Trump repeats the claim that the US has “virtually total control” over the Strait of Hormuz during an event marking Hispanic Heritage Month.
Published On 1 Oct 20261 Oct 2026
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An interactive, floor-to-ceiling walk-through “Dune” attraction is coming to Los Angeles in November, and it promises spectacle, as well as a bit of mystery. Step around, and potentially inside, awe-inspiring vehicles from the film, or come face-to-face with the Bene Gesserit, a group of priestesses who possess, among other things, the ability to bend the will of others.
In one centerpiece of the exhibit, guests will be asked to take their so-called “test of humanity,” an opportunity to place one’s hand in a box and, in the lore of the “Dune” franchise, experience a none-too-pleasant sensation. It’s a battle of will, and intellect, and at “Dune: The Experience,” the hope is it will be fun.
“Dune: The Experience” is an immersive, walk-through exhibit coming to downtown Los Angeles.
(Fever / Legendary Entertainment )
“I don’t want to spoil exactly what happens when you put your hand in the box, but it is intended to be somewhat shocking, participatory and to put people on edge,” says Rob Shalhoub, a team lead at Fever, which is producing the event in partnership with Legendary Entertainment. “It really immerses you into the intensity of these films, where you’re up close and personal with these characters.”
“Dune: The Experience” is planned to launch in November in support of the theatrical release of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Three,” which is out on Dec. 18. The event doesn’t have an opening date or an end date yet, but it is intended to tour. It will be in Los Angeles at a location in downtown’s Art’s District at least through the end of December. Expect costumes, props and life-size vehicles from the film, as well as projection-based rooms designed to immerse guests in the desert planet of Arrakis.
Tickets will go on sale Oct. 7 via the official “Dune: The Experience” web page and range in price from $30-$45.
There will be about a dozen rooms to explore, says Shalhoub, each designed for guests to spend around five minutes in. Some will feature hidden messages within ancient carvings, while others will emphasize photo opportunities with Paul Atreides’ throne, allowing guests to attempt their best Timothée Chalamet impression. “Dune: The Experience” is also built for attendees to linger, as it will feature an area with themed food and cocktails.
“It will reward your curiosity,” says Amado Trevino, director of interactive media and experiences for Legendary Entertainment. “Walls will begin to whisper throughout. You get to take Paul’s throne and see the desert come alive around you. Guests may even find out if they have what it takes to ride a sandworm.”
Different rooms are said to explore contrasting sensations, with some emphasizing touch, sound or visuals.
“We have this amazing projection room where you’re going to get to experience what it’s like in the desert in Arrakis, to really feel the scale of the desert and some of the dangers that lurk within the desert, namely sandworms,” Shalhoub says. “We’ve re-created these environments in a very interactive and immersive way.”
Adds Trevino, “There are things to see, there are things to hear, there are things to do, and there are things to feel. We’re showing beautiful artifacts from the productions, but you’re doing it from within the world of ‘Dune.’ ”
A NEW Minecraft rollercoaster and hotel is coming to the UK next year as part of a huge new theme park expansion.
Chessington World of Adventures announced the new £50million Minecraft World earlier this year, which will be the first of its kind.
And new details about what will be in the land have been revealed.
The main ride will be Escape the Nether, the first Minecraft rollercoaster in the world.
Passengers will be taken through ‘dark mines’ on the indoor ride, before travelling through a Nether Portal to an Overworld themed area.
Little else is known about it, although it says it will be a ‘high-speed indoor adventure’.
The park has also revealed what to expect from the new Minecraft World Hotel.
Inside will be 69 rooms spread across four floors, ranging from standard to premium.
Guests can expect the famous Minecraft blocks and items within the rooms, while the ‘Nether Portal’ themed lifts and mine tunnel corridors will add more to the immersive experience.
Also inside will be a Woodland Mansion themed ‘potion’ bar as well as an underwater-themed restaurant.
This is alongside other retail and dining attractions in the land as well.
An official opening date for the new land is yet to be confirmed with it being sometime in 2027.
Daisy Mercedes, Creative Producer at Merlin Entertainments, said: “We promised something truly special when we announced Minecraft World earlier this year, and with Minecraft World Hotel we are offering even more.
“Not only will fans be able to experience the game imagined for real life, but they’ll be also able to sleep inside it, ensuring fans respawn exactly where they want to be.
“Seeing the Minecraft World Hotel take shape alongside the attractions we are building at Chessington World of Adventures theme park is a Minecraft fans biggest dream.
“Every room, corridor and detail has been crafted with immense love for this game, the stories made within it and its community.
Trains from London to Chessington take around 35 minutes. Tickets start from £34 each.
In the mean time, you can visit the UK’s first dedicated Paw Patrol-themed land, which opened at Chessington earlier this year.
VAPES could be seized in UK airports under a new rule that is coming into force next week.
As it stands, there is not a strict limit on how much e-liquid vapers can bring back with them from their holidays.
But come Thursday, October 1, that is set to change.
From next week, travellers coming into the UK will be limited to just 50ml of liquid, which equates to around five standard bottles of 10ml of juice.
Anyone arriving with over this amount must declare it and pay tax and duty.
Failure to do so, could see your goods confiscated and seized, according to government guidance.
With that in mind, you can expect to pay an extra £2.20 on every extra 10ml brought into the UK.
It comes as Brits are set to be charged more for vaping as part of new rules also coming into force on October 1.
The change will see a flat rate of 22p per millilitre or £2.20 per 10ml on vaping liquid, regardless of how much nicotine it contains.
It means a single 10ml bottle of juice currently scanning for £3.99 will rise to £6.63 by next week.
Meanwhile, any three for £10 deals on 10m liquid will rise to £17.92.
The rise in e-liquid duty was first announced in the Spring Budget in 2024 but reconfirmed by former Chancellor Rachel Reeves in the Autumn Budget last year.
A MEMBERS club loved by the Royals is opening a new location in a historic English town.
It will feature restaurants, bars, a 25-metre pool, racquet courts and even direct access to the River Thames.
A new “reimagined” country club from the Soho House brand is set to come to Windsor, situated directly along the River Thames from next year.
Located less than 45 minutes from central London, Soho River House will also be home to a Health Club, riverside restaurant and Vinyl Bar.
The main house, a Victorian mansion within 35 acres of land, will feature 93 bedrooms designed for members who wish to extend their stay overnight.
The Health Club comes with a gym dedicated to all members’ fitness needs as well as a novel Lazy River feature, which offers cold plunges designed for muscle recovery.
The location will also hold the first Soho House Racquet & Rowing Club with padel, tennis and pickleball courts.
For those wishing to try their hand at rowing, the site will come with boat storage, a dedicated staging area, and direct access to the river through a launching ramp.
The Lazy Lawn overlooking the Thames also provides the perfect lounging spot to catch some much-needed sunrays.
Every week, the club is set to host a number of events for members – including live performances and “One Night Only” dinners with well-known chefs.
Expected to arrive in 2027, those interested are able to register their interest online to keep an eye out for upcoming applications.
Soho House has 14 other locations in the UK, including sites in Manchester, Somerset and East Sussex.
The brand is loved by both Royals and celebrities, with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry having their first date at 76 Dean Street, a Soho House location in London back in 2016.
A new burger joint in La Castellana, an affluent neighborhood in eastern Caracas. Photo: Santiago Bernal.
Any Venezuelan can tell you how unpredictable our country is. This uncertainty, almost idiosyncratic to Venezuela’s national identity, can be felt before you even arrive. You never really know what awaits you when visiting from abroad, no matter how many times you have made the trip before.
This trip, my first since Maduro was captured by US forces in January and less than two months after the deadly earthquakes that devastated parts of the country in June, was certainly unusual from the beginning.
I arrived in Valencia, a city with a small airport poorly equipped to handle the hundreds of passengers diverted from Maiquetía International Airport, the country’s largest. To reach my hometown of Mérida, I had to take a flight departing from another city, Maracay, because Valencia’s airport was too crowded with international flights to accommodate additional domestic routes. The flight departed not from a conventional commercial terminal, but from a small facility inside Venezuela’s largest Air Force base, surrounded by some of the Russian anti-aircraft equipment and fighter jets that had spectacularly failed to prevent Maduro’s extraction. The check-in process had to be done in a mall in the city, a few kilometers away from the base, to which we were transported in a small shuttle bus. The process was surprisingly efficient.
The road between El Vigía’s airport, which serves Mérida, and the city was in better condition than I expected, although the scars of decades of underinvestment remained clearly visible. In some places, sections of road that had collapsed in landslides more than two years ago were still buried under rubble.
I arrived in Caracas after a drive in a taxi equipped with a Starlink antenna, a gadget that until not too long ago could land you in prison.
As we approached Mérida, I spotted a car-carrying truck filled with brand-new Toyota models.
I could not remember the last time I had seen one of those while living in Venezuela. Maybe 15 years ago? In any case, what would be an unremarkable sight in most countries had become extremely rare in Mérida, a state whose economy depends heavily on its university and small-scale tourism, two sectors devastated by Venezuela’s decade-long economic crisis.
After arriving in Mérida, I realized that the car carrier was serving one of several car dealerships that seemed to have resurfaced across the city, all filled with new vehicles. They were also visible on the streets: hundreds of new Chinese models, alongside smaller numbers of Japanese, Korean, and American cars, were driving around Mérida for the first time I could recall in years.
This may sound banal or superficial, but Venezuela’s aging car fleet had long served as a stark reminder of the country’s economic demise. Between 2014 and 2018, car sales collapsed, reaching a historic low of just 2,000 vehicles sold nationwide in 2018. Seeing a model manufactured after the early 2010s outside Caracas had become highly unusual.
The situation has changed since 2025, when more than 38,000 cars were reportedly sold across the country. That remains a fraction of the more than 300,000 vehicles sold in pre-crisis 2007, at the height of Hugo Chávez’s oil boom, but it is enough to make a noticeable difference.
Mérida’s urban landscape has also been transformed by the hundreds of new stores that have opened across a city where economic stagnation and widespread power outages forced countless businesses to close over the past decade. The same phenomenon was evident in Caracas, where I arrived after yet another tour through Maracay’s Air Force base, and after a drive in a taxi equipped with a Starlink antenna, a gadget that until not too long ago could land you in prison and can now be purchased online through different national authorized distributors.
Beyond new cars, large sections of the city, including old Chacao in Caracas’s affluent east, appear to be undergoing an incipient but rapid process of gentrification, reminiscent in some ways of iconic European neighborhoods such as Gràcia in Barcelona, Ruzafa in Valencia (the Spanish one), or Shoreditch in London.
Chacao’s Bolívar Square is marked by a striking contrast. Its 18th-century church still bears large cracks caused by the earthquakes, while the surrounding streets are now filled with lively atmospheric restaurants and cafés that would not look out of place in Lisbon or Barcelona, and fitted with contactless payment systems charging prices that match those of many large European cities.
These businesses serve a small but very real segment of the Venezuelan population that can afford them. That group is not necessarily limited to enchufados.
This raises an obvious question: how can these businesses be profitable in a country where typical salaries remain around $220–280 a month, less than a tenth of the already meager average European salary, and where living what might be considered a relatively normal life has been estimated to cost around at least $800–1,000 a month per person?
The answer is that these businesses serve a small but very real segment of the Venezuelan population that can afford them. That group is not necessarily limited to enchufados, people who have enriched themselves through their connections to government corruption. Exact figures are difficult to establish, but managers in private companies can reportedly earn around $1,200 a month, while senior professionals in some sectors, including medicine, can make several thousand dollars a month in private practice, depending on their specialization.
The widespread adoption of Cashea, a fintech company offering consumers interest-free microcredit for everyday purchases, has also increased the purchasing power of a broader segment of the population. Cashea’s success is visible not only in Wall Street, but also in its extraordinary penetration of everyday commerce. Its recognizable yellow logo now signals that the service is accepted in businesses ranging from large clothing stores in shopping malls to small kiosks, and funerary homes.
You can even use Cashea to pay for a ride with Yummy, Venezuela’s equivalent of Uber.
These businesses still operate within a heavily dysfunctional financial system, distorted by an artificially low exchange rate and an economy constrained by high inflation and low productivity. Yet they serve a segment of the population that is slowly turning into a small, resurgent middle class. That group is helping drive growth in specific sectors, most notably real estate, which has reportedly expanded by around 30 percent in 2026.
This modest revitalization has coincided with an important reduction in street violence. Today, around 60 percent of Venezuelans report feeling safe walking at night, according to Gallup, something difficult to imagine only a few years ago. This is one factor helping explain the revival of nightlife in places such as Chacao, Caracas’ historical center and, to a lesser extent, parts of Mérida.
A similar transformation was evident in Margarita Island, a place I had not visited in almost two decades.
Most of these changes began before the US intervention in Venezuela. But they appear to have accelerated and spread in the months following Maduro’s capture.
Known as the “Pearl of the Caribbean,” Margarita’s tropical beaches, tax-free stores and fascinating history attracted large numbers of European and Latin American as well as Venezuelan tourists during the 1990s and early 2000s. Some of my own fondest childhood memories are, in fact, on the island.
That changed dramatically after 2014, as Venezuela’s political, economic, and public-service crises deepened, leaving the island in a state of abandonment.
Today, Margarita is experiencing a modest but noticeable revival in domestic and international tourism compared with the previous decade. This has been partly fueled by significant investment from domestic and international hotel chains, which now offer a wide range of accommodation, from relatively affordable all-inclusive packages to high-end luxury experiences.
After several years in which the island received mostly Russian and Polish tourists, Margarita is once again welcoming growing numbers of international visitors, particularly from Colombia, and Brazil. Many tourism operators are already looking forward to the possible return of American visitors in the short to medium term.
Less than 15 minutes from the mall in Pampatar, I also visited a community that has gone more than six months without running water.
People I spoke to said Margarita feels more alive and prosperous than it did between 2016 and 2019, the worst years of Venezuela’s crisis, even if the situation remains vastly different from the island’s golden age thirty years ago.
Cities such as Pampatar and Porlamar are experiencing a revival similar to what I saw in Mérida and Caracas, with new restaurants and stores filled with customers. In Pampatar, I visited what was probably one of the largest and most modern shopping malls I have ever seen, comparable to those in Miami or Madrid, filled with stores selling American and European brands whose prices I often found prohibitive even by European standards.
Most of these changes began before the US intervention in Venezuela. But they appear to have accelerated and spread in the months following Maduro’s capture, as the idea that something resembling a normal life might again be possible seems to be taking hold in some.
There is, however, a large elephant in the room. Improvements remain largely cosmetic and circumscribed to a small part of the population.
On the other side of the Avila, the mountain that separates Caracas’ gentrified neighborhoods from the Caribbean sea, over 12,000 people who lost their homes in the earthquakes wait for solutions in dozens of temporary camps erected among the ruins of their apartments.
But the limitations of this apparent resurgence are perhaps most obvious in the dismal state of public services. Hours-long power outages were common in Mérida and Caracas throughout my stay. Less than 15 minutes from the mall in Pampatar, I also visited a community that has gone more than six months without running water. Its residents make a living largely by collecting and selling salt from the island’s salt flats, with virtually no gear, or protection from the region’s unrelenting weather.
Businesses, hotels, and even many households have adapted to what are, in practice, nonexistent public services. Solar panels, batteries, and water tanks allow those who can afford them to maintain a large degree of independence from the State-provided services.
For most Venezuelans, however, these solutions remain unaffordable.
The same is true for healthcare and education. Both systems remain crippled by chronic underinvestment and neglect. The Venezuelan public health system remains severely understaffed and unable to provide adequate services to most of the population, while out-of-pocket health costs represent a large proportion of total health expenditure and less than 10% of the population can afford private insurance. In terms of education, despite a recent increase in school enrollment, the number of students has fallen by almost 2.8 million compared with figures reported in January 2024, as large numbers of high-school students continue to leave their studies to work.
Venezuela is far from fixed, and it will never truly be as long as chavismo remains in power. But it is certainly not the same country I left in 2019, nor the same country it was before January 3.
Many of the people I spoke to still want to leave, especially now that expectations of a quick transition to democracy have been tampered by the warm relationship of the Trump administration with Delcy Rodriguez. Others have decided that a somewhat normal life in Venezuela is once again possible and that, despite its uncertainties, it may be preferable to the immense challenge of migration in an increasingly hostile world.
Yes, these improvements are fragile, uncertain, and profoundly unequal. They exclude most of the country. But they are also an opportunity: Not only for some to live a relatively normal, easier life. But also a chance to build on whatever progress has been made and keep pushing towards the deep institutional and political reforms that only a democratically elected government can implement.
EUROPE’S biggest pumpkin festival is kicking off in the UK this weekend.
Fans of all things autumn are in for a major treat as the annual event returns for 2026.
Tulleys Farm in West Sussex hosts its epic festival every year, with 100 acres of sprawling pumpkin picking fields, food, rides, entertainment and more on offer.
Tulleys Pumpkin Festival is returning to the farm in a matter of days, as it prepares to open up to the public once again on September 19.
Tickets are available now for the entire seasonal run, which will draw to a close on November 1.
The farm offers both daytime and night sessions, with kids and adult’s tickets both starting from as little as £9.95.
The pumpkin fields have produced over one million pumpkins and gourds for visitors to pick from this autumn, with everything from shiny, round orange ones to knobbly, unique ones planted all over the patch.
Once fans of fall have secured their pumpkin haul, exploring the festival’s attractions, including the new Pumpkin Village is a must.
It’s the perfect place for adorable photo opportunities. Nestled within the “heart of the festival”, you can explore “winding paths, with wooden bridges leading across gentle streams and peaceful ponds”.
Guests can soar to heights of 108 feet during a ride on the observation ferris wheel or enjoy a spin on the Vintage Carousel, before checking out the themed entertainment dotted around the farm.
There’s dressed-up performers, roaming musicians and quirky street theatre to enjoy.
And for those who love nothing more than a tasty festival treat this time of year, there’s no shortage of food and drink offerings.
Grab a boozy beverage at the Cauldron Bar or a cup of something warming at the Coffee House.
Visitors can toast marshmallows and cheese on open fires or indulge in pasta, pizza, foot-long hotdogs, burgers, Greek delights and much more.
TRAVELLERS will soon be able to have a freshly made cocktail on Eurostar trains in a two-floor bar.
Eurostar boss Gwendoline Cazenave has revealed that the new Eurostar Celestia will have a double-decker bar on board.
Speaking to The Times, she revealed that the cocktail bar in Eurostar’s Premier lounge at St Pancras, London, will be “the design of the bar on the new Eurostar Celestia”.
Celestia is the fleet of 50 double-decker trains ordered last year for €2 billion (£1.7 billion).
Inside the lounge, mixologists make more than 300 cocktails a day and visitors can expect to find a variety of seating options from large tables to cosy chairs as well as a large selection of complimentary magazines.
Eurostar Premier travellers, Carte Blanche and Étoile members can access the lounge up to two hours before their train’s departure.
Read more on travel inspo
Deliveries of Celestia will begin in 2031 and each train will be able to carry 20 per cent more passengers.
As a result, for the first time there will be more than 1,000 passengers onboard.
The trains will transport passengers from London to Frankfurt, Germany, four times a day and Geneva, Switzerland, three times a day.
Cazenave said: “Because it’s going to be a double-decker, it’s going to be a double-decker bar.
“It’s going to be as exciting as a speakeasy bar. That’s what we’re building, and I hope it’s going to be as nice as this place.”
Eurostar is also launching services to Antwerp from London four times a day from December 14.
The announcement comes as Virgin Trains prepares to launch services from London to Europe by 2030.
Italian firm Trenitalia has also promised high-speed cross-channel services by 2029.
