Police are appealing for information about a sexual assault in Hereford as a woman was using a cash machine.

It happened outside the HSBC Bank in High Town, at about 2.35am on Saturday, 31st August.

The 21-year-old victim had withdrawn some money when she was grabbed from behind and pulled to the ground but managed to get the man off her and get to her phone to call 999 at which point the man then ran off through High Town in the direction of Commercial Street.

She described him as Asian, 5ft 6ins in height, of slim to average build and with short dark brown hair.

At 12.45am on Monday, 2nd September, police were alerted to a man seen acting suspiciously near a woman using the cash machine at the Natwest Bank in Commercial Street. A man was arrested nearby, but police are trying to trace the woman.

Detective Constable Mel Reynolds of West Mercia Police said: “We are appealing for witnesses to the first incident when the town was quite busy, despite the time of night. Pubs and clubs were closing and there were lots of taxis in the area at the time.

“We are also trying to trace the woman in the second incident as she may have information which would be of benefit to the inquiry.”

A man was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and is currently on bail pending further inquiries.

Anyone with information is asked to contact DC Reynolds at Hereford CID on the non-emergency number 101 quoting incidents 94-s-310813 or 17-s-020913 or ring the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.

Urban village group have had their plans for a 10 one bedroom apartments next to the Freedom Church in Coningsby Street Hereford.

Quote from HT: Gareth Scannell, Sanctuary’s development manager, said: “These will be high quality affordable homes, designed to meet the needs of those requiring supported accommodation in Hereford.”

 

I will be upgrading the whole site over the next few weeks, so if you see the odd glitch please just ignore it until I announce that the upgrading process is complete.

I will be extending the site to cover the whole of Hereford, I have been asked to do this quite a few times by some members and I think it's the only way forward, if we are to continue growing our membership.

I have registered another domain herefordvoice.co.uk - Hereford Voice will be our new name


If there is anything that you would like to see or forums that you would like added or any features you think you would like, now is the time to ask and If I can accommodate, of course, I will.

You may see the forum turned off from time to time but this is quite normal when upgrading (can't start a process if a member is in the middle of posting) but once that particular section has been completed the forum will be turned back on, so you may see new features popping up.

Finally, if you look at the forums as they normally would appear click HERE (You will see the top 6 recent posts at the top then all of the various forums listed below, on here however, I have what is called a 'Portal' installed, (Front Page) which allows articles and pictures to appear just like a newspaper, I also need to upgrade this, so again, if everything looks like it has disappeared, don't worry, it's only me messing with the Portal, just go into the forums as normal, photo's and files still appear inside individual topics.

Any questions, just ask.

New service contracts for the county commenced yesterday for those looking after the county's highways, buildings and streets.

Herefordshire council undertook major procurements earlier this year to deliver the new contracts with the local authority spending more than £20m each year on these services.

The council says that new agreements will save £2.4m as part of its overall plan to reduce budgets.

The most noticeable change change will be the roll out of the new Public Realm Services contract with Balfour beatty Living Places.

Balfour is now looking after the county's highways maintenance, street lighting, traffic signals,street cleaning,parks and public rights of way,design services and fleet maintenance.

People will begin to see the new vehicles around the county this week.

The other major contracts to be awarded are building repairs and maintenance which will be provided by Interal UK LTD. and building cleaning services, which was awarded to Initial Facilities Services.

Both these contracts will be for an initial three year term.

I thought you might all enjoy this;

Man who created own credit card sues bank for not sticking to terms

http://topinfopost.com/2013/08/12/man-who-created-own-credit-card-sues-bank-for-not-sticking-to-terms

Summary;

He renegotiated the contract on a credit card (junk mail) proposal, sent it back with his terms, they didn't check it, signed it and sent him the card 0%, unlimited. Then he fined them nearly £60,000 every time they tried to fine him for late payments etc. Went to court, the judge found in his favour. He's now looking to take them to the cleaners for breach of contract.

The banks defence... "We didn't read the small print". 

They don't like it when the shoes on the other foot do they!

I am very annoyed with Hereford council for selling off the Merton Meadow Car Park for house building and not ensuring that the one thousand or so Long stay car park is replaced. When I wrote to them they said the old market site will have 600 new spaces. What they forgot to mention was some were going to be for the new supermarket at 2 hours max and the other would be short stay Car Parking. I have family that work in town and can not afford to pay £1.20 per hour out of their minimum wage to park. One of my family works for Tesco and they can enjoy free parking. Nurses, High Street workers, office staff and college students rely on the long stay car park. This is just another tax on the high Street worker! The transport strategy is that they don’t want cars coming and staying in the middle of town, this immediately begs the question as to why they would build another supermarket there? I know owners of homes in Whittern Way already complain that some students’ park there and they can’t park outside their own homes. How will Belmont residents feel when they have the same problem?

I was very pleased to see a great article in this weeks Hereford Times. Colin James has highlighted the problems that many parents face when trying to photograph their children.

Hereford dad wants to end camera bans at school and public events
Hereford Times Article


A HEREFORD father wants to end the bureaucracy he says has left him with no memories of his children to look back on

Colin James, from Belmont, is sick of being told he cannot photograph his children at various school and public events.

Now the father-of-two, who just this month was prevented from filming his teenage daughter in a stage performance, has launched an online petition and Facebook group in protest.

People will frown at you the second you get out your video camera, they look at you like you are some sort of criminal.

Well done Colin good effort
Stand for Councilor in May, you have my vote!

I have just come back from the Information Centre to pick up a copy of the Journal, only to be shown a letter from the Journal office stating as from next week the Hereford Journal is no longer FREE, there will be a cost of 45p per copy to members of the public, this will come into effect next week. They are also looking for new outlets for the journal to be picked up from.

Taken form the HT.

Amey has been awarded a multi-million pound contract to deliver water servicesin the county for the next six years. The firm will take on responcibility for repairing and maintaining around 20,000km of clean water pipes, as well a meter installation and new connections in the area served by Welsh Water. The £108m contract will commence in October and will run for six years.

Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear, l do hope this is not the finished article. This is worse than before. It has now become a health hazard.

A couple of thoughts...

Firstly wasn't there talk recently about changing the bin collection to fortnightly? Well I put out my bins this week, one from a week and one from 4 days, and they were dripping with maggots. The bins are sealed, so it must have been one rogue fly as I'm very careful about that because I can't stand the smell, maggots or flies. Needless to say the smell was repulsive. And this is on weekly collections, surely it's not a good idea to change to fortnightly? We're going to end up with streets piled with rotting flesh and maggots like the Victorian times..... what is it with the city and going backwards?

The second observation was that the bins are generally collected after 10am, yet at around 9am, what sounded like, a road sweeper goes around the streets. Surely it would be better to send the sweeper around AFTER the bins have been collected as they often have burst contents or windswept rubbish that has been left behind.

My God! I've just this minute logged in and I can see that there are a whole bunch of H.T. Posters who've registered with Colin James and the good people of Belmont Voice.
To those who don't pay any attention to the Hereford Times Posters, and personally speaking I can't blame you, we've gone on strike.
Our demands were to not pay us, give us no fringe benefits, treat us with the contempt we all deserved and reinstate one of our comrades who'd been banished into the ether.
The management of the Hereford Times had no difficulty whatsoever in agreeing to the first three demands but alas, thus far, they have refused to release the rotting corpse of our fellow poster who was thrown off the site and allow him/her to be reinstated.
Untill they reinstate this poster or at the very least post us his finger, a toe or better still, his right clubbed foot, we have downed tools, not that we have any, and are refusing to post. Sadly for the good people of Belmont Voice, the banished poster and his/her colleagues have built there nest here amongst you.

Since my colleague announced his/her arrival, I've been thinking about this issue and perhaps I am wrong in my personal approach to these very important social issues.

What we could do, and it'd require some work, would be to gather up all our homosexual men, lesbian women, our bisexual community and those others who have some other sexual orientation and tell them that, 'whilst you all are not as normal as us, hence the reason we've gathered you all up here together in High Town, what's bloody left of it, we want you to know, that despite the fact you are not as normal as us, we want you to enjoy the same rights as everyone else. How about that Biomech? That'd be sure to sort the whole issue out.

We could go further, instead of ticking the box that asks about sexual orientation, we could simply pose the question, 'Are you normal or are you abnormal'. That would cut down on administration and it'd certainly make the collation of social information more straightforward.

Yeah! This idea of normality is beginning to win me over. Of course, when they protest and say,'this is unfair and we feel humiliated', we simply say, 'but your argument is flawed, you cannot have children. You need a normal person to produce your offspring which confirms why we now choose to call you abnormal'.

That'd sort it all out!

Information I received from Amey

Some of the bus routes which school pupils will be travelling when the new term starts in September, you will see in the attached a lists of roads where Amey will be carrying out tree works (some crown lifting and balancing of trees within South Wye)to facilitate double decker buses travelling through.

 

Works are needed to facilitate the safe passage of the buses and so need to be done promptly. The following streets which is indicated in RED will be done first, YELLOW second, no colour when required.

 

Newton Farm

(RED)

 

The Oval both sides

Masefield Ave

Charlton Ave

 

YELLOW

 

Waterfield road.

 

Redhill

(no colour code)

 

Ross road,

Marlbrook road

Walnut tree Ave

 

Putson

(RED)

 

Winston road.

However, as tree works of any kind are often emotive any queries / complaints please contact me.

If you, like me, are sick of the way the ruling council cabinet is taking decisions, please sign my petition:

Over the past three weeks I have requested Amey to carryout works in Newton Farm, Hunderton and Belmont, the flaying of trees and undergrowth along the whole of the GWW will be completed by Friday this week,lighting has been checked and repairs done where needed, a meeting has been arranged with the PCC Mr Longmore to take place next week to ask for CCTV on the GWW.I Will update you on this after the meeting.

The Newton Brook in Newton Farm is in the process of being cleared and trees cut back, this work will carry on into Hunderton, The Brook From Northolme road through and along the CH7 in Belmont will be done at the same time, Amey is aware of a Badger set in Northolme road so care will be taken not to disturb the Badgers. The trees / undergrowth and grass will also be cut in Glastonbury Close open space along the boundary. This additional work I have requested will be completed within the next two weeks.

The trees and undergrowth will be cut back where necessary along the Shaw Walkway, also I have had a site meeting with Phil Pankhurst from Amey in the past week to look at the condition of trees in the nature reserve in this area
some work will be carried out.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the following people Neill Davies, Phil Pankhurst and Adrian Hall for work that has been carried outso far, and in the process of being carried out.

I have been on a site visit this morning in Newton Farm, Hunderton, Belmont and GWW with Amey checking work in process.

This seems like a good place to ask as I believe there are a number of councillors present.

This is something that has always baffled and upset me - why do we pay VAT? Well no, I know why we pay VAT, because the government want more or our well earnt money.

Really my question is, what do we get in return for the VAT that we pay? Where is the "Value"? What "value are we getting?

While I'm sure it all goes towards the big pot of public spenditure, that's not really the issue.

Let's say a small business that is not VAT registered sells.... little plastic Colins and Bobby47's for £10 each. And then company number 2 who are VAT registered sell the same figures, at either £10 or £12. Now what extra value are we getting by paying either the same or extra for the same product?

This is not intended to offend anyone but I just could not resist, but does the new Mayor of Hereford in this picture look remarkably similar to Widow Twankey in the other ha ha