内容摘要："This gives us an opportunity to focus it on a very specific cohort of children.

"This gives us an opportunity to focus it on a very specific cohort of children.

Two publicly owned swimming pools earmarked for closure next month have been reprieved after opposition councillors won a crucial vote to block the move.They also pressed for repairs needed to keep Park Pool in Ormskirk and Skelmersdale's Nye Bevan Pool open for the next five years.

The vote at Wednesday's full meeting of West Lancashire Borough Council in Ormskirk was a defeat for the ruling Labour group, which had insisted it had no other option but to reluctantly shut the pools.The outcome of the vote means the local authority will now have to hold a special budget meeting to amend its spending plans.said opposition to the pool closure plans came from the Conservatives, the local Our West Lancashire party, and former Labour councillors who now sit as Independents.

They said strong public opposition to closing the leisure facilities, expressed in a winter consultation exercise, should be respected.Opposition councillors have asked a senior director to report to their next full meeting with proposals for repairs to the two pools "to ensure continued operation for the coming five years".

They also called for a cross-party working group to:

Earlier, Labour councillors Carl Coughlan, who has a leisure services remit, and Mark Anderson, responsible for finances, acknowledged the depth of public feeling over the issue."Those services are a real lifeline for people needing to get into Taunton for college, or medical appointments or to catch trains and the consequences of losing them would have been unimaginable.

"I am absolutely delighted at this outcome and I would only urge those many, many people who campaigned against the cuts to start taking the bus more often as the best possible method of showing their true support for the services."An American man is being held in Russia after airport security discovered cannabis-laced sweets in his luggage, according to Russian state media.

The 28-year-old man, who is not named in the reports, is facing drugs charges after he was arrested at Moscow's Vnukovo International Airport last week.According to Russian state news agency Tass, a drug-sniffing dog alerted security to one of his bags which was then found to contain two jars and a plastic bag of cannabis products.