July 23 (UPI) — The Houthis in Yemen claimed responsibility for two attacks on Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea with missiles and drones.

The Iran-backed Houthis, who have been fighting for control of Yemen, claimed on Wednesday that they had hit the Encelia and the Layla oil tankers, which they said were violating their blockade of Saudi ships. They had announced the blockade on Monday.

Saudi Arabia’s transportation authority confirmed the attack on the Encelia in a statement. It said there was a fire on board but the crew were all safe. It didn’t mention the Layla.

Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said the group promised to continue naval operations and would continue “enforcing the ‘siege for a siege’ equation,” the BBC reported.

The Houthis claimed they had also forced “10 ships to retreat and return.” That claim could not be independently verified, The Times said, but at least six vessels reversed course in the Red Sea on Monday and Tuesday after the Houthis warned shipping companies to avoid Saudi ports, according to Kpler, a maritime data company. It was not clear if those ships were part of the Houthis’ claims.

The Saudis and the Houthis have been in an effective cease-fire since 2022. But last week, tensions flared when the Houthis accused the Saudis of striking the airport in Yemen’s capital Sanaa. The spat came from a dispute when an Iranian plane had tried to land at the airport.

The Houthis then attacked the Abha airport in Saudi Arabia.

When the Houthis announced the “maritime embargo,” they didn’t give many details. But a media official said they would close the Bab al-Mandab Strait. That strait is on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula from the Strait of Hormuz. It’s the gateway between the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, and blockades of both straits would cut off Saudi Arabia ships entirely.

The United States and Iran continued to trade attacks for the 12th consecutive night after the cease-fire between the two countries ended.

Inflation has fallen both in the UK – down to 2.6% in the year to June helped by slowing diesel and petrol prices – and in the US to 3.5%.

But questions remain whether the slow down will prove short-lived due to the renewed conflict in the Middle East.

New data released on Thursday showed that UK petrol prices have risen by 5p a litre since the beginning of July, hitting reaching almost £1.56.

Diesel is at £1.72 a litre, on average, according to the RAC.

Average gasoline prices in the US have surpassed $4 a gallon once more, up from $3.92 a month ago, according to motorist advocacy group AAA.

“More expensive fuel and energy can ripple through the wider economy, increasing costs for businesses and ultimately feeding through into the price of food and other goods,” said Jonathan Raymond, investment manager at Quilter Cheviot.

“This creates another headache for central banks as they continue their battle against inflation.

“If energy prices remain elevated, policymakers may come under pressure to keep interest rates higher for longer or even raise them. This would come as a blow to mortgage holders and borrowers already feeling the strain.”

The Bank of England, which sets UK interest rates, has held them at 3.75% in its last four meetings.

Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said he believed the Bank will “almost certainly” hold them again. But he said analysts still expected that interest rates could be cut next year if energy price rises ease.

Kevin Warsh, the newly-appointed chair of the US Federal Reserve, last week told Congress that the central bank had “no tolerance to persistently elevated inflation”.

US President Donald Trump had pushed Warsh’s predecessor, Jerome Powell, to cut interest rates.

Trump has made it clear he expects Warsh to fulfil his demand for reductions in borrowing costs for Americans.

But the Fed held US interest rates between 3.5% and 3.75% at Warsh’s first meeting last month. He also told Congress that he was committed to “restoring price stability” in the wake of the Middle East conflict impacting prices.

A NEW 34-mile coastal path linking two pretty English villages has opened today.

It will give hikers access to previously unwalkable routes and forms part of a huge coastal path project.

A major new 34-mile section of the King Charles III England Coast Path has officially opened today, Thursday July 23.

Running between Foxfield and Greenodd, the opening of the path is the latest milestone in completing the 200-mile coastal stretch from Gretna to Silverdale, on the Lancashire border.

The new opening now brings the grand total of walkable Coast Path in the North West to around 208 miles.

Those looking to walk the path will be treated to charming coastal communities, nature reserves and historic industrial landscapes.

COAST TO COAST

Fascinating UK hol spot with 2 coasts, secret seaside pools & hidden beaches

IN DEMAND

‘Old school’ seaside town with cheap hotels set to be popular this summer

When fully complete, the King Charles III England Coast Path will become a 2,700-mile stretch around the entire English coast.

The National Trail route is set to be the longest managed coastal walking route in the world.

From today, walkers can now explore the new section of path located on the eastern edge of the Furness Peninsula.

The new section of path is a key milestone in the delivery of the 70-mile stretch of coastal route from Silecroft to Silverdale.

Winding through a number of coastal communities, visitors will pass by Kirkby-in-Furness, Askam-in-Furness, Barrow-in-Furness, Bardsea and Ulverston, before crossing the Leven Estuary.

The route also offers views of Morecambe Bay and passes the end of the Ulverston Canal.

Walkers can also spot a number of distinctive slag banks, sand dunes and an abundance of wildlife along the path.

The delivery of the new path will move visitors away from previously unavoidable shores, leading to a greater discovery of the area’s coastal landscape.

Natural England deputy director for Cumbria, Claire Argent, said: “The Furness Peninsula is one of those places that genuinely takes your breath away, whether you’re watching the light change across Morecambe Bay, listening for curlews over the estuary, or discovering the layers of history tucked into these coastal communities.

“This new stretch of the King Charles III England Coast Path gives people the chance to experience all of that on foot, safely, sustainably and responsibly, whilst learning about and caring for our wonderful landscapes and nature.

“We’re proud to see this route taking shape and look forward to completing the full 200-mile Cumbrian stretch.”

The path is located on a mix of existing public rights of way, permissive access routes and new access.

Councillor Adrian Waite said the project was a “huge job” which required “securing contracts and permissions, specifying work, getting quotes, managing the contractors and liaising with landowners”.

The cabinet member for Environmental Services and Transport at Westmorland and Furness Council said the teams had put in “more than 300 signs and waymark posts, 10 sets of steps, 23 bridges, around 60 gates” and five kilometres of fencing and surfacing.

Anyone looking to grab their hiking boots and try out the coastal path is reminded to follow the Countryside and Coastal codes when walking the route.

Travellers are also warned to exercise caution around Morecambe Bay, as fast-moving tides and quicksands in the area could be dangerous when venturing onto sands and saltmarshes without an experienced guide.

A wartime science fiction thriller is available on BBC iPlayer and viewers are hooked

A World War I drama hailed as “brilliant” by viewers is available to stream now.

The Sentinels, an eight-part French wartime sci-fi series from STUDIOCANAL, has been snapped up by the BBC and can currently be viewed on BBC iPlayer.

Starring Louis Peres, the series was drawn from the graphic novels Les Sentinelles by Xavier Dorison and Enrique Breccia and is billed as an “adrenaline-drenched steampunk-style thriller”.

It follows a soldier, played by Louis, who who has been injected with a super serum and joins an elite unit on a mission to end the fighting.

“At the outbreak of World War I, Gabriel Ferraud – a gravely wounded soldier – is recruited into a top-secret French military programme designed to create the ultimate weapon: enhanced humans,” said a synopsis.

“After being injected with a mysterious serum, Gabriel gains extraordinary strength, speed, and resilience. He joins an elite unit known as the Sentinels – augmented soldiers forged for the front lines.”

However, as the conflict goes on, Gabriel discovers “a terrifying truth”.

“The Sentinels is a fully immersive war drama, drenched in adrenaline,” said Nick Lee, head of BBC programme acquisition. “Prepare for something totally different and unforgivingly entertaining.”

The series has won over viewers, with one posting on IMDb.com: “If you like superheroes (antiheroes), war movies and aren’t afraid of some action with a touch of grim dark sci-fi in a first world setting… then you’ll love this!”

Another wrote on review site Rotten Tomatoes: “This is absolutely brilliant if you’re into war dramas, thrillers and superheroes. The characters are well developed, both protagonists and antagonists – there’s three main storylines which are all equally compelling, and the action set pieces are entertaining bringing all the gritty brutality of fighting on the Western Front combined with the dirty combat. All in all, something different to the usual.”

“I thought this show absolutely ruled and hope to see more seasons,” another viewer commented on Reddit.

“This was a really great watch,” agreed somebody else. “Loved the costume design, and the action wasn’t cringy and badly done like a lot of shows.”

The Sentinels is available on BBC iPlayer.

A CLOSED theme park set to become a new housing development will reopen for one last hurrah.

Camelot Theme Park in Chorley was once a beloved theme park for families but closed back in September 2012.

Now, a huge event has been announced for the abandoned park before it disappears for good.

Scare City – who are responsible for some of the best scare events in the UK – are planning to open its “largest, darkest and most psychologically brutal evolution to date” at the park.

As part of the experience, visitors will be able to see areas never seen by the public before, including a never-used entrance.

The event will be spread across nine different zones, of which many of the themes are yet to be announced.

Read more on travel inspo

SO FLY

Our fave beach hols under 5 hours from UK with Caribbean dupes & £2 bottles of wine

ALL IN

I found the best value all inclusive London hotel… just £55pp with free food & booze

One zone confirmed is CarniValley, which will feature outcasts and a carnival-like atmosphere, albeit more creepy.

However, Scare City has confirmed that it will be the “most intense event yet”.

Adding on its website that: “What was once a kingdom of rides and laughter has become a sprawling nightmare of darkness, fear, and chaos.”

There will be towering outdoor sets, different pathways to the scare zones, live actors – and they will all be in the decaying former attractions of Camelot.

Scare City has been running at Camelot for the past five years, but this will be the last year before the abandoned theme park is turned into a large housing estate.

The event will run from September 26 to November 7.

New research shows more Brits have visited the Eiffel Tower than some of Britain’s most iconic landmarks, with cost of living and lack of time cited as the main barriers to exploring closer to home.

Britons are more likely to have visited landmarks overseas than those on their own doorstep, according to new research.

A survey of 2,000 adults found that more people have laid eyes on the Eiffel Tower (55%) than some of Britain’s most beloved landmarks, including the Tower of London (54%), Tower Bridge (53%) and Trafalgar Square (52%). The findings also revealed that people were better at identifying foreign landmarks than those closer to home.

More than three quarters (78%) of respondents could identify the Eiffel Tower, while 71% recognised the Leaning Tower of Pisa and 61% could identify Rome’s Colosseum. By contrast, fewer people were able to recognise St Paul’s Cathedral (58%), Westminster Abbey (53%) and Edinburgh Castle (52%).

In honour of these landmarks, Railcard.co.uk, which commissioned the research, collaborated with ‘Sand in Your Eye’ to craft a variety of attractions and famous sights from across Britain in sand. The sculpture was revealed on Blackpool promenade and will stay there for the public to view until the weekend.

Constructed using 12 tonnes of sand and taking three days to complete, the creation showcases the attractions topping Brits’ wish lists: Tower of London (22%), Edinburgh Castle (18%), Stonehenge (18%), Eden Project (18%) and Scotland’s Loch Ness (18%).

Catherine Lyver, from railcard.co.uk, which commissioned the research to encourage Brits to make the most of British landmarks by offering a third off travel for adults and 60% off for children, said: “It’s easy to overlook the iconic landmarks and hidden gems on our doorstep, yet Great Britain is full of incredible places to explore.

“We’re encouraging people to do a third more with their break, making it easier and more affordable to tick off some of the bucket-list-worthy destinations closer to home.”

“Whether you’re still looking to tick off historic favourites like the Tower of London or have added the modern Eden Project to your list, there are plenty of opportunities to make your summer go further when you travel by train.”

The overwhelming majority in the OnePoll.com survey for railcard.co.uk (79%) said they would like to discover more British landmarks – but the cost of living (43%) and lack of time (33%) are the primary obstacles preventing them.

When visiting British landmarks 23% will travel by train, because it’s relaxing (59%), more convenient (46%) and don’t have to worry about parking (43%).

THE 10 MUST VISIT ATTRACTIONS IN BRITAIN:

1. Tower of London
2. Edinburgh Castle
3. Stonehenge
4. Eden Project
5. Loch Ness
6. The British Museum
7. Buckingham Palace
8. Lake Windermere
9. Windsor Castle
10. Jurassic Coast

Unity Holidays has three parks across the UK that still have availability over the summer holidays – and they’ve got a food and drink offer on too

The summer holidays have officially descended upon us, and with the British weather actually offering up some sunshine and balmy temperatures, it’s no surprise that most of us are dreaming of our next staycation.

If you haven’t got anything locked in yet, the good news is that there are still plenty of tempting deals to be had, including one chain of holiday parks with family breaks under £400 including school holiday dates.

Unity Holidays recently gave its parks a £10million transformation to include new features such as lidos, splash parks, trampoline parks, dog agility parks and an array of activities from axe throwing to archery, so it’s worth having them on your radar. All alongside the likes of bars, restaurants, watersports, playgrounds and even soft play, it’s easy to see why it could be a hit with families on a budget this summer.

The brand has three sites, with prices for a family of four during the holidays from £209. That includes its Unity Beach in Somerset from £396, Skirlington in Yorkshire from £399, and Seven Lakes from £209, all of which can be booked on unityholidays.co.uk.

But that’s not all. For those who want to stretch their budget that little bit further, there’s more good news. For every summer break booked between July 3 and September 28, 2026, Unity Holidays are offering a £100 food and drink voucher that can be used at any of the venues on site (excluding the grocery stores). To claim the voucher, simply use the code UNITY100 when you book on unityholidays.co.uk.

Unity Beach’s brand new lido opened earlier this month, unveiled by former Olympic swimmer Baroness Sharron Davies MBE. The resort’s new lido, water park and festival gardens represented an £11million transformation, with the lido offering a capacity of over 400, with two heated pools including one specially designer for children. The holiday park already boasts an indoor pool, an indoor splash zone for Under-16s, two indoor water slides, and three more slides outside.

Baroness Sharron, who won an Olympics silver medal in the 400m individual medley in 1980 as well as two Commonwealth Games gold medals, said at the opening: “At a time when we are seeing the amount of swimming facilities in the country dwindle – we’ve lost 500 since 2010 – to have Unity Holidays investing millions in pools and lidos across the country, and creating jobs for local people, is tremendous.

“They are enabling children to gain water confidence and learn to swim, while giving families a stunning location to enjoy amazing spaces to play and relax.

“Our seaside towns need this injection of funds, and I was honoured to officially open the lido and water park in Brean while also seeing first-hand how impressive what a modern, 21st-century family holiday park has to offer can be.”

Unity Holidays isn’t the only firm to be offering up some tempting last-minute getaways.

For example Haven has three-night breaks from £179 if you’re booking over the next few days or even for next week, while Parkdean Resorts has last-minute breaks from £269 in late July. Butlin’s also has some last-minute availability for July with family breaks from £198.

FAMILIES were left disappointed as the main attraction at a seaside town was forced to close significantly sooner than expected.

A lengthy farewell message was issued to the community, thanking locals for their support.

Eastbourne beach has said goodbye to the popular Sky Club Wheel following the announcement it was closing for good.

The attraction was only opened to the public in April 2025 and following the announcement of its closure, it was intended to be operational until September 6.

However, the ride’s final day has already passed, July 20, almost seven weeks earlier than intended.

Eastbourne Council has previously confirmed the attraction was closing due to “commercial considerations.”

RACE YOU

Real-life Mario Kart attraction that lets you race your friends to open in UK city

IN DEMAND

‘Old school’ seaside town with cheap hotels set to be popular this summer

A spokesperson for Sky Club Wheel said: “It is with a heavy heart that we announce that Sky Club Eastbourne has now closed permanently.

“We’d like to sincerely apologise to everyone that was hoping to visit us again before the end of the season. Unfortunately, we had to close earlier than expected.

“To everyone who has visited us over the years – thank you. Whether you rode with family, friends, or simply came to enjoy the incredible views, you’ve helped create so many special memories, and we’re honoured to have been a part of them.

“The support we’ve received from local residents, visitors, businesses and our amazing team has meant more than words can say.

“We are incredibly grateful for every ticket purchased, every recommendation and every smile shared with us.

“Although this chapter has come to an end, the memories we’ve made in Eastbourne will stay with us forever.

“From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for all your support over the years. We wish the wonderful town of Eastbourne all the very best for the future.”

A MAJOR airport has launched the first in the UK robot car parking.

Travellers are now able to save time and avoid searching for a free parking spot as they leave their cars in the hands of robots.

London Gatwick Airport has introduced the new Robotic Parking system, which uses state-of-the-art robots to lift vehicles by their wheels and transport them to a secure parking space.

Instead of searching for a bay, drivers simply leave their vehicle inside a private drop-off garage before heading to the terminal.

The robot then takes over, gently lifting the car from underneath its wheels and moving it to an access-restricted parking area.

One of the biggest differences from traditional airport parking is that customers keep hold of their car keys throughout their trip.

DRINK IT IN

Nine of the most beautiful pub walk routes across the UK

PASS ON

Family forced to miss £6.5k dream holiday to Egypt due to confusing passport rule

When travellers return, their car is brought back ready for collection.

According to Gatwick, the system is compatible with around 95% of vehicle models.

The robotic parking area is located on the airport site and includes 24-hour security patrols, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) at the entrance and exit, perimeter fencing, floodlighting, no public access and Park Mark Safer Parking accreditation.

The airport says the private garages are fully accessible and compliant with the Equality Act 2010, while the shuttle bus linking the facility with the terminal is also fully accessible.

Passengers using the service are just a short walk or shuttle bus ride from the terminal before beginning their journey.

A year after racking up more miles than any team in the NFL, the Chargers are homebodies.

For the first time in their 10 seasons in Los Angeles, they will open with back-to-back games on their home field — against Arizona and Las Vegas.

What’s more, one of their away games will be at SoFi Stadium, against the host Rams on Nov. 1.

Who knows if less time in an airplane will make a difference, but a franchise that hasn’t won a postseason game since the 2018 season will look for anything to change that trajectory.

It’s worth noting that Jim Harbaugh got his team to the playoffs in each of his first two seasons, and he has a history of turning around franchises in college football and the pros.

And, as they’ll show in training camp, the 2026 Chargers have made some significant changes.

Here are five things to watch in training camp:

Justin time

Chargers offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel speaks at a news conference on June 17.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

It’s the seventh season for Justin Herbert, and the star quarterback is on his fifth offensive coordinator. Will former Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel be the play-designing architect to push him over the top and get him that elusive first playoff victory?

Already, McDaniel has done some tinkering and fine-tuning, tweaking Herbert’s footwork out of the shotgun formation to allow him to get the ball out of his hands a fraction of a second earlier. That should allow his receivers more time to turn up the field and bump up their yards-after-catch numbers.

The ball is coming out even before the receivers have turned their heads for it, and McDaniel has warned them the ball could hit them in the face if they’re not ready. It’s a way to neutralize the pass rush, too.

“If you’re getting the ball out quickly, there’s really nothing they can do about it,” Herbert said of defenders. “You’ve got to find a way to slow them down, and I think that’s just [McDaniel’s] way of taking them out of the game.”

Herbert has absorbed a lot of hits over the years, and he has leaned heavily on his arm strength too.

“In years past, you rely on your arm strength to put the ball exactly where you need to,” he said, “instead of trusting it and just throwing it to a spot and letting them go and get it.”

Next man up

Chargers defensive coordintor Chris O’Leary speaks at a news conference on June 17.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Jesse Minter did such a solid job as defensive coordinator of the Chargers that he was hired as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens. So in steps his protege, Chris O’Leary, who coached under him at Georgia State and Notre Dame before spending the 2024 season coaching Chargers safeties. Then it was off to Western Michigan for O’Leary last season, where he was defensive coordinator — a year of experience in that job before returning to replace the departing Minter for the Chargers.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s expected to be the philosophy of O’Leary, who tutored his Western Michigan players by showing them tapes of the Chargers.

That said, he’s probably not going to follow Minter to the letter. He likely will have the same coverage schemes and rely just as much on All-Pro safety Derwin James, but his defenses might blitz more than Minter’s (the Chargers were near the bottom of the league in that category in 2026) and will look to turn first-round pick Akheem Mesidor into a pass-rushing star.

Odafe Oweh, acquired during the 2025 season in a trade with Baltimore, will play for the Washington Commanders this season. Mesidor, a linebacker who played collegiately at West Virginia and Miami, was selected 22nd overall.

It’s all on the line

Chargers offensive tackle Joe Alt participates in a drill at minicamp in June.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

The Chargers have huge draft capital invested in their offensive line — including spending first-round picks on bookend tackles Rashawn Slater and Joe Alt — and that was supposed to be a strength of the team last season. That went off the rails early, however, with the team losing Slater to a season-ending injury in training camp and Alt soon after the season started.

The line wound up being a disaster with a reshuffled cast virtually every week. One of the few fixtures was center Bradley Bozeman, who Pro Football Focus rated 40th out of 40 players who qualified at that position. He retired after the season.

The Chargers have a new center in Tyler Biadasz, who was released by the Commanders in a cost-cutting move, and Alt (ankle) and Slater (knee) are cleared and ready to go. If this unit can stay healthy, it will look a lot different — and a lot better — than the 2025 version.

Beginning of the ends

Chargers tight end David Njoku speaks during a news conference on May 19.

(William Liang / Associated Press)

In the not-too-distant past, the Chargers had one of the NFL’s premier tight ends in Antonio Gates, enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame last summer. Since, the team has had more downs than ups at the position, although it saw some flashes last season from rookie Oronde Gadsden II, a talented pass catcher.

The Chargers got another infusion of promising tight ends in the offseason, acquiring free agents David Njoku and Charlie Kolar, both of whom thrived elsewhere.

Njoku was a gifted receiver and blocker in Cleveland, catching 81 balls and scoring six touchdowns in 2023. His numbers dropped off last season, though, as the Browns cycled through five different quarterbacks.

Kolar was more blocker than receiver in his four years with the Ravens, and he did that very well. When he did see passes thrown his way, he did a good job of reeling those in.

Oh my, Omarion

Chargers running back Omarion Hampton speaks at a news conference during minicamp on June 17.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

The rookie grade for running back Omarion Hampton? Incomplete. The 2025 first-round pick from North Carolina got off to a good start, including a 128-yard rushing performance at the New York Giants in Week 4, before sustaining a fractured ankle the following week that sidelined him for two months.

In his sophomore season, he should be running behind a far better line and playing for an offensive coordinator with a history of coaching running backs to breakout seasons. Look what De’Von Achane did under McDaniel in Miami, where he ran for 1,350 yards and caught 67 passes last season.

If Hampton can come close to that, he’ll be a popular fantasy pickup.

July 23 (UPI) — President Donald Trump said on social media Thursday that Saudi Arabia must sign the Abraham Accords as part of its nuclear deal with the United States.

Trump added that the nuclear deal will be approved but Saudi Arabia’s entry into the Abraham Accords is a required condition.

“The Civil Nuclear Deal (There will be no enrichment of material!) being made between the United States Department of Energy and Saudi Arabia, which pertains only to non-military use such as the ones that Iran and UAE (and others) already have, will be approved, but it is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” Trump wrote. “The United States is not opposed to Civil (Non-Enriched) Nuclear Facilities.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed the agreement on Wednesday. The Department of Energy says U.S. companies will benefit from the deal with involvement in establishing nuclear facilities in Saudi Arabia to the tune of billions of dollars.

The nuclear deal is to last 30 years and will involve the United States supporting Saudi nuclear development.

The Abraham Accords are meant to normalize relations between Israel and Arab nations in the Middle East, including the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia’s entry into the Abraham Accords would be a step toward a diplomatic relationship with Israel.

Saudi Arabia has called for progress toward Palestinian statehood, a sticking point that has drawn Israel’s criticism of the nuclear deal with the United States.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have also voiced skepticism over the nuclear deal, fearing that it may ultimately lead to the enrichment of uranium and plutonium for the development of nuclear weapons.

“This agreement will set off a nuclear race in the region, further disincentivizing Iran from limiting its own program,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., posted on social media.

Fatima ‘Teema’ Mahmud uploaded a short clip on her Telegram Status that morning; it showed a leaked intimate video involving individuals in northern Nigeria. The time was 8:13 a.m.; minutes later, she uploaded another one and another. By midday, she had uploaded dozens of similar pieces of content. By evening, there were hundreds.

Some of the updates advertised leaked, non-consensual intimate videos that had circulated across social media timelines in the region days earlier. Others promoted sex work services, paid erotic video calls, and private VIP groups featuring explicit videos of women, particularly northern actresses. Among them, and pinned prominently at the top of Fatima’s Telegram profile, were screen records of what she claimed were sexual and nude videos of children, advertised under paid access tiers.

The next morning, the cycle began again.

This reporting was never supposed to become an investigation into child sexual abuse material. It began with a simpler question: where do the leaked intimate videos that circulate on northern Nigerian social media end up?

Every few weeks, another such video appears. The names change, but the outrage follows a familiar script: WhatsApp groups begin asking for links, X users post screenshots before directing followers to Telegram, and Facebook pages recycle the same clips. For a day or two, timelines become courtrooms. Then attention shifts elsewhere, and the people at the centre of those scandals disappear from public conversation, but the links do not.

One such link appeared in May. An X account, now suspended, promoting what it described as a leaked intimate video involving a woman, instructed followers to continue on Telegram. Instead of downloading the material, HumAngle followed the trail, using a pseudonymous account to trace the same path thousands of other users take whenever another intimate video erupts across northern Nigerian social media.

For three months, HumAngle watched what that trail led to: an ecosystem that had evolved to survive platform bans, rebuild audiences almost overnight, and transform some of women’s most private moments into commercial products. Within that ecosystem, children appeared to have become one of its most valuable commodities.

Following the trail

It started with “Teematv” on X. HumAngle stumbled on the account promoting a teaser video following a scandal involving a Kaduna-based woman, whom HumAngle will not name to avoid re-victimising her. The X account claimed to have the “full video” and encouraged followers to access it on Telegram.

We created a pseudonymous account and followed the trail.

The first Telegram channel, “Teematv” (@teematv9), which is the main feeder channel and had over 40,000 subscribers before it got suspended in June, looked much as expected: pornography, leaked videos, and VIP subscriptions. But the longer the investigation continued, the less it resembled another anonymous pornography page. The channel did not exist in isolation. Every video and image posted linked to something else, and subscribers were encouraged to save the phone numbers provided by the administrators. “Add my contact,” she often tells subscribers. 

Once saved, these numbers unlocked Telegram Status updates, which promoted private VIP groups, which led to new administrators, who promoted replacement channels. When one account disappeared, another had already taken its place.

It felt less like browsing social media and more like walking through a marketplace where every stall owner knew the next. The journey was remarkably consistent, and the pattern held across every operator HumAngle traced; the public channels attracted attention, Telegram Status sustained it, and private conversations completed the sale. Each platform served a different purpose within the same business. X functioned as a storefront, where explicit clips and provocative teasers attracted attention and encouraged users to click through. Telegram became the marketplace itself, while WhatsApp and private Telegram conversations handled the transactions.

Looking closer, the structure reflected an operation built specifically to survive the content moderation it was navigating.

The pattern started with what appeared, and what did not appear, on X. Operators such as Teema used their X accounts to post pornographic clips into X’s video feed, content that the platform’s moderation has grown relatively permissive toward, and whose recommendation algorithm readily surfaces more of it once a user engages with it repeatedly. At no point during our three months of monitoring did HumAngle observe child sexual abuse material posted directly on X. 

Whether by experience or deliberate caution, the operators appeared to understand the distinction: ordinary pornography might slip through a platform that has relaxed many of its guardrails around adult content, but material involving children almost certainly would not survive there. The Telegram link attached to those X posts was, in turn, rarely the final destination. It served as an additional layer of security, requiring users to either save a phone number or send a private inquiry before anything further was revealed.

Only after that number was saved did the next stage begin, through Telegram Status. There, too, the same caution applied. Rather than posting material involving children directly, operators uploaded blurred collages or screenshots, with titles and scenes presented as proof that a fuller collection existed, along with a caption advertising group access and a price, directing interested buyers into a private conversation. Nothing that could be mistaken for the material itself appeared in a space Telegram or outside observers could easily flag; the proof of possession and the point of sale were kept one careful step apart. HumAngle observed screenshots of children naked and being abused.

The advertisements rarely remained online for long. Telegram Status updates disappear automatically after 24 hours, and the administrators appeared to exploit that feature deliberately, because the posts remain accessible on the profile itself to anyone who has saved their contact. On some days, one operator uploaded close to 200 Status updates, rotating through advertisements, teaser clips, and promotional graphics before repeating the process the following morning.

The result was a constantly changing catalogue. One day, the focus might be leaked intimate videos. The next, sex work services. Then paid video calls. Then another newly emerging leaked-video scandal that had just begun trending elsewhere on social media. The operators appeared to respond quickly to public attention: whenever an intimate video began circulating widely online, it often appeared inside the network within hours, repackaged as a commercial product, a short preview posted publicly with the full video available, administrators claimed, after payment. The scandals that dominated social media for a day or two became inventory.

Identifying the operators

There was one problem with Telegram usernames: they rarely lasted. By the time HumAngle finished documenting one account, another had often appeared. The usernames, invitations, and even profile photographs changed. But the people behind them did not.

To understand who was operating the network, our investigation moved beyond monitoring channels and focused instead on the digital traces the administrators had left behind, rather than the material they were advertising. The approach was deliberate: HumAngle had already decided it would not purchase access to private VIP groups or attempt to obtain any material advertised as involving children. 

Beyond the obvious ethical concerns, doing so could expose journalists to illegal content and compromise the investigation itself. Instead, we focused on the operators’ own mistakes, and the first was surprisingly ordinary: money.

Like any online business, the administrators eventually needed customers to pay. Across multiple Telegram channels and Status updates, Teema repeatedly instructed interested buyers to save a phone number before making enquiries or completing payments. Unlike her usernames, the number rarely changed. It became the first real-world lead.

A search through Truecaller, a popular caller identification service, returned the name “Fatima Mahmud”. One result was not enough, so the same number was cross-checked against Nigerian online banking applications, including OPay and PalmPay, both of which use registered phone numbers as account identifiers and display the associated account name before a transfer is completed. Both returned the same name. For the first time, the investigation had connected one of the network’s most active operators to a real-world name, confirmed through two independent verification methods.

Finding the person behind that name proved harder. Searching “Fatima Mahmud” and “Teema” on social media produced dozens of unrelated results, and many of the accounts connected to the investigation had already been suspended or had disappeared before they could be examined. So HumAngle changed direction, following relationships rather than names: Telegram usernames led to older accounts, older accounts led to replacement accounts, and replacement accounts led to suspended X profiles, each revealing another fragment of the same digital footprint.

The same process and the same dual verification through Truecaller and banking app records identified a second recurring figure in the network who used several online identities: Deejah, Nanadady, and Deharjah. Once again, the payment trail pointed to one name: Khadija Adamu.

Despite the frequent account suspensions and identity changes, traces of her activity remained visible. As recently as July 17, Khadija remained active. In a Telegram Status update, she told followers her phone had been damaged and appealed for financial support to replace it, posting her Union Bank account details. The account name she provided, Khadija Adamu Abubakar, was confirmed through a mobile banking application search, adding a third independent verification to the identity already established through Truecaller and her OPay and PalmPay records. Fatima’s administrator account was also active at the time of publication.

Khadija’s operation mirrored Teema’s in structure, but she operated across a considerably wider segment of the online sex trade, advertising leaked intimate videos, homosexual pornography, sex work, paid sexual video chats, sex toys, sexual stimulants, and VIP groups promoted as containing child sexual abuse material. Of that range, child sexual abuse material appeared to be one of her primary products, and her pricing across the board was consistently higher than Teema’s, with VIP access advertised at between ₦50,000 and ₦100,000. From what HumAngle observed, she made no attempt to obscure or apologise for any of it.

A further question remained: were the photographs attached to their profiles genuine? At first glance, they appeared convincing: young Hausa women in casual portraits and self-portraits, but reverse-image searches using Google Lens and facial-recognition software found that several did not belong to the account holders at all. Instead, they matched publicly available photographs of Hausa actresses and other individuals whose images had been lifted from elsewhere online. The people running the accounts had carefully concealed their own identities behind someone else’s faces.

Fatima addressed this directly in the description of her main feeder channel, Teematv (@teematv9), which had more than 40,000 subscribers before it was suspended on June 12. “I post pretty Hausa girls on my page. If you see your picture here, then know [that] you are pretty,” she wrote. “Some of you are complaining. I just leave compliments as the caption. I mean no harm. [It] is just for fun.”

A final search, this time relying on Facebook’s “People You May Know” recommendation feature after the administrators’ phone numbers were saved as contacts, surfaced a profile that strongly matched the identity already established for Khadija. Fatima’s case proved less conclusive; several profiles appeared, but none could be verified with sufficient confidence. The search stopped there. We do not possess the legal powers available to law enforcement agencies, but what the reporting established was enough: two operators had been identified through the payment infrastructure they themselves had created, and neither appeared to be working alone.

The product

The advertisements followed a consistent commercial logic, and the same pricing structure recurred across all operators and channels documented in this investigation.

Individual leaked Hausa intimate videos, after a short teaser had been posted publicly, typically sold for between ₦2,000 and ₦5,000. Buyers seeking larger collections were encouraged to pay for VIP memberships instead, which administrators claimed offered hundreds of additional videos. The advertisements suggested a tiered business: casual customers bought individual videos, regular customers subscribed, and those willing to spend more were offered access to increasingly exclusive groups.

At the top of the pricing structure were advertisements for group access explicitly involving children. Unlike the adult-content advertisements, which typically promoted individual clips, these posts promised something larger: a collection, membership, exclusivity. They were usually brief: a blurred collage or screen record, a short caption, sometimes only a few words, followed by a price. Most commonly, that price was ₦50,000, though some operators, like Khadija, advertised memberships as high as ₦100,000. The wording varied slightly from one administrator to another, but the sales strategy did not, and the same pattern appeared consistently across multiple Status updates, different administrators, and different channels over the three months of monitoring.

At first, HumAngle questioned whether the advertisements were genuine; exaggerated claims to lure paying customers are common online. But the consistency, repeated across unrelated administrators using nearly identical language, made coincidence difficult to sustain as an explanation.

Teema’s advertisements illustrated how the claims were built up over time. In a sequence of Status updates viewed chronologically, she claimed her VIP collection had grown from around 600 videos to more than 800, and eventually to over 1,200. HumAngle could not independently verify those figures, but documented them as part of the marketing strategy: growth itself had become a product, with a larger claimed catalogue used to strengthen the sales pitch.

The operators appeared to understand a basic principle of online commerce: that people rarely arrive intending to make their largest purchase but are guided towards it. Every stage encouraged the next. The channels resembled a subscription business more than an ordinary social media page. Only the product was different, and its advertisements did not appear hidden in obscure corners of the internet. They appeared alongside the same promotional posts advertising leaked intimate videos, prostitution, and paid video calls. Children were not presented as something separate. They were presented as another product category, another premium tier.

HumAngle also decided not to attempt to identify the children referenced in the advertisements. INTERPOL’s International Child Sexual Exploitation database, the tool specialist law enforcement units use to identify victims and offenders worldwide, treats abusive images and videos as evidence tied to real children, real locations, and real offenders, material to be handled by trained victim-identification specialists rather than pursued independently. Attempting to trace the children through the material risked compounding the harm the investigation was seeking to expose.

The network

For much of the investigation, Teema and Khadija appeared to be running separate operations: different Telegram channels, different X usernames, different pricing. It was easy to assume they were competitors. Then one Status update changed that.

While reviewing Teema’s Telegram Status one afternoon, HumAngle noticed she was no longer advertising her own channel, but Khadija’s. Only days earlier, one of Khadija’s Telegram accounts had disappeared or been removed before we could complete the documentation of its activity. The replacement account appeared almost immediately, and Teema introduced it to thousands of followers. Over the following days, the same promotion resurfaced repeatedly across dozens of Status updates before disappearing after 24 hours, only to return.

Tracing the followers who interacted with those promotions on X uncovered dozens of accounts exhibiting remarkably similar behaviour. When one profile disappeared, another announced its replacement. When Telegram removed a channel, fresh invitation links circulated through WhatsApp Status updates and newer Telegram accounts. The audience rarely needed to search; the network guided them. Investigators documented several accounts operating under different versions of Teema’s identity, including @teematv2 and @teematv3, with Khadija running parallel replacements under her own aliases.

Around them was a wider ecosystem. Channels such as AREWA GIDAN DADI, Arewagidanharkazallah, and Sadearharka surfaced repeatedly throughout the investigation.

HumAngle found no evidence that these accounts were all controlled by the same individual, nor could we establish that every operator knew every other one personally. What our investigation does establish is narrower but significant: the accounts consistently promoted one another, shared audiences, and directed followers towards replacement channels, forming a distribution network that platform bans repeatedly failed to disrupt.

The blind spot

The most surprising thing about the network was not that it existed, but that it appeared to operate in plain sight. The operators behaved less like people trying to disappear than people confident they would not be noticed. That raises a broader question: why did a network operating so openly prove so resilient?

Part of the answer may lie in language. Almost every account documented in this investigation communicated primarily in Hausa, and the cities referenced in conversations, such as Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Katsina, Sokoto, and Abuja, pointed overwhelmingly to audiences in northern Nigeria. This was not simply a Nigerian online marketplace; it was a Hausa-speaking one. 

Researchers have increasingly warned that many widely spoken African languages remain “low-resource” from the perspective of artificial intelligence and automated content moderation. While Hausa is spoken by tens of millions of people across West Africa, there are comparatively fewer linguistic datasets and moderation tools to help technology companies automatically identify harmful content in the language, meaning abusive or exploitative content can be harder to detect at scale than equivalent content in English. 

Nothing in HumAngle’s investigation suggests the operators tried to hide the language they used; on the contrary, their marketing relied on local expressions and reflected the culture of Arewa social media. The same characteristics that made the network accessible to its intended audience may also have made it less visible to moderation systems built primarily around better-resourced languages.

This is not a uniquely Nigerian, or even uniquely Hausa-language, problem. Investigations in other parts of the world have documented strikingly similar patterns, in which mainstream platforms funnel users toward Telegram-based child sexual abuse material (CSAM) marketplaces that survive enforcement through rapid replacement. 

A BBC Eye investigation published in July found that Instagram’s advertising system in India was itself directing a test account toward paid child sexual abuse material sold through Telegram channels, with material advertised for as little as the naira equivalent of one US dollar; Meta’s own moderation team initially cleared one flagged advertisement as compliant with its policies, and only acted once BBC journalists sought formal comment. 

A separate investigation by Sudan’s Ayin Network documented Telegram channels operating an almost identical structure to the one described here: administrators charging roughly $30 for VIP access to material described as exclusive, channels going dark after reports only to be quickly recreated with subscribers migrated across, and content sourced from economically vulnerable communities with little legal recourse. 

Malaysiakini’s Kini News Lab has separately described Telegram as functioning as a “dark mall” for this kind of material, in which promotional content on more visible platforms consistently routes interested users toward Telegram, where moderation is comparatively lighter. 

Another investigation, conducted by the Brazilian outlet Núcleo with the Pulitzer Centre’s AI Accountability Network, found dozens of Telegram bots capable of generating AI-manipulated child sexual abuse imagery, most operating despite Telegram’s own public commitments on child safety.

These investigations point to a recurring global pattern. Broader research suggests the problem extends far beyond the networks examined in any single investigation. Research conducted by UNICEF Innocenti, ECPAT International, and INTERPOL across 13 countries in Africa and Southeast Asia found that, depending on the country, up to one in five internet-using children aged 12 to 17 had experienced online sexual abuse within a single year. Social media platforms were among the environments where children most frequently encountered the abuse. 

Nigeria was not included among the countries studied, leaving no comparable national estimate of how many Nigerian children may be affected. UNICEF and the WeProtect Global Alliance have warned that online child sexual exploitation is becoming increasingly complex as offenders adapt quickly to new technologies, encrypted platforms, and gaps in national responses, arguing that effective responses require cooperation between technology companies, law enforcement, child-protection organisations, and governments, rather than isolated moderation decisions by individual platforms. UNICEF Nigeria has separately noted that violence against children increasingly occurs in both physical and digital spaces, while support for victims remains limited.

As we identified the operators of these accounts, an obvious question emerged: if journalists could trace those digital footprints using publicly available tools, what prevented authorities from doing the same?

Nigeria does not lack the relevant laws. The Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act criminalises the production, distribution, and possession of child sexual abuse material, alongside offences relating to the use of digital platforms to facilitate unlawful activities, including the non-consensual distribution of intimate images.

The Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act recognises image-based sexual abuse, and children receive further protection under the Child Rights Act and the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Enforcement and Administration Act. 

The activity documented in this investigation appears to fall squarely within conduct already prohibited under Nigerian law. Over three months of monitoring, HumAngle found no public record of investigations or prosecutions specifically targeting the Hausa-language Telegram ecosystem documented in this reporting, even as channels disappeared, replacement channels emerged, subscribers migrated, and the marketplace continued operating.

The threat was not entirely new to Nigerian authorities. In 2023, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) said it had observed increasing cases involving child sexual abuse material, sextortion, and revenge pornography, and had established a Cybersecurity Response Team, in partnership with organisations including Meta and the United States National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). That year, the agency said it was investigating six cyber-tip reports involving online child exploitation and sextortion, drawing on NCMEC’s CyberTipline, the centralised reporting system through which tech companies and the public flag suspected child exploitation to law enforcement worldwide. What remains unclear is whether the Hausa-language network HumAngle documented had ever entered that reporting system.

The network appeared to exploit precisely the jurisdictional and institutional gaps that researchers have long warned about: Telegram channels directed users toward WhatsApp, WhatsApp conversations led back to Telegram, and X attracted new audiences, with each platform seeing only one part of the picture while the operators appeared to see the whole. Platform enforcement removed accounts. Law enforcement, at least publicly, appeared largely absent, aside from the small number of cases NAPTIP said it was already investigating. 

What follows

Before publication, HumAngle shared its findings with Telegram and NAPTIP, seeking answers about the network, its operators, and the apparent gaps that allowed it to persist. The advertisements, the Telegram links, the payment instructions, and the phone numbers had all been public. The operators had made no effort to hide them.

In the Mid-City neighborhood where Syd grew up, lots of people now refer to this 34-year-old musician as the mayor.

“During COVID, I’d spend all day on the grass waving at everybody,” she says with a laugh. More recently, a bunch of “unruly teenagers,” as Syd describes them, have been doing doughnuts in the street near her parents’ house.

“I’m out there talking about, ‘Hey! Stop!’ I had one of my trucks parked in front, so I was like, ‘Y’all ain’t finna mess my s— up.’ But also they were hanging out the window — it was really dangerous.” She laughs again.

“I’m an old head when it comes to safety.”

Syd’s new album happily embraces a sense of maturity — of “feeling more sure of myself than I ever have,” she says. Released last week, “Beard” — the title was inspired by Syd’s wife’s request that she maintain the peach fuzz on her upper lip — sets thoughts of romantic commitment and professional achievement against gleaming R&B grooves that occasionally nod toward Afrobeats or bossa nova. It’s Syd’s third solo LP since she emerged nearly two decades ago as a member of the Los Angeles hip-hop collective Odd Future; it also comes eight years after her most recent album with the Internet, the Grammy-nominated soul-music combo she shares with Matt Martians and Steve Lacy (the latter of whom dropped his new “Oh Yeah?” on the same day Syd dropped “Beard”).

Yet for all the growing up she’s done, “ironically, I feel younger than I’ve ever felt,” Syd says. “Beard’s” blurry cover photo, which shows her shaved head and slightly doleful eyes, “captures exactly what I was trying to portray with the music,” she adds. “It’s kind of this nonbinary image, where if you’re looking at it and you don’t know who I am, you might wonder: Is that a 12-year-old boy?”

Syd and I are talking over coffee at a crowded spot on Jefferson Boulevard that she says she visits every day. (So many people say hi to her that I’m inclined to believe it.) The restaurant isn’t far from her house, which itself is just an eight-minute drive from her folks’ place; eventually, she says, her parents plan to swap homes with Syd and her wife, the model Simone Clay, so that the couple can fulfill their dream of becoming foster moms in the larger house.

“With all my privilege and with all the peace I’ve been able to create for myself, I would love to spread that,” says Syd, whose full name is Sydney Bennett and whose younger brother Travis (known as Taco) also came up through Odd Future before finding success as an actor.

Syd recorded “Beard” between a studio she built at her parents’ place and a studio in North Hollywood owned by Raphael Saadiq, the veteran R&B star whom Syd counts as something of a mentor. The singer says she can relate to the way Saadiq moves between making solo records, working in a band (in his case Tony! Toni! Toné!) and writing and producing for other artists, as Syd did on Beyoncé’s 2022 “Renaissance” album.

“Syd is just looking for things in music that are breathing,” says Saadiq, who plays bass and co-produced several cuts on “Beard.” “She keeps developing, and she’s not developing to be relevant — she’s developed because she loves doing it. People like Syd and myself, we’ve been at this since we were kids. We were the ones in the neighborhood who’d walk outside and say, ‘Anybody want to get on this track? Anybody want to play?’”

Songs on “Beard” like “Closet” and “My Love” reflect recent changes in Syd’s life, not least her decision to get hitched last year, which she attributes in part to an uncertainty about how long same-sex marriage will remain legal in the United States.

“You know the Supreme Court,” she says with a shrug.

She also quit drinking after realizing that she was waking up more often than not with a hangover. “People around me weren’t like, ‘She be drinking,’” Syd says. “But it was every day, and it was just at the crib. Everybody has a different relationship to it, and I found that mine was tied to boredom, which I think is probably better than it being tied to sadness. But that’s also what made it a little bit harder to call it a problem, you know what I mean? I had to realize: OK, this might not be a problem for someone else, but it’s not serving me.”

So two and a half years ago, she stopped — and on a holiday some can’t imagine without booze.

Says Syd: “I raw-dogged New Year’s Eve, bro.”

“Ironically, I feel younger than I’ve ever felt,” Syd says.

(Nabil)

“Beard” encompasses shifts in Syd’s business too. After fulfilling her contract with the Columbia label, the singer signed last year to Warner Records, where an old high school pal, Tim Hinshaw, oversees a boutique label called Free Lunch. The new deal inspired her to mix up her creative process and hold a songwriting camp with an assortment of writers and producers, among them the duo Nova Wav, who’ve also worked with Beyoncé; on “Beard,” the duo co-wrote and co-produced the hooky “Callin” and “Jasmin 17,” a lusty boudoir jam titled after the unisex fragrance. (Additional collaborators on the album include James Fauntleroy, Van Hunt, Rodney Jerkins, Big Sean and Jordan Ward.)

Given her high-profile gig writing and producing Beyoncé’s “Plastic Off the Sofa” — a sensual retro-soul number that went on to win a Grammy — I tell Syd that I assume the offers came rolling in immediately afterward to join other A-list acts in the studio.

“To be honest, that opportunity didn’t give me any more producing opportunities,” she answers, to my surprise. “Nobody was reaching out — like, ‘Hey, can I get beats?’” She’s not bothered, though, since what the experience did do was “give me the confidence to produce this album for myself.”

And anyway, she’s got a solo tour coming up, not to mention a long-awaited Internet LP to finish. The band has been recording intermittently at her place, and last month she spent a week working at Martians’ studio in rural Georgia.

“We’re closer than we’ve probably ever been,” Syd says of the band, whose drummer, Christoper Smith, put out yet another solo record on the same day as “Beard” and Lacy. Syd doesn’t want to reveal too much about the Internet’s new music. But she will say that so far the group has avoided using Auto-Tune, the vocal-processing software that she feels has become sadly ubiquitous.

“I want nuance, I want texture, I want the lack of perfection,” she says. “I’d rather mess up naturally than not mess up unnaturally.”

WHEN booking a city break, it can be hard to choose where to go with hundreds of cities to choose from.

Add in the fact that a lot are full of crowds most of the year round, the decision can feel a little like a minefield.

The good news, though, is that there are loads of cities that don’t have the crowds and still have loads to see and do.

Whether you want a history-focused city break or more of a foodie-themed holiday, here are some lesser-known city breaks for under £250 per person:

Ditch Lisbon for Coimbra, Portugal

Instead of heading to the crowded cities of Lisbon or Porto, venture to Coimbra, which used to actually be the Portuguese capital.

The city is home to one of the oldest universities in Europe, which is even a UNESCO World Heritage University.

Read more on travel inspo

SO FLY

Our fave beach hols under 5 hours from UK with Caribbean dupes & £2 bottles of wine

CHEAP BREAKS

UK’s best 100 cheap stays – our pick of the top hotels, holiday parks and pubs

To see the university itself, head to the 18th-century Joanina Library which has Baroque architecture.

Plus, the city is only an hour from Porto.

You could stay at Hotel D. Luís, which sits on the banks of the River Mondego in the heart of the city.

The hotel has 100 rooms with TVs, private bathrooms and complimentary toiletries and there’s even a restaurant in the hotel and a buffet-style breakfast too.

A three-night stay for two people between September 15 and 18, flying from London Stansted, costs £159 per person.

Ditch Rome for Bologna, Italy

Instead of heading to Rome, venture to Bologna in Italy.

Known for being a major foodie city, Bologna is loved for its restaurants selling fresh pasta as well as having hundreds of red terracotta rooftops.

Head to Piazza Maggiore, which is the central square in the city, and visit the unfinished Basilica di San Petronio.

In the city, you could stay at Savhotel Fiera, which features chic modern rooms – the hotel also has a restaurant and buffet-style breakfast, as well as outdoor terraces.

A three-night stay for two people between July 29 and August 1, flying to Forli (about a half- hour drive from Bologna) from London Stansted, costs £199 per person.

Ditch Brussels for Ghent, Belgium

Instead of going to Brussels, head to the city of Ghent, often considered Belgium‘s best kept secret.

In the centre of the city, you’ll find no cars, as well as fascinating architecture.

The city is known for its three towers – the 14th century Belfry of Ghent, St Bavo’s Cathedral and St Nicholas’ Church.

You could stay at the ibis budget Gent Centrum Dampoort, which is conveniently close to the train station with 119 rooms, each with a TV and there is also a bar and buffet breakfast.

A three-night stay for two people between November 8 and 11, flying from London Heathrow to Brussels (a 28 minute train journey away) costs £249 per person.

Ditch Budapest for Sofia, Bulgaria

Both Budapest and Sofia have lots of grand architecture with socialist-era buildings.

Yet, despite being the capital of Bulgaria, not many people head to Sofia for a city break.

But this vibrant capital is super cheap and has a lot to see including ancient Roman ruins and a bustling cafe culture.

If you love the outdoors, you can head to Vitosha Mountain as well, which takes under 20 minutes from the city centre.

You could stay at the Lopera Guest House, which is just a short walk from some of the city’ s main sights, such as St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which is just five minutes away.

Rooms each have a private bathroom, as well as all the other features you’d expect.

You could stay for three-nights for two people between September 27 and 30, 2027, flying from London Stansted for £159 per person.

Ditch Berlin for Tirana, Albania

Like the German city of Berlin, Tirana has transformed historical spots in the city into creative attractions, with former communist structures now home to art galleries.

Even though Tirana is the capital of Albania, you’ll be hard pressed to find a crowd.

When in the city explore the lively cafe culture and head to Bunk’Art & Bunk’Art 2 to explore declassified Cold War nuclear bunkers that are now home to museums.

You could stay at the four-star Hotel Boka, just a short walk from Skanderbeg Square – the city’s main square.

The hotel boasts 20 rooms, each with a TV and minibar.

There’s also a bar with snacks and then a continental breakfast in the morning.

You could stay for three nights for two people between December 2 and 5, flying from London Luton for £169 per person.

Ditch Prague for Vilnius, Lithuania

Much like Prague, Vilnius has a similar fairytale-like atmosphere with mediaeval churches, towering castles and cobblestone alleys.

The capital of Lithuania is known for its UNESCO-listed Old Town where you can head on a walking tour.

In fact, it is one of the largest surviving medieval old towns in Northern Europe.

You could stay at the Panorama Hotel in the heart of Vilnius Old Town.

The hotel has 224 rooms with views of the Old Town’s rooftops.

There is an onsite restaurant too serving European food and a bar, as well as breakfast in the morning.

You could stay for three nights for two people between October 6 and 10, flying from London Stansted for £129 per person.

ONE couple ditched pricey holidays to Thailand, Costa Rica and the Maldives for staycations – after renovating a carpenter’s van.

Andy and Claire Stocks, who hail from Barnsley, opted for UK road trips after deciding to buy a run-down van to convert.

The couple now go away every week and document their travels on their YouTube Channel – and they’ve just published a book It Started with a Van detailing all of their staycation adventures.

When the pair first ditched far-flung destinations for the UK, it’s safe to say their friends were dubious.

Andy explained: “People that knew us from before doing this would have never thought we’d be fans of motorhomes.

“We were always going to exotic places rather than staying at campsites.”

COAST EFFECTIVE

Best UK family theme & waterparks with cheap stays from just £3pp a night

DIVE IN

Mega waterpark hotels with EVERYTHING you ever wanted & all inclusive from £189pp

But since owning a van, which has since been traded in for a newer motorhome model, the pair have ventured all over the UK.

Claire admitted: “I don’t think we ever appreciated how beautiful the UK is and we go everywhere – one of my favourite places is actually Hartlepool.”

“We went with no real expectations but we saw dolphins in the sea there – it blew our minds.”

Andy added: “We’ve found some great waterfalls in the UK too – which we actually went all the way to Costa Rica to see.

“But actually there are loads in North Yorkshire like Janet’s Foss and Malham Cove.”

Other places they’ve explored are Glastonbury which Andy described as an “amazing spiritual town”.

In the Yorkshire Dales, the couple stopped by The Strid which as Claire explained is one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world.

When it comes to campsites, Claire and Andy like to mix it up from five-star sites to cheaper options with beautiful sea views.

Talking about one of their most memorable stays, Andy said: “There’s a campsite on the Isle of Mull called Fidden Farm.

“You turn up and can park wherever you like, but as it’s coastal, you stay right on the white beach.

“It has the best sunsets that you could possibly wish for and so wild – you get every season within around 15-minutes.”

Pitches start from £14 per night per adult, and £7 per night for children.

When it came to five-star stays, the couple said the Concierge Camping in Chichester was one of their favourites.

Claire admitted it’s “one of the best campsites I’ve ever been to”,

The campsite even has ‘award-winning washrooms’ which is perfect for those who don’t enjoy the classic camping toilet situation.

It has granite-topped wash areas, complimentary toiletries and lots of the facilities have underfloor heating.

Sun Travel found pitches from £73 per night.

On occasion, Andy and Claire head over to Europe. At one point they explored seven countries including Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, France, Belgium and Italy in two weeks.

And for anyone driving across to France in a motorhome, they suggest you check into an Aire.

‘Aire’ is short for the French term ‘aire de service’ – which essentially is a free or cheap motorhome camping area.

Andy explained: “We used Aires on a trip to Normandy, they’re really basic campsites but they’re about €10 a night so it’s a really cheap way to get around.”

Claire added: “You don’t have to book either, and they’re spotlessly clean and lots of them have beautiful views as well.”

“There’s a lovely one outside of Honfleur,” said Andy. “And from there you can just walk into the town.”

Talking about whether it’s made travelling any cheaper, Andy confessed it hasn’t as he never saw any return on his original van.

But he added: “I don’t talk about money – but it’s all experience. That’s how the book ends, it’s not about money, it’s about your life.”

The budget airline has confirmed it’ll be cutting the number of aircraft from one of its city bases by five, and its schedule will have two million fewer seats to a popular city break destination as of winter 2026

Ryanair has slashed the number of seats from its schedule for a city break destination that’s famous for its Christmas market and historic sites, as well as being a major business hub.

The decision was made in response to the country’s decision to raise aviation taxes, with Ryanair releasing a strongly-worded statement to announce they would be cutting two million seats from two of the capital’s airports.

The Federal Government of Belgium announced plans to raise the country’s aviation tax from €5 (about £4.20) to €7 (about £6) as of January 2027. This was erroneously described by Ryanair in a statement as a “250% increase since 2025.”

As a result, the budget carrier plans to cut five aircraft from its base at Brussels South Charleroi Airport, and reduce capacity by two million seats overall from Belgium’s Charleroi and Zaventem airports. The reductions will be applied to the winter 2026 and summer 2027 schedule.

Brussels is not the first destination to see a cut in the number of Ryanair seats this year. Earlier this year it announced reductions in services to Spain and Portugal, with smaller regional airports the most affected.

Valladolid and Jerez saw cuts to their services, while scrapped routes included Asturias and Vigo. A service to Tenerife North was also scrapped as a result of a dispute over airport fee hikes, leaving the airport with no alternative direct UK routes. Ryanair also closed its two aircraft base at Santiago de Compostela which reduced capacity.

As a result over one million seats were taken from the winter 2025 routes, and 1.2 million cut from the summer 2026 schedule. Another cut was to a Portugal service, with Ryanair cutting six routes to and from the Azores, an emerging tourist destination. It was estimated the cuts affected around 400,000 passengers.

At the time, Ryanair blamed this cutback on growing airport charges set by Portuguese authorities and environmental taxes linked to the EU Emissions Trading System. John Paul II Ponta Delgada Airport, the islands’ main airport, now only has a single seasonal UK route from London Heathrow operated by British Airways.

Speaking about the cuts in Belgium, Ryanair CEO, Eddie Wilson, said in a statement: “It’s absurd that the Federal Govt have decided to increase Belgium’s aviation tax by 250% from Jan ’27, especially when competing EU countries, like Sweden, Hungary, Slovakia, regional Italy, and Albania are abolishing aviation taxes to grow traffic, tourism and jobs.

“We warned Prime Minister De Wever that increasing Belgium’s aviation tax would result in traffic cuts, but he failed to listen. As a result, Ryanair will now remove 5 aircraft from our Charleroi base and 2m seats from our Brussels schedules (Charleroi and Zaventem) for Winter ’26/Summer ’27 and relocate to more competitive economies.”

Have a story you want to share? Email us at webtravel@reachplc.com

So what is the project Codina sees at West Ham?

Guarino, who led Juventus to four successive Serie A titles, took over from Rehanne Skinner at West Ham midway through last season.

She stated in January that “step by step” they would improve their style of play, but it was clear that organisation and a focus on defensive stability was the priority.

But that could change this season.

“Honestly, I think that we’re going to see a West Ham that the fans will be proud of, and that’s the main thing for me,” said Codina.

“It will be a recognisable West Ham – a team that can play football, and that will try to have the ball as much as possible.

“With Rita, you could see their main characteristic was to defend, but I think that this season we’re going to try to improve on the ball.”

Codina says she already feels at home, having begun pre-season training this week, but it helps that she is still living in London.

The centre-back moved to England in 2023 after nine years at Barcelona, where she progressed from the club’s academy and into the first team.

Now she wants to give back to the community and is already giving up her time to help West Ham’s foundation work with young children in east London.

“I’m enjoying the life here. I love to learn new cultures. London has something special. I’m trying to enjoy it as much as possible,” said Codina.

“Football gives me this opportunity and I’m going to try to use it as good as possible.

“I tell [the children] that it’s not only about winning. It’s not only about going to WSL. It’s not only playing for the national team. It’s all the other things.”

July 23 (UPI) — Three firefighters were killed, two in France and one in Italy, and 12,000 people were forced to evacuate as wildfires continued to ravage areas of southern France, Italy and Spain.

Almost 6,000 acres have been burnt in the area west of Bordeaux, where 10,000 people were ordered to flee amid a ban on internal combustion and electric engines and road closures, the Gironde regional government said Thursday.

Authorities said 500 firefighters were tackling the blaze, which was moving southwestwards after breaking out in Saumo, a small town 20 miles northwest of Bordeaux, on Wednesday and that firefighting aircraft were en route to the scene.

No injuries had been recorded.

The two French firefighters died Tuesday as they battled to bring a separate blaze under control in a suburb of Bordeaux.

Var, a department on the Cote d’Azur between Marseille and Nice, was also badly affected, with thousands of acres burnt. Residents evacuated there were allowed to return to their homes Thursday to assess damage on strict instructions to restrict movement and activities because of the risk the fire could flare up again, amid windy conditions.

Meteo-France red alerts for forest fires were in place across several other departments in southern France on Thursday.

In Italy, a firefighter was killed and another was injured Wednesday battling a major fire on Sicily.

Sicilian Civil Protection chief Salvo Cocina said the wildfire in San Cataldo, in the southwest of the island, was one of 10 major incidents that had triggered the evacuation of residents, as a precaution.

About 6,000 firefighters, forestry officers and civil protection personnel were deployed in the operation.

The regional government said the most critical fires were in Casaboli, Bivona, Alimena, San Cataldo, Galati Mamertino districts and certain areas of the Madonie Park and Syracuse areas.

Footage online, shot by the Spanish Civil Guard, shows officers going door-to-door telling residents to leave as a major wildfire raged southwest of Madrid, between Almorox and Villa del Prado.

It comes after a huge wildfire to the north of the capital in Guadalajara province that broke out on July 16 razed almost 80,000 acres and a deadly forest fire in southeastern Almeria province that killed at least 11 people on July 10.

Across European Union countries, wildfires have burnt more than 628,000 acres so far in 2026, European Forest Fires Information System figures show — although the figure was below the 668,000 acres burnt in the same period in 2025.

Indian authorities release the two men after years in prison although both remain under tight court-imposed restrictions.

Indian authorities have released prominent Kashmiri human rights activist Khurram Parvez and journalist Irfan Mehraj on bail after years in prison on “terrorism” financing charges although both remain under tight court-imposed restrictions.

The two men walked free from a New Delhi jail late on Wednesday, their relatives said, as India’s National Investigation Agency seeks to overturn their bail – the latest chapter in what rights groups call New Delhi’s sweeping crackdown on activists, journalists and dissidents in India-administered Kashmir since 2019 when it scrapped the region’s autonomy, granted under the Indian Constitution.

Parvez, programme coordinator for the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), was arrested in 2021 by the National Investigation Agency at his home in Srinagar.

Mehraj, a freelance journalist who worked with the same rights group as a researcher, was arrested in 2023.

Both face charges of “funding terrorism” and “propagation of secessionist agenda” under India’s stringent “antiterrorism” laws, which in effect allow authorities to hold people without trial indefinitely.

The National Investigation Agency accuses the two of using the JKCCS to fund militant-linked activities and promote a separatist agenda. Both men deny the allegations.

A lower court granted them bail last week, but the agency appealed. The Delhi High Court refused on Tuesday to suspend the release order although it imposed tougher restrictions on the men’s movements and activities while it hears the appeal.

Under their bail conditions, the two must arrange their own stay in the capital, where they are facing trial, and cannot travel to Kashmir, according to a court document seen by the news agency AFP. Proceedings in the case will continue in the coming weeks.

Human rights violations

The JKCCS has for decades documented alleged rights violations by Indian government forces in Kashmir, including torture and unlawful killings, and has drawn attention to thousands of unmarked graves in border areas suspected of holding victims of “enforced disappearances”.

International rights groups, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, have consistently called for the men’s release, saying they were jailed for their work.

In 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said Parvez’s arrest was an “act of reprisal for his human rights work, and an attempt to silence him and Kashmiri civil society as a whole”.

After their release, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights and the World Organisation Against Torture said the two were arrested on “trumped-up charges” and called on Indian authorities to drop the case, describing the proceedings as politically motivated.

Journalists in Indian-administered Kashmir say they have faced harassment and arrests since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government annulled the region’s partial autonomy.

From 2019 to 2023, more than 3,600 people were arrested there under “antiterrorism” laws, more than half of whom remain in prison, according to government figures.

Muslim-majority Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence from British rule in 1947. Both countries claim the territory in full.

Rebel groups have fought the Indian government since 1989, demanding independence or a merger with Pakistan. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians.

Is the Trump administration actually stealing from Venezuelans?

The Financial Times estimated the “likely value” of Venezuela’s oil revenues since January, when those income streams (not only from oil and gas, but also from gold and other minerals) came under the direct control and supervision of the US government. Using data from Kpler and Argus Media, the newspaper put the figure at $13 billion. 

Let’s assume that one figure is accurate or at least comes close to the real number. The key question here, which neither the United States nor Venezuelan authorities have bothered to answer, is how much of that has been trickling back to the Venezuelan economy.

American officials, in press conferences and hearings, have given remarks about how the revenue repatriation framework is supposed to work under the current arrangement. There was a temporary framework immediately after the gringo takeover (the famous Qatar fund we reported in January). Now, it allegedly works like this:

1) Oil revenues flow into accounts managed by the US Treasury. Crude buyers, such as India and Spain, route payments into US-controlled “Foreign Government Deposit Funds.” 

2) Secretary of State Marco Rubio (empowered by Executive Order 14373) provides instructions to the Treasury for disbursements to Venezuelan entities, particularly the Venezuelan Central Bank (BCV).

3) The funds land in BCV accounts.

4) One chunk of that pays pensions, public workers’ salaries, the military and the police apparatus, i.e. the basic components of the State.

5) Another part of those dollars is channelled to the domestic banking system through a select group of private banks—here’s where things start to get tricky. Rather than holding competitive auctions or floating currency rates on a free market, the BCV distributes capped quotas of dollars to these banks at the strictly controlled official exchange rate.

6) At the final stage, from commercial banks to the private sectors, the transaction is a direct cash sale: to purchase dollars, Venezuelan companies must have the full equivalent in bolivars ready in their accounts. Banks immediately debit the buyer’s bolivar account at the day’s official rate and credit the equivalent dollars into the company’s local foreign-currency account. It works as a rationing mechanism, since major corporations (e.g. those in key sectors like food and medicine) are prioritized, and smaller companies acquire USD on a first-come, first-served basis through online banking platforms until daily dollar quotas run out.

Good. So now we know how the repatriation framework is supposed to work.

Let’s go back to the $13 billion figure, and the stage of the sequence connecting the US Treasury and the BCV. The US calls itself de facto custodian of Venezuelan money (remember EO14373 speaks of the “Custodial Nature of United States Possession”), so it should showcase full transparency over those transactions and demand accountability from the Delcy Rodríguez government. How much money has the US disbursed? Has it published anything about those disbursements? What about the Delcy government?

The fundamental question is not only how much revenue the US and the Rodríguez administration are processing, but who ultimately benefits from these flows and whether they contribute to genuine economic recovery.

Here’s where the news is worse. Washington has not disclosed anything concrete. What we know is limited to what US officials tell journalists (mainly foreign correspondents) off the record, which is very vague, and very little. Most recently, a “senior US official” told reporter Stephania Taladrid (who wrote this 11-pager about Maria Corina Machado) that the Trump administration “authorized the disbursement of more than six billion dollars to Rodríguez’s government.” Officials had given some accounts of the amounts disbursed in the first days of the arrangement. For instance, Rubio mentioned that $300m were disbursed through the Qatari fund during a Senate hearing in late January. In early February, an anonymous US official confirmed that Venezuela received its first $500 million post-Maduro. That was the first full disbursement, the last one that the US addressed, though without offering any form of paper trail.

You could say things are equally opaque on Delcy’s front, with the caveat that we are used to this defining feature of the chavista regime. I should add something else about the US-Venezuela framework explained above: according to public statements from American officials, Caracas should submit monthly budget requests to the US, so Rubio can keep authorizing cash transfers with peace of mind. The State Department (through Western Hemisphere chief diplomat Michael Kozak, who is playing an important role in Venezuelan politics) said in April that the accounting firm KPMG was hired to produce quarterly audits of how Venezuelan oil revenues are being spent. He also claimed that, by then, $3 billion had been “moved through” to Venezuela.

Three months later, those reports do not exist. Or are not public at least. It seems that our friend El Kenedi was right when he warned Venezuela will never show you the money, but that’s the Viceroy’s fault, not just Delcy’s.

The Financial Times, which ran the story that ignited the controversy, is playing an interesting role in shaping the conversation about the value of Venezuelan assets and liabilities. Right before the devastating earthquakes, an FT scoop said the Delcy government would reveal a $240 billion debt pile (“much higher than expected”). The latest article might not paint the full picture (as a New York Times reporter suggests) but it’s perhaps the first major broadsheet to lambast Trump for his irresponsible (and misleading) remarks, and his team for the lack of transparency over the handling of Venezuelan money. This issue is nothing new, although the recent catastrophe makes full disclosure much more urgent. Other prominent figures and organizations had raised their voice before the quakes.

On June 2, Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann wrote a column in Project Syndicate titled “The Rape of Venezuela” where he addresses this issue and others, including the politics of the looming debt restructuring and the lack of a democratic recovery. In it, he accuses the Trump White House of viewing Venezuela not as a democratic reconstruction project, but as a strategic hydrocarbon asset in the service of American power. A day later, the Council on Foreign Relations (a leading liberal-leaning US think tank) broke down how US control of Venezuelan oil remains murky. That has served as a valuable source for much of the stuff we mention here.

Going back to yesterday’s story, it quotes Venezuelan economist Alejandro Grisanti noting clear indications of large dollar inflows over the past few months. While Grisanti had initially expected economic growth to accelerate in the fourth quarter of this year, he noted that the recent earthquake is now likely to push that recovery back into the middle of next year.

These “indications of large dollar inflows” provide a clear clue as to how the Delcy Rodríguez administration is spending the oil revenues disbursed by the US Treasury. The BCV continues to deploy significant foreign currency reserves to artificially stabilize the official exchange rate. As Juan Comella observed in May, Rodríguez’s monetary policy differs little from that of the Maduro regime. Grisanti and Ecoanalítica remain sharp critics of this interventionist model, the very mechanism that wrecked Venezuela’s economy in the first place by turning privileged access to official-rate dollars into a primary driver of systemic corruption and economic inefficiency.

In an April report, Ecoanalítica criticized the rigid framework governing the domestic private sector’s acquisition of foreign exchange. Only entities with foreign bank accounts (which can be cleared through the SWIFT network) can buy dollars from the select group of major Venezuelan banks, effectively excluding emerging firms and SMEs. Consequently, local businesses receiving US dollars often cannot execute international transactions (such as paying overseas vendors) because they lack the proper banking infrastructure or because their local financial institutions lack correspondent banks abroad. Furthermore, the report highlights that retail accounts held by natural persons capture 20-30% of total FX allocations. This reflects the classic playbook of rewarding cronies while perpetuating market distortions: privileged individuals purchase dollars cheaply at the official BCV rate and immediately offload them on the parallel market at a premium.

We may not know the exact figures, but funds are trickling through the system. The fundamental question is not only how much revenue the US and the Rodríguez administration are processing, but who ultimately benefits from these flows and whether they contribute to genuine economic recovery.

HOLIDAYMAKERS have revealed the one thing a staycation must have – a pub nearby.

A poll of 2,000 adults who have holidayed in the UK found 61 per cent consider a drinking establishment to be essential for the perfect break upon these shores.

Ideally it should offer traditional pub grub (67 per cent), a cosy interior (60 per cent) and a beer garden with scenic views (60 per cent).

Local ales (37 per cent), a roaring fire (36 per cent) and live music or entertainment (30 per cent) are also desirable – as is being dog friendly (26 per cent).

And 42 per cent prefer a ‘proper local’ over a more touristy option.

The research was commissioned by cottages.com, which has partnered with broadcaster and countryside champion Clare Balding to launch its Pub Walk Collection.

It includes a hand-picked selection of pub walks, including some beautiful lesser-known routes, helping Brits to find their sense of exploration.

Clare said: “A proper pub walk is a much-loved British tradition. For me, the perfect route is four to six miles with dramatic scenery, ending at a great local pub.

“It’s fantastic to see that our appetite for adventure has grown and we want to help people discover the lesser-known corners of the UK that make a staycation truly special.

“Some of the most memorable parts of a break can come from taking a different turn, chatting to locals and discovering places which aren’t on every itinerary.”

The study also found 46 per cent think people’s sense of adventure has increased significantly over the past 10 years, while 51 per cent would rather discover lesser-known destinations than visit famous tourist hotspots.

Further to this, 32 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds prefer hidden gems over famous destinations, compared to 69 per cent of over-55s.

Nearly a quarter (24 per cent) would actively seek out places which haven’t become overrun with tourists, while an additional 46 per cent would look for hidden gems when planning where to holiday in the UK.

When asked about the top holiday priorities, value for money ranked highest with 49 per cent, followed by good weather (34 per cent), being easy to get to (31 per cent), great local walks (28 per cent) and peaceful, crowd-free surroundings (28 per cent).

As many as 70 per cent said peace and relaxation matter more than how a destination looks on social media when choosing where to go.

However, 34 per cent had visited a restaurant, beach or landmark specifically because they saw it on social media, according to OnePoll.com figures.

A spokesperson for cottages.com, which has a collection to help travellers discover some of Britain’s best pub walk routes, including trying out some lesser-known trails, added: “Britain’s best holidays aren’t always about travelling further, they’re about discovering more.

“Whether it’s finding a beautiful new walking route, stumbling across a fantastic village pub or exploring somewhere you’ve never visited before, those moments are often what people remember most.

“Our research shows people are looking for experiences that feel authentic and help them connect with the places they’re visiting.”