euro

Having done more than most to step into the boots of talisman Gareth Bale, Harry Wilson still has time on his side.

The forward, who has scored 17 international goals, will be 31 when the Euros come around and there is no real reason why he cannot build on the brilliant form he has shown this season.

With Wilson being tipped to leave Fulham at the end of his contract this summer, Wales and Bellamy will cross fingers he picks the right club from what is expected to be a lengthy list of suitors.

Former England captain Wayne Rooney recently suggested Wilson fitted Fulham perfectly and wondered whether he would get lost at one of the Premier League’s top clubs.

It would be natural for Liverpool academy graduate Wilson to want to test himself at the highest level possible, but Wales will certainly want to feel the benefit of him being a certain starter with his club side.

Where Harry heads might well be significant.

CHESSY, France — A 118-foot mountain of ice rose over the suburban Paris countryside this weekend as Disney opened its Arendelle kingdom to the world — Elsa’s palace glowing at the summit, a “Frozen” Nordic fishing village below, and the company’s new chief executive standing before a crowd of celebrities.

World of Frozen, an immersive land themed to the blockbuster animated franchise, opened Sunday as a centerpiece of a $2.2-billion transformation at Disneyland Paris.

The transformation renames one of Disneyland Paris’ two parks from Walt Disney Studios Park to Disney Adventure World. The inauguration drew Penélope Cruz, Naomi Campbell and Teyana Taylor.

It is the largest expansion in the 34-year history of Disneyland Paris, and one node in a roughly $60-billion global build-out of Disney’s parks, resorts and cruise lines.

A new CEO’s first stage

It is also the first major international stage for Josh D’Amaro, who took over as Disney’s CEO on March 18 — 11 days before the French gates opened — after nearly three decades in the company’s theme parks division.

The parks-and-experiences business reportedly generated 57% of the company’s $17.5 billion in segment operating income last year, the force that observers say propelled D’Amaro from parks chief to the corner office.

“The Walt Disney Co. was built on one man’s dream, and for more than 100 years we’ve shared that dream with the world,” D’Amaro told the inauguration crowd.

“Storytelling is fundamental to everything that we do, whether that’s on screen or stage, in our theme parks, on our cruise ships, or even at home.”

He called the opening “a transformational moment” and paid tribute to the creative team behind the attraction, including “Frozen” writer-director Jennifer Lee — who are all now at work on “Frozen 3.”

An Associated Press journalist accompanied D’Amaro on the “Frozen” ride Saturday night.

The carriage splashed through water to childlike cheers from riders and laughter from the new CEO as they glided past Elsa singing in the dark. Some stepped off lightly wet.

The evening’s emotional peak came when Lou, an 11-year-old whose wish was granted through Make-A-Wish France, took the stage to sing a few notes of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”

A next-generation robotic Olaf walked out to join her. It was the 25,000th wish fulfilled for a sick child at Disneyland Paris since 1992.

A French reversal

On Friday, D’Amaro had stood alongside Emmanuel Macron at the resort.

The French president used the visit to claim the park as a national economic asset, calling Disneyland Paris “the leading tourist destination in Europe” and describing it as “a genuine ecosystem of success.”

Macron said the latest expansion would create 1,000 additional direct jobs.

“Since the beginning, that’s 13 billion euros invested on this territory,” Macron said, a figure equivalent to about $15 billion.

Disneyland Paris says it has recorded more than 445 million visits since 1992, accounting for 6.1% of France’s national tourism revenue.

Macron’s presence underscored a remarkable reversal.

When the park opened as Euro Disney in 1992, French intellectuals derided it as a “cultural Chernobyl.” The president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, dryly derided the new attraction as “not exactly my cup of tea.”

Now a French president was standing in front of cameras calling it an engine of national prosperity.

European roots

“‘Frozen,’ of course, has its roots in European storytelling,” said Michel den Dulk of Walt Disney Imagineering.

“It’s very loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen. So to have a northern European, charming wooden little village here in Disneyland Paris — it just made sense.”

The new Tangled family ride, too, draws from European folklore — the Brothers Grimm’s Rapunzel.

The land re-creates Arendelle around a lagoon, its timber buildings painted in muted Scandinavian pastels, facades adorned with rosemaling, a traditional Norwegian decorative art.

At the center is Frozen Ever After, a boat ride featuring state-of-the-art animatronics and immersive projection effects.

Guests can meet Anna and Elsa inside Arendelle Castle, have a conversation with a responsive baby troll named Mossy who talks back, and watch a lagoon celebration called the Snow Flower Festival — featuring an original song.

Visitors praised the scale of the mountain and the detail of the village, even after delays and minor glitches.

“Despite the wait, it was well worth it. The attention to detail is incredible, and the perspective of the ice mountain is breathtaking,” said Daniel Weber, 41, an architect from Munich, Germany, after the ride Sunday.

“You forget you’re outside Paris. For a few minutes, it really feels like Arendelle,” said Léa Moreau, 27, a graphic designer from Lille, France.

Beyond World of Frozen, the rebranded park brings a vast new lake called Adventure Bay, a Tangled family ride, 15 new dining locations — including the posh Regal View Restaurant — and a nighttime spectacular called Disney Cascade of Lights featuring more than 380 drones.

A Lion King land, already under construction, will follow.

More than 90% of the second park’s offerings will have been redesigned since it opened in 2002, and Disney says the footprint will roughly double once the full transformation is complete.

Disney’s streaming has swung from deep losses to profitability, but the parks remain the company’s most dependable earnings engine — and D’Amaro is the man who ran them.

“We continue to dream bigger and bring stories to life in brand new ways,” D’Amaro told the crowd.

Pyrotechnics lighted up Arendelle Village.

The ice palace on the mountain turned blue.

And 34 years after Euro Disney became a punchline, a brand-new kingdom opened in the fields east of Paris — for the first time in forever.

Adamson writes for the Associated Press.

Published on
27/03/2026 – 17:47 GMT+1

EU lawmakers have overcome a key political hurdle in the negotiations of digital euro, making the project closer to approval, according to a draft text seen by Euronews.

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The Parliamentary rapporteurs involved in the legislation have found an agreement on the design of the digital euro, which will be able to function both online and offline.

The digital euro would be an electronic form of cash issued by the European Central Bank, designed to sit alongside banknotes and the payments services offered by commercial banks.

It has taken on new political weight as economic tensions between the EU and the US sharpen the debate over Europe’s reliance on American payment giants, such as Visa and Mastercard.

Under the European Commission’s proposal, digital euro users would have a wallet for both online and offline payments, with transactions designed so they are not trackable.

The situation in Parliament changed on Wednesday evening, when the centre-right politician Fernando Navarrete, who is the leading rapporteur on the file, announced the withdrawal of his position to reduce the scope of the digital euro to offline use only.

His position blocked the advancement of negotiations for months, jeopardising the whole legislative process, according to three sources familiar with the negotiations.

The political deadlock has pushed EU leaders to accelerate progress on the digital euro. At the European Council meeting on 19 March, they set a goal to have the digital euro legislation approved by the end of 2026.

With the Council, representing EU countries, having already adopted its position, the European Parliament is now the only institution left to advance the law.

“Thanks to our amendments and firm stance, we have finally broken the political deadlock on the digital euro. The distinction between online and offline has been removed, and it is now established as a single payment system,” Pasquale Tridico, the rapporteur for The Left, told Euronews.

However, lawmakers still need to agree on two key aspects: the “hold limits” and the “compensation.”

The hold limits determine the maximum amount a user can store in a digital euro wallet, while compensation sets out a model for reimbursing commercial banks that provide digital euro services.

Although negotiations are not yet complete, the text is expected to be voted on in the Parliament’s economy committee before the summer, according to a source familiar with the matter.

WHEN I told my friends about my recent European getaway, many met me with two questions in quick succession: firstly, “Where?” and then pointedly “Why?”

I’m not surprised. I hadn’t heard of the city – a two-and-a-half-hour flight from London – until I decided to whisk my wife away on a romantic weekend there. What I found was meals out for less than £10, posh Airbnbs for only £50-a-night, and drinks at about half the price we pay at home.

In recent years, we’ve had weekend breaks in Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Vienna, Lisbon, Rome and Amsterdam – but they can often feel too big to truly explore over a weekend.

Add in long airport journey times, expensive hotels and pricey restaurants, and you come home knackered and empty pocketed.

Increasingly, I’ve found that it’s simply more enjoyable to head somewhere smaller: instead of Paris, try Toulouse; instead of Barcelona, try Grenada. So, when we decided on a trip to Poland, we picked a trip to Lublin, rather than Warsaw or Krakow.

We wanted to go on a “couple weekend” – like a date night for married people, but conducted over 48 hours somewhere well away from home. 

Except for Vienna, all our previous minibreaks were in Western Europe – this time, we wanted something more exotic, perhaps to the East or North. 

Plus, we were seriously skint.  Anything in Scandinavia was prohibitively expensive.

One friend had just been to the chic Arctic Circle town of Tromso in Norway and warned: “For even a very average bottle of wine in a bog standard restaurant you are looking at eighty quid”.

I thought he must have mis-typed, but no, that number did indeed have a Y on the end – eighty.

So Norway was out. Sweden and Finland didn’t sound much better when it came to price. 

So when a friend suggested an affordable alternative, Poland, I was interested. Which is how we came to settle on Lublin.

In the east of the country, with a population of around 327,000, Lublin is closer to the border with Ukraine than the capital, Warsaw. 

The city featured prominently in one of our favourite films of last year, A Real Pain, which won Kieran Culkin a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

It came across as both fascinating and charming. 

We then found we could get a smart Airbnb double room in the heart of this pretty city for £50 a night – and return flights out of Luton on Wizz Air for just £37 each. Sold!

Lublin is a tiny airport – just four gates – so easy and quick to navigate, then there’s a little single carriage tram-like train to ferry you very cheaply the few miles into the city to find that double room. 

Our rental was an absolute steal for the price: views from two large windows looking directly at the dramatic castle with ramparts that dominate the old town, and it also features as a backdrop in A Real Pain

A bottle here for the price of a glass there

The food and drink were a steal too; the wine in particular was a lot, lot cheaper than you’d find in the UK.

A bottle here for the price of a glass there.

In both restaurants, the food was less than half the price for something comparable at home – generous mains for under a tenner.

In fact, everything from Uber rides to gallery tickets seemed to have this “less than half” aspect, which left us thinking it might be even more financially advantageous to simply move here.  

Lublin was beautiful, intense, constantly interesting and surprisingly romantic- but also very, very cheap – perfect for the couple with no money. 

Even though Lublin is the largest city in eastern Poland, there are far fewer crowds than Krakow, making it the ideal family destination too.

Of course, we wanted to check out the locations features in A Real Pain too.

The film, a mix of comedy and tragedy, told the story of two cousins, Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg, visiting the city where their Jewish grandmother had grown up before being caught up in – and narrowly escaping – the Holocaust. 

That historic atrocity looms large in Lublin.

Until 1939, the city was one of the great Jewish centres in all of Europe, comparable to Oxford for its cultural reach.

First, we headed to the Old Jewish Cemetery – but it was closed for the sabbath so we could only peer in at the atmospheric stone monuments.

At a hotel around the corner, a travel group leader told me that the building had been the largest Jewish academy in the world when it opened in 1930.

But barely a decade later, its entire library burned in what is now the hotel carpark and its students were systematically slaughtered. 

Just outside Lublin is a concentration camp, Majdanek, where 78,000 died.

But of course, it wasn’t just Polish Jews who were murdered.

Outside that cemetery, for example, a sign proclaimed: “This place is hallowed by the blood of Poles, prisoners of Lublin Castle, executed by the Nazis on 23 December 1939.”

The fairytale castle we were looking at from our room had a dark past. 

The other film location we tried was a restaurant, Mandragora, in the old town, where Culkin’s character plays the piano.

On our visit to this delightfully old-fashioned place, there was also music, from a small band with accordion, fiddle and clarinet that seemed to give a pre-war atmosphere.

Even more retro-atmospheric was a restaurant not in the film, Zaczarowana, where a gothic interior of shadows, black curtains and candlelight made it feel like we were on the set of some composite film mash-up of the Frankenstein and Dracula stories.

Like travelling back in time

There’s lots to see in the city too.

If travelling with kids, you can head to the Open Air Village Museum, which is an immersive museum with historic farmhouses and of course, farm animals too.

There’s also a water fountain and light show in Litewski Square to watch in awe.

In the Old Town you will find pastel coloured houses, neatly lined up and there is also the castle – one of the oldest royal castles in the country – which has great views across the city.

According to Backpack Adventures, it is even like “travelling back in time” with a number of gates leading onto narrow alleys.

The city has over 150 trolleybuses to get around the city, which were introduced back in 1953.

And it is the perfect time to visit, as the city has been named one of Europe’s Capitals of Culture for 2029.

Hungry? Head to U Szewca in the Old Town, where you an discover a pub with sport-themed rooms, pizza for just £6 and Bolognese for around £7.50, and a beer for about £4.25.

When it comes to grabbing something to drink, head to Nocny Portier where you will find “upside-down pot plants, absurd monkey portraiture and terrific cocktails from a movie-inspired menu”, according to The Times.

You even need a password to head downstairs to the speakeasy and once inside, you will be able to grab a cocktail for just £6 delivered on a toy railway.

For more cheap European getaways, these are the cheapest European cities to fly to this year according to the experts – with loads of flights from £15.

Plus, these are Europe’s top 20 cheapest beach resorts.