A Kent dog owner faces an anxious wait to see if his Staffordshire bull terrier cross will be put down after it attacked another man.
He’ll learn next month if a court has decided Demba will be destroyed following the alarming incident near Whitstable.
Also in today’s podcast, the family of a one-year-old who unexpectedly died says the wait for answers and “missed opportunities” has prevented them from grieving.
During five hospital visits, medics missed the fact the “happy and always smiling” child suffered an undiagnosed and extremely rare heart condition.
Families have hit out at a former mayor and gravestone manufacturer over ‘long delays’ in getting memorials for their loved ones.
Several people have spoken up, including a sister and mother who say they have been left waiting for nearly two years to get a headstone.
Doubts have been raised over whether a town will get a promised new leisure centre, following a change of political leadership.
During the last months of the Conservative administration at Maidstone council, the cabinet committed to providing either a completely new leisure centre or carrying out a refurbishment – but that’s now up in the air.
And you can hear from the Gillingham boss after their pre-season friendly victory over the weekend.
Mark Bonner says he’s going to continue to push his squad as they face a run of fixtures in the lead up to the start of their League 2 campaign.
Can't online news news you can trust. This is the Kent online podcast. Kate Faulkner. Hello. Hope you're okay. Thank you for downloading today's podcast on Monday, July 22nd. Coming up today, we'll hear from a charity about how the summer school holidays can be a challenging time for parents across the county. We'll also hear from the Youjillingen boss after their pre-season friendly over the weekend, but first taking a look at our top story today, a dog owner from Kent is facing an anxious way to see if his Staffordshire Bull Terrier cross will be put down after it attacked another man. Lucy has been following this story for the Kent online podcast. She joins me now. Lucy, first of all, what can you tell us about the attack? Well, Anthony Flaxman had driven to Swail Cliff to take his dog, Denver, for a walk on March 2nd. The 61 year old says Denver jumped out and ran off as soon as he opened the car door and then ran out of sight. Surely after the stuffy, ran towards Connor Frost, who was walking his dog in the area and began acting aggressively. Mr Frost managed to pull his own pet to safety before trying to bring Denver under control, but he suffered a scratch on his arm and was bitten between his thumb and forefinger. So all of this happened while Anthony Flaxman was still looking for his dog. What happened when the police showed up? When officers arrived on the scene, there was no owner to be seen. Denver was taken to a kennel and has stayed there for the last four months. Flaxman, who lives in Long Rock, was later arrested and charged with having a dog dangerously out of control and coursing injury. He's appeared in court and has been ordered to obtain a report from the vet on how dangerous the dog is. Depending on what the court decides, they could impose a destruction order or impose one that would see Denver put down only if they were breached. The sentencing for Anthony and Denver is on August 30th. Thanks Lucy. Kent Online News A man in his 20s has suffered life threatening injuries after being hit by a car in Broadstairs. He was walking along Fairfield Road yesterday lunchtime when he was knocked down by a black Nissan cashed guy, which stopped at the scene. The man was blown to a London hospital for treatment. Three men have been arrested after reports. Another was taken to hospital after being attacked in Canterbury. Police were called to Headcorn Drive just after 5pm last Thursday. It's alleged the victim was attacked after stepping out of his car. Officers have since arrested three men aged between 19 and 25. They've been released as investigations continue. It's been reported that border force officers have reportedly seized a yacht following an incident involving asylum seekers in the channel. The government agencies Hurricane Vessel was seen towing the small boat into Dover on Saturday before securing it in the harbor. It comes as more than 1100 people have crossed the channel in the past week, bringing the total to almost 15 and a half thousand for the year. Kent Online News The family of a one year old boy who died at a Kent hospital say the wait for answers has prevented them from grieving. Archie Squire was taken to Margate's QEQM several times last year, suffering from constipation, breathlessness, sweating and stunted growth and investigations found missed opportunities to recognise an abdominal cardiac shadow on an x-ray before his death. There were also delays in accepting GP referrals and inconsistent documentation, and a date for the full inquest still hasn't been set. A dog has been rescued by firefighters after getting stuck in a drain in Favisham. Bramble fell into a stormwater sewer and got lost in the system. Crews had to lower a bag for the cocospanial to jump in. He was then lifted up and reunited with his owner. Now, as the school holidays get underway, it's claimed nearly a third of parents here in the southeast are worried they won't be able to afford to provide three meals a day for their children. A survey has been carried out by action for children. Jo Lane is from the charity. At Action for Children, we help hundreds of thousands of families and children every year and we see on a daily basis how difficult it is for so many of those families to make ends meet. That can be particularly acute over the summer. Families with children obviously have more mouths to feed. They have activities to pay for. That might include childcare. They might need to take time off work to do that childcare as well. People over summer, families of the children really feel that financial pinch. As you say, that includes struggling to afford food. That's particularly stark because school cantines close and only some parents get direct help with food costs in the southeast. Our survey told us that around a quarter of parents are worried that they will have to use a food bank this summer and nearly a third are concerned about putting three meals a day on the table for their children over the summer break. I was reading as well this idea of an unhealthy holiday. Can you talk me through what that means? I think that for parents going into the summer feeling worried about their finances face a range of stresses and those will range from the emotional impact of that. They can't give their children the activities. They want around two and five are worried that they won't be able to afford a holiday. That rises to over half in the southeast. That unhealthy holiday is a combination of the food that they will be able to feed them and the activities that they will be able to provide to support parents. Parents really feel that emotional impact of they want to give everything they can to their children. They want their summers in particular to be that magical, memorable summer where their children are having that sort of rich experience that they're eating well, that they're doing activities that they'll remember and enjoy. For many, many parents despite all the budgeting they do all year despite often cutting out themselves to provide for their children are really, really worried that they're not going to be able to provide that. A campaign is underway to boost supplies at food banks in Kent head to kmfm.co.uk to find out more about tons of teens. Meanwhile, action for children also surveyed parents about how they're feeling about their chances of getting away for a break over the next six weeks. More than half of parents fee, they won't be able to afford a summer holiday with around 700,000 families estimated to have never gone away. 27% of those surveyed by action for children plan to take unpaid leave or go off sick. 52% say their budgets couldn't stretch to even a short break. Daniel Smith is from Deal. He says he's lucky to have the coast nearby, but that's not without challenges. I'm a really outdoorsy person. I was able to be an outdoorsy person when I was a kid. I always was out and about at different clubs or the summer holidays was always a really exciting time for us. So yeah, I think I would really like to be able to take though around the country really and see some of the things that I want to offer in the UK. But yeah, and absolutely I'd love to take her away. You know, further afield, I would love for us all to be able to go abroad. It's ridiculous really, isn't it, when you think about it? Like actually, regardless of whether you look at going on holiday in the UK or whether you look at going on holiday abroad, it's a similar cost really. And it's just not viable. I think, you know, we, we wonder about kind of paying the bills each month, let alone kind of putting money aside to go on holiday. We're, we are fortunate in the sense this year we, we are, we get married at the end of September. And our honeymoon is essentially four days away in Wales, which has been paid for by everybody else as a wedding gift. So yeah, it's disheartening to thinking it's hard to think actually and quite stressful to think about. Actually, if we were to even sit down and think about planning a holiday, it's stressful in itself because it's like, well, where do you even find the money to put that aside to pay for a holiday? If we look at what's happened over the last 14 years, not only have we prices increased, but actually we've lost the ability to take advantage of what's on our doorstep. Kids clubs and things like that throughout the summer have just disappeared over my adult lifetime. Like whereas when I was a kid, there was always something to go to as a kid. And I did interestingly just looked earlier on and thought about it actually, what can people send their kids to? And I think it's easier when you've got toddlers like my, my little one, her age, she's happy to be with us all the time and she's happy to be on the beach or she's happy to be walking or happy to be doing an activity that we've created at home. But when you get to sort of 11, 12 years old, your kids don't want to be with you anymore. They want to go off and explore and have that independence and that's a form of natural development. Now, those things, and I looked earlier, like if you want to send your kid away off summer school, it's like, you know, a couple of thousand pound. That's not, that's not viable. Whereas when I was a kid, we used to have things that were like happening in school that during the summer or, you know, the beer, it'd be things that you could get involved with that was actually run through the government, through youth groups or through charities or whatever. And people had some things during the summer that meant that the weight of trying to pay for a holiday abroad wasn't so, wasn't so heavy because they could plan things out like going down to, you know, going to clubs or to groups or whatever and enjoying the summer in, in the UK, whereas that's even that now, it's just majorly expensive to stay at home. You know, we're, we're really lucky. We live for 10 minute walk, 20 minute walk from the beach. So we're really lucky that we have that resource on our doorstep that we can access, but it's still, even if you think of just remedial things like the cost of ice cream's going through the roof, the cost of drinks going through the roof, it, it all mounts up. And that then makes you as a parent and as an adult, it makes you think to yourself, well, can we actually afford to walk down to the beach, which is free and enjoy ourselves and stay hydrated and do all the things that we want to do and not be stressed about it? Kent Online News. Doubts have been raised over where the Maidstone will be getting a new leisure centre. The previous Conservative Administration promised to provide a new one or refurbish the one at Mote Park by 2031, a coalition of green, independent and Lib Dem Councillors have been running the Authority since May. They're reluctant to commit to the plan as they review their spending budget. A gravestone manufacturer in East Farley has been criticised as some families have been left waiting for nearly two years to get a headstone for lost loved ones. Several people say they've paid deposits of more than 700 pounds to the stone shop and struggled to get in touch with the owner Gordon Newton. He says he's now retired and passed on all business to the Phoenix marble and granite store in Dorset. Kent's own a new Conservative MP has been telling us more about her ambitions and journey through politics. Katie Lamb was elected for the brand-new 'Weald of Kent' seat at the general election. She previously worked for Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunaka and Suella Braverman, and says her priority is protecting the countryside for local residents. Speaking on the Kent Politics podcast, she's also shared details of her family's history and how they fled Nazi Germany. My grandmother came to this country when she was 13 years old and her family were journalists and politicians. They were left-wing journalists and politicians actually. They were socialists in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and there were fierce critics of Hitler and of the Nazis and so when they came to power they were stripped of their citizenship. My great-great grandfather, many of the family were in prison. My great-great-grandfather jumped out of his second-floor prison cell and sort of crawled to Czechoslovakia on a broken ankle. I've been to see the prison. It's amazing. They set up a resistance radio station in Czechoslovakia as was. They broadcast back over the border. They were raided by the SS. One of the operators was shot dead. So eventually they came to freedom in England. My grandfather's family, who were Dutch Jews, lived in Amsterdam, were almost exclusively murdered in the Holocaust. They were killed in Auschwitz and in Sobbibor. So when I was a child and when I was growing up, politics and the power of politics was something that we took very seriously and had quite a reverence for. We were cynical about politics in my family because we had seen for good and for bad what politics can do. You can hear the full interview on the politics page of Kent Online. Kent Online News. Two roads in Paddick Wood are going to be closed for six weeks as work continues to replace water pipes. Get ridges Hill and Chandler's Hill will be closed from tomorrow for the second phase of the 900,000 pound project. Southeast water say teams will be working extended hours in order to minimize disruption. A shop in Dover that's been empty for 14 years is finally being brought back into use. The unit on King Street has been taken over by a new owner who's turning it into a florist and coffee shop works underway to get bunch and lunch ready to open. Thousands of tree covers on the Isle of Shepey are said to be removed after calls on the council to have them cleared. Around 5,000 trees were planted alongside a development in East Church but eventually outgrew the covers littering a woodland after initially saying it wasn't responsible. Swale Council was now set up a community volunteer date this Friday to help collect and remove the covers. A housing association is being urged to keep its promise to clear an overgrown alleyway and part of Chatham. Sue Abner spent 14 years begging MHS homes to tackle the site in Oliver Close in Luton which she says is overrun with rubbish and rats. Bossers say they'll be sending someone out to look at it. Kent Online News. Now a couple who were the first to get married at a makeshift church in Kent have returned to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Patricia and William O'Connor met by chance after becoming flatmates and renewed their wedding vows at St Thomas of Canterbury Church in Headcorn on Saturday. They've been chatting to our reporter Cara Simmons. Bill came over on a boat from New Zealand and I was already over here from New Zealand because I was born here but went to New Zealand when I was just a little girl. I got an English dad in the New Zealand mum who met in Italy during the war. So I was over here with my sister and we were flatting and north eventually actually and my friend who I went to training college with came over on the same boat as Bill. So when we were looking for some flatmates she said I'll ask them about the guys that I met on the boat and Bill and one of the other guys came and flattered in the flat with us. So that was how we first met and we were just friends for a very long time before we started going out together. I only came for two years a day back home. That was my planet. I came with a mate just on a day out really and we'd take a two years' leave for our jobs to go back to our jobs teaching back in New Zealand. So that was my planet initially that never happened. Still here. So the wedding, what was that like? I know it was the first wedding in that church ever. So take me through what was it like? Was it had you had a lot of people come with you? What was your dress like? It was actually quite a small wedding. My parents were over here at the time. My dad was over here with his job. So that's why the wedding was in head corn. So it was mostly my family. They weren't any of Bill's family. Just him and a few friends. What is your secret to a long marriage? The most important thing is love, which gives you the goodness and patience and all those sorts of things. But we also feel that an important part of our marriage is faith because we're both Catholic and we've always been part of the church community where we've lived. That's been a big important part of our lives, hasn't it? Yes, but four beautiful daughters has been a very important part of our lives. We're very lucky to have four wonderful daughters and now we have seven lovely grandchildren and an eight from the way. It probably took us 15 minutes, 20 minutes to really get to grips with their shape. We worked a little bit this week thinking what we might come up against, but we just struggled to deal with a bit of rotation and a bit of movement early on. But we got to grips with it. Some of our defending on the ball, round the ball was very good. We knew the game would be a bit more of a counter attack out of possession day for us really. We worked quite a lot on that this week, which was a good opportunity for us to test ourselves. We had some good moments. There were some good chances in the first half, dragged a few wide, a few set plays. Goalkeeper for us, both goalies haven't really been troubled in terms of saves, but we've had to defend a lot around our box and a lot of penalty box entries, but we did that quite well. I thought we'd be dangerous in counter attacking situations. We scored two good goals. We looked fitter and more organised than last week, which is obviously important. I'm really pleased with some of the individual performances, especially when you're playing the team that I think that was their fourth game, it's our second. We've got a bit of a mixed match of players still, quite a few young boys getting good minutes, some out of position and some for the first time. Really good exposure for them. That's what it's all about, seeing who can step up at the moment in the early part of the season. So yeah, nice with halfway through pre-season. We're in a decent enough spot, but long way to go yet. Staying with football and Mark Bonner says he's going to keep pushing the squad as they continue with their pre-season training. He's trying to build fitness during an intense program of friendly matches. They're taking on dart for tomorrow night before facing South End United on Saturday. To cricket, an England have completed a series victory over the West Indies. They won the second test by 241 runs at Trent Bridge, wrapping up the match in four days. Kenton Zach Rawley opened the batting for England but only scored three runs across both innings. That's all from us today. Thanks ever so much for listening. Don't forget you can follow us on Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok and threads. You can also get the details on the top stories, direct to your email each morning via the briefing. To sign up, just head to Kentonline.co.uk. News you can trust. This is the Kenton Line Podcast. (dramatic music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
