building was purchased by a new owner. 

The store will close in April 2026 (Image: THE NORTHERN ECHO)

Store bosses later signed a deal in March 2025 to extend House of Fraser’s stay in the town centre by a further 12 months.

The news of the store’s closure came three months after plans were approved to convert the former Binns store, on High Row, into six separate units.

Last month, residents and shoppers said the closure will “rip the heart out” of Darlington.

Anne Weatherall, an 88-year-old Richmond resident said she was “sad” about the news.

“I’m old and I remember it as Binns. I think it’s sad when everything is closing and going online,” she said.

Woodham resident Steve Poad, a former retail worker, was worried about what it could mean for the town too.

Steve, 70, said: “It’s a real shame. Without the building Darlington is going to be dead.”I think Darlington will lose its character.”

House of Fraser has been contacted for comment.

Miller Homes will build their new Maplebrook development at a site on Meikle Earnock Road

A 7.5-acre site in Hamilton is to be developed for housing, with 64 new properties to be constructed and the first residents set to move in at the end of the year.

Miller Homes has announced its acquisition of the site at Meikle Earnock Road for its new Maplebrook development, which will consist of three- to five-bedroomed properties and is due to be launched this summer with a showhome then opening in autumn.

The company says it marks 25 years of building in the town, following previous developments including Highstonehall Park and nearby Highstonehall which were both completed in 2025, and described the latest project as a “significant milestone”.

Maplebrook is described as providing energy-efficient homes, with five house types including terraced, semi-detached and detached.

The company says the new Hamilton site “reflects Miller Homes’ long-standing presence and commitment to the area”, adding: “Over the past quarter-century, Miller Homes has helped create thriving communities across the region, and the team is excited to bring forward a new neighbourhood as part of its continued investment in South Lanarkshire.”

Regional operations director Andrew McArthur visited the site, in a growing residential part of the town, to mark the acquisition announcement; with the company saying the first properties are scheduled for completion in November.

READ MORE: Hamilton pupils’ artwork welcomes visitors to housing developmentREAD MORE: Former Lanark Grammar building being redeveloped into flats

He said: “As we mark 25 years of building in the area, we are delighted to be bringing forward our next development in Hamilton.

“With demand for energy-efficient family housing remaining strong, we will maintain our focus on identifying and investing in land opportunities that support the area’s expansion and align with our regional growth strategy.

“The acquisition of Maplebrook further strengthens our land position in the west of Scotland, and this latest purchase will enable us to continue delivering the new communities that South Lanarkshire requires.”

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