Redcar and Cleveland Council says "urgency" forced it to sign the short-term contract.

Police say Tomasz Dembler could have been killed weeks before.

Listen to BBC radio commentary from Saturday's action in the National League.

Jordan Bell died in hospital two weeks after he was struck by Dominic Robson during an argument.

Youths have been shouting obscenities and vandalising the family's car.

Hull City are within touching distance of automatic promotion to the Championship after a draw with third-placed Sunderland.

Follow live text updates from Wednesday's seven Championship games, including Rotherham v Middlesbrough.

Newcastle Falcons sign back-rower Carl Fearns from French Pro D2 side Rouen with immediate effect.

Earlier this month the venue received a £3m loan from the government's Culture Recovery Fund.

Daniel Holland
Local Democracy Reporter

An investigation is under way to find out why the River Ouseburn in Jesmond Dene turned frothy at the weekend.

The Environment Agency said it does not appear to have had a negative impact on local wildlife.

The organisation has asked people not to put anything containing chemicals down surface-water drains, which are designed for rainwater run off.

It's not the first time the Environment Agency has been called in to investigate strange goings on in the Ouseburn.

In 2011, huge volumes of white foam were seen in the water and traced upstream to a pipe near Salters Bridge – with suspicions that it may have been caused by a detergent being poured down a drain.

Police say the car "perched precariously" on the van was "one of the most idiotic things" they had seen.

Local Democracy Reporting Service
Stuart Arnold

The leader of Redcar and Cleveland Council has defended its IT security over a cyber attack, which left it without online services for weeks.

Councillor Mary Lanigan said: “There was nothing wrong with our systems – this was a foreign attack that came into Redcar and Cleveland. It had a ransom attached which we did not pay.”

The cyber-attack is estimated to have cost more than £10m and left about 135,000 people without online public services in February 2020.

Councillors are confident conditions attached to the payment of a £3.6m government grant intended to help with the costs of the cyber attack will be met.

It will be paid to the council early next month but all, or some, of it could be clawed back if conditions are not met.

They include the authority providing an independent assessment by the end of September on work undertaken to recover from the cyber attack, and a financial assurance review, commissioned by the Local Government Secretary Robert Jenrick’s department to be completed by the end of July.

Councillor Glyn Nightingale, cabinet member for resources, said: “Some of the work has already gone into fulfilling these conditions in order to provide the government with due diligence so it could assess whether we [got] any money or not.”

Ms Lanigan said: “We tried to get as much money as we could [from the government] and it has been a tremendous effort from Redcar and Cleveland to get that done.”

Police issue a fresh appeal for help to find who killed Andrew Stones, who vanished in October.

Youths have been shouting obscenities and vandalising the family's car.

Stuart Whincup
BBC Look North

Police on Teesside have praised the vast majority of reopened pubs, bars and restaurants for doing their best to follow the coronavirus rules.

This weekend saw queues on streets and packed outside seating areas, with people meeting for the first time in months, as restrictions eased.

Sarah Best from Dr Watson's said Saturday night was had given them some challenges.

"It's totally crazy, it's like being in a playground, it's like trying to keep the customers seated and trying to keep the customers from not retaliating because they're not used to drinking and it's like a different world to what we were before the pandemic started," she said.

Officers were on patrol across the town checking premises were trying to keep people safe while trying to build up their businesses again.

Julie Spensley from The Dickens, where a queue had formed while people used track and trace to check in, said it was a good atmosphere

"Everybody's really happy, everybody has been really, really good, we can't believe how good everyone has been," she said.

Cleveland Police says it will continue to encourage and explain rules to licensed premises but will take enforcement action if premises don't follow the law.

A couple who won £1m on the National Lottery have decorated and donated bird boxes to a Newcastle school.

Kate and Darren Donaghey are among a number of winners who have been making the bird boxes for Thomas Bewick School in West Denton, which looks after children with autism.

Pupils at the school, who include the couple's children, will be able to watch the birds nest and chicks hatch via a camera system installed in one of the boxes.

Image source, National Lottery

More than 40 bird boxes have also been given to the school, so the children can decorate them and put them in their gardens at home.

The young are "less likely" to drink at "risky levels" than the middle aged, a campaigner says.

Cleveland Mountain Rescue Team says it is seeing the busiest start to its year for a long time, with volunteers called out nine times in nine days.

The team says it's a 41% increase on the average for the same period across the previous three years.

Call-outs have ranged from weather-related ones at the beginning of the year, to a couple becoming stranded on Roseberry Topping after deciding to climb it in high winds at night.

As lockdown restrictions are relaxed and more people venture out and about, Gary Clarke from the team said: "If it continues that way for the rest of the year we'll either equal or surpass our record year."

He said most people have been well prepared.

"This last group of call-outs we've had three walkers who were all kitted out with correct footwear et cetera and it's just very simple to slip and fall, in these cases they were all broken legs, and we had a man on Saturday who was properly kitted out and well prepared and he was taken ill on the day," he said.

Image source, Cleveland MRT

A man and a woman were held on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving, police say.