soft

RAIN is on the way and whether you’re excited for the end of the heatwave or not, indoor play is back on the cards.

Here are some of the top indoor attractions to keep the kids occupied when bad weather strikes from indoor gaming to trampolining and soft play.

The Playhive, North Yorkshire

The Playhive at Stockeld Park in North Yorkshire is one of the biggest indoor playgrounds in the UK.

Inside is everything from massive spaceships – with rocket walkways, ladders and nets – to planes and submarines.

Jungle-themed climbing walls and under-the-sea play areas are also part of the attraction – there are even toddler-friendly areas too.

Tickets to Stockeld Park start from £13.55pp.

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Activate, London

Activate is a popular immersive experience with nine different rooms filled with games.

You can have a go at dodging lasers, digital dodgeball, basketball and challenges to test reflexes.

There are four venues across London: The O2, Oxford Street, Vauxhall, Westfield White City and Islington and children have to be over six-years-old.

Tickets to Activate start from £22.95pp.

Woodlands Family Theme Park, Devon

Woodlands Family Theme Park is home to Devon‘s largest soft play.

Inside there are drop slides, ball pools, climbing tubes, obstacles even an Ice Palace.

In the Circus Drome Zone there’s even more soft play as well as a bouncy castle, rope swings and slides for kids.

Tickets to Woodlands Family Theme Park start from £12.25pp.

Play Factore, Manchester

Play Factore in Manchester has the tallest standing indoor slide in the UK as well as a laser tag arena.

Kids can enjoy a bounce on the interactive ValoJump trampolines, the zip wire and play frame which has network of tunnels, slides and obstacles.

In the Toddler Area, there are two floors of play designed for kids under the age of five.

Tickets to Play Factore in Manchester range from £3.95 to £21.95pp.

Riverside Hub, Northampton

The Riverside Hub will keep children entertained for hours with lots of different zones to explore and an enormous climbing frame with a huge beanstalk climbing wall.

There’s a Role Play Village too where kids can use their imagination to explore a make-believe world, with a cafe, shop, witch’s house and tooth fairy dentist.

Inside is also a football pitch and a dedicated zone for toddlers with ball pits and activity walls.

Tickets to the Riverside Hub start from £7.45 for adults and £12.50 for children.

Flip Out

Flip Out are family-friendly trampoline and adventure parks filled with more activities than you can imagine.

The facilities vary depending on location, but most have a whole floor of trampolines for bouncing about, as well as inflatable obstacle courses and even a Ninja playground.

Some venues also have soft play centres and ones dedicated to toddlers.

There are over 30 Flip Out venues across the UK too so one is bound to be near you – tickets start from £8.

Gravity Max

These massive entertainment venues are great for a rainy day with lots of activities to try out.

There’s electric go-karts, digital darts, street golf, karaoke, an arcade with lots of classic games and even AR bowling.

At the sports bar there are food stalls and live sporting events are shown on the TV.

There are Gravity Max venues in Liverpool, Cardiff, Yorkshire and London and tickets vary in cost depending on activities but start from £10.99.

Junkyard Golf Club

Anyone who is a fan of crazy golf should head to one of the putting venues of Junkyard Golf Club – of which there are six in the UK.

The venues are known for their uniquely designed courses which are all made from reclaimed items.

The very creative golf course themes go from Circus Fear-Ground to Polluted Paradise, 90s Garage Scrapyard and Basement Horror.

Tickets to Junkyard Golf Club start from £16.50pp.

TeamSport, Warrington

There are 38 TeamSport tracks around the UK – but the one in Warrington has the UK’s biggest indoor track at 1000 metres.

There are 22 corners and a Monaco-style tunnel split over three levels, so it will prove to be a challenge whether or not you’re a pro-driver.

Their e-karts hit speeds of 40mph and the average lap time is just over a minute – if you’re really fast you might appear on the leaderboard.

Tickets to TeamSport Warrington start from £47.66pp.

Arcade Club

Arcade Club is the perfect spot for gamers where you can return to the golden age of gaming with these classics.

From pinball machines to Astro Blaster and Pac-Man, it’s the best place for a bit of pixel nostalgia – the arcades can be found in Blackpool, Leeds and Bury.

They also have food and drink on site, offering pizzas, burgers, hot dogs and nachos at their restaurants.

Adult tickets to Arcade Club are £18 with children under 16s being able to get their game on for £10.

The leader known as Qatar’s father emir was able to redefine his nation’s position on the political map of the Middle East.

From a tiny state struggling to survive to a country punching above its weight with soft power, wealth and influence felt in the region and beyond, Qatar and its success story were propelled by late Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.

Sheikh Hamad, who died on Sunday aged 74, was able to redefine Qatar’s position on the political map of the Middle East, moving it from the margins of the Gulf to regional prominence in the political, diplomatic, national and humanitarian fields, relying on his vision that transcended the country’s modest size and narrow borders.

Those who knew Sheikh Hamad said he was aware, even before assuming power in 1995, of his country’s lack of traditional elements of strength and understood the need to invest in soft power.

From the early days of his reign, he implemented enormous projects in education, health, scientific research and sports in addition to the vital energy sector, transforming his country’s wealth into international diplomatic weight and not merely a source of prosperity for his own people. The former emir also understood the power of media when he created Al Jazeera, one of the most successful news channels in the Arab world, which later transformed into a powerful media network.

Qatari diplomacy led fruitful mediations in complex disputes and conflicts across a vast geographic expanse from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Horn of Africa.

Doha brought together leaders in Lebanon in 2008, concluding a historic agreement that quelled the risk of another civil war. Qatar sponsored negotiations that lasted 30 months between the Sudanese parties over the Darfur crisis, culminating in 2011 in the signing of the Doha Document for Peace.

Qatar continued to sponsor dialogue between Hamas and Fatah, the two sides in the Palestinian divide, and settled disputes in Yemen and Somalia and between Eritrea and Djibouti in a rare diplomatic model.

During the Father Emir’s era, Qatar established the Al Udeid military base, which hosts the largest United States military force in the Middle East. Not far from it, Doha hosted the leadership of Hamas, a stance that prompted some residents to describe Sheikh Hamad as the “emir of the resistance” when he visited southern Lebanon in 2010 to inspect villages that had been rebuilt with Qatari funding after the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war.

He was the first Arab leader to visit the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the Israeli war in 2012, announcing from there the launch of housing and reconstruction projects with a grant worth $400m.

Qatar’s mediation role remained shielded from affecting its political principles, especially the Palestinian cause, considering it had to maintain open communication channels with all parties to the conflicts, including Israel.

The Gulf state supported the “Arab Spring” revolutions, and it adopted policies that explicitly backed the right of the region’s peoples to freedom and dignified lives.

The Qatari project during the father emir’s era was not focused solely on economic modernisation but also built an independent political identity capable of regional and international influence.

Sheikh Hamad left his post in 2013 after his vision for Qatar became a reality, and during the era of his son and successor, Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, he witnessed Qatar’s transformation into an energy and mediation power.

Donny Hathaway had already been expounding on the splendors and indignities of American life by the time he got to the Troubadour in West Hollywood in the last week of August 1971.

A classically trained pianist with a declamatory voice shaped by his years in the church, Hathaway closed Side 1 of his 1970 debut with an original called “Tryin’ Times” — “Maybe folks wouldn’t have to suffer,” he sang, “if there was more love for your brother” — and finished the LP with a stately rendition of Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Months after the album was released, he dropped a joy bomb of a holiday single, “This Christmas,” that unapologetically made space for a Black experience in the yuletide-industrial complex.

Donny Hathaway performs at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago in 1971.

(Val Mazzenga / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Yet Hathaway captured something indelibly American during his week of shows at the Troubadour, which were recorded (along with a later gig at New York’s Bitter End) for the singer’s classic “Live” album that came out in February 1972. On an LP full of spine-tingling performances, the undeniable high point is Hathaway’s take on Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” — a clear-eyed if optimistic portrait of resilience and cultural exchange.

King — who’d made her name in the 1960s as half of a prolific Brill Building songwriting duo with her husband, Gerry Goffin — wrote “You’ve Got a Friend” after leaving Goffin and moving to Los Angeles with her two young daughters. Here she remade herself as a low-key singer-songwriter dispensing wise yet unflashy tunes about love, home and family — part of a gentle resetting of pop’s mood after the turmoil of the previous decade.

Cut like the rest of the album at A&M Studios on La Brea Avenue, “You’ve Got a Friend” helped drive King’s 1971 “Tapestry” LP to sales of more than 10 million copies and to a boatload of trophies (including album, record and song of the year) at the Grammy Awards; the singer’s pal James Taylor, whom she’d performed with for the first time in late 1970 at the Troubadour, topped Billboard’s Hot 100 with his own cover of “Friend” featuring background vocals by Joni Mitchell.

On the advice of Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler, Hathaway also recorded “Friend” as a studio duet with Roberta Flack, a fellow Howard University alum; their take sat in the Top 20 of Billboard’s R&B chart as Hathaway began his run at the Troubadour — popular enough that the audience on “Live” erupts at the sound of Hathaway’s opening organ lick.

Carole King at A&M Studios in Los Angeles in 1970.

(Jim McCrary / Redferns via Getty Images)

Indeed, the crowd is really the thing in this live version of “You’ve Got a Friend.” Hathaway and his band — including guitarist Phil Upchurch, bassist Willie Weeks and 16-year-old Fred White (soon to be of Earth, Wind & Fire) on drums — are cooking, to be clear; the groove is funky and viscous, and Hathaway’s vocal is gorgeous, not least in his nimble ad-libs.

But it’s his interplay with the few hundred folks in the room that elevates the recording to a deeply moving piece of art.

For King (and Taylor), the song’s promise of unflagging support is an intimate one-to-one matter; their renditions use homey acoustic arrangements to create a picture of two people exchanging confidences. In Hathaway’s hands, “Friend” is about community: Before he even asks them to, the audience takes over for him on lead vocals in the song’s chorus, a congregation in all but name.

Given the proximity to the civil rights movement, it’s impossible to hear Hathaway’s “You’ve Got a Friend” as disconnected from the struggles of Black people. At the Troubadour (as in his and Flack’s duet), he nixes the song’s second verse to arrive more quickly at the bridge, in which he describes a cold world filled with those who’d “hurt you and try to desert you” — even “take your soul if you let them.”

As Emily J. Lordi notes in her 2016 book about “Donny Hathaway Live,” the crowd lays back during the bridge before rejoining Hathaway for the song’s second chorus; the decision, somehow spontaneous and collective at once, is an expert bit of record-making on the part of an audience that, according to legend, hadn’t been told the concert was being taped.

“From this perspective,” Lordi writes of Hathaway’s fans — some number of whom had surely availed themselves of the Troubadour’s bar, as she points out — “they are not stealing the show so much as they are holding him up, ensuring he won’t sing the duet alone.” Together, performer and audience are turning back (not that they necessarily had a choice) to the ugly truths that singer-songwriter music sometimes sought to move past.

In this way, Hathaway’s “Friend” becomes a reinvention of a reinvention — an act of moral imagination about as American as it gets.

This wasn’t the only instance of a Black soul singer interpreting a tune King had written as a single mom newly arrived in L.A.: In May 1972, the Isley Brothers released a sultry cover of “It’s Too Late”; a month after that, Aretha Franklin’s live “Amazing Grace” album mashed up “You’ve Got a Friend” with “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” completing the gospel-ification that Hathaway had begun in a bastion of white rock culture temporarily remade as an African American church.

Yet in Hathaway’s “Friend” you can hear the whole story American music tells about identity and belonging (and about commercial ambition).

“This might be a record here,” Hathaway tells the crowd near the end of the song, and so it was — a document of adaptation, a testament to borrowing, a bulwark against pretty fictions.

A HUGE new indoor soft play park is coming to a major city in the UK this weekend.

Families are set to get a new destination for rainy-day fun with everything from laser tag to trampoline games.

Epicland UK will launch in Partington, Greater Manchester on Sunday, July 5.

Owners say the venue has been completely fitted out from scratch, with all-new play equipment installed throughout.

Children can look forward to light-up racing slides, interactive trampoline games, laser tag arena and soft play zones.

Parents won’t be left out either as they can sit back and enjoy fresh coffee and matcha drinks at a brand-new cafe.

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After an active play, your little ones won’t go hungry as the cafe offers healthy snacks and children’s lunch options.

The centre is designed to cater for children of all ages, with plenty of space for toddlers and older youngsters alike.

To celebrate the opening, the centre is offering a bargain deal with 20 per cent off all entry tickets until the end of August.

Customers can use the code “WELCOME20” to book a play session at a discounted rate.

The new attraction will open its doors at 9am on Sunday with a full programme prepared for the occasion.

The grand opening will be packed with fun activities from face painting, balloon artist, traditional lion dancing to giveaways.

The centre will stay open until 6pm on July 5, which means you’ll have to be quick to make the most of it.

June 23 (UPI) — A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration cannot allow states to bar federal food assistance recipients from using their benefits to buy soft drinks, snacks and candy, finding the Agriculture Department lacked the authority to approves such restrictions.

About 42.1 million low-income individuals across the nation receive federal food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP, which allows recipients to use the benefits to purchase most foods, excluding alcohol, tobacco and hot prepared foods.

Amid soaring obesity rates across the United States, 22 states received waivers from the Trump administration to exempt certain foods and beverages from the federal definition of food to ban SNAP recipients from using the benefit to purchase these items. Though the waivers vary by state, they all target high-calorie, sugary foods, such as soft drinks, energy drinks, candy and others.

In March, five SNAP recipients in Colorado, Iowa, West Virginia, Tennessee and Nebraska sued the Trump administration over its approval of waivers, saying the restrictions were vague, complicated and counterintuitive, causing significant confusion for both them and retailers, while harming SNAP recipients who rely on sugary beverages to manage chronic health conditions, such as diabetes.

In her ruling Monday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson found the Agriculture Department’s waivers violated the Administrative Procedure Act, stating the department acted in excess of its authority and without following public input noticed procedures as required by law.

“The secretary purports to waive not just a mere administrative or technical obstacle, but the very definition of ‘food’ as it was laid down by Congress,” the President Barack Obama appointee wrote in her 68-page ruling.

“Neither the USDA nor the states can force this square peg into a round hole to avoid the plain language of the statute and the requirement of 2026(k),” which requires SNAP projects to be consistent with the program’s food-assistance purpose.

The National Center for Law and Economic Justice, which filed the lawsuit, celebrated Monday’s ruling as “a major step in restoring essential food assistance to the millions of families that rely on SNAP nationwide.”

“This decision makes clear that the USDA cannot bypass the legal guardrails that establish how SNAP must operate across the country,” Katie Deabler, senior attorney at the NCLEJ, said in a statement.

“It affirms that families deserve a program that works without confusion.”

Sitting in the control room of their home studio known as the Centre of Mental Arts (COMA for short), Long Beach husband-and-wife duo Scott Montoya and Julia Kugel smile as they discuss new music they recorded for their band Soft Palms. Their new album, titled “In Echo,” has been in the works for over five years. The 10-song album, out Friday on Everloving Records, was inspired by their frustration about how they feel the world has devolved since 2020.

“The first record I was like, ‘I want to give the world a hug,’” Kugel says. “And then this one I was like, f— this world.”

For Kugel and Montoya, the album serves as the latest chapter of their creative and personal journey. The pair met in 2012 at a music festival in Dallas (“The most romantic city,” Kugel quips), while playing in the Atlanta-based band the Coathangers and Orange County’s the Growlers, respectively. They bonded over a shared disgust at gladiator shoes, and soon thereafter, were in a relationship.

By 2017, they were married and settled in Long Beach. Despite Kugel’s role in the Coathangers at the time (Montoya left the Growlers in 2016), the couple wanted to form a band. Previously, they recorded a pair of songs that constituted Kugel’s second solo seven-inch single. That experience made them comfortable knowing they could balance their professional and personal lives.

“He’s super easy to work with,” Kugel says of Montoya, who sits beside her, trying to hide a smile. She looks at him and continues, “he’s very talented and very patient.”

“When we were in our other bands, we used to meet up on tour,” Montoya, who also produces and engineers for other artists, says. ”You see the absolute worst of people on tour … so this is nothing.”

To kickstart Soft Palms, Kugel drew from a batch of songs she had previously written that had no home. Being able to record in their own studio allowed the pair to craft songs without feeling any pressure to meet a deadline.

By late 2019, the pair put the finishing touches on their self-titled debut. When the record was released in July 2020, the pandemic was still in full force. The pair were disappointed and upset by the state of the world, and after a few years of stewing, Kugel and Montoya got started on a second album.

Don’t be fooled by its breezy ’60s-analog vintage pop sound. Soft Palms are angry, and that informs the spirit of “In Echo.”

The pair points to “Radio” as the album’s bellwether. First released in 2025, the song rails against how, over the past handful of years, people have fought for the sake of fighting, with no end in sight.

More strikingly, on the biting “Nervous as Hell,” Montoya points to Fox News as “infecting everyone’s parents.”

“I did some digging because I couldn’t believe something that hateful existed,” he says of the network, specifically its landmark $787-million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. “It turned it from this horrible thing into this s— business that has taken advantage of the elderly and destroyed families.”

That anger continues on the angsty rocker “The Wedding Song.” Kugel points to attending a wedding where a family member married a “total raging maniac,” and how they dealt with the buildup of delicately balancing being cordial yet firm.

“He [the family member] goes, ‘I just want you to show up and shut up!” she says. “I was like, ‘Well, firstly, f— you. Then secondly, this is a song — you just handed me gold.”

Since settling in Long Beach, for the last 10 years Kugel and Montoya took it upon themselves to help foster a positive, artistic community. It’s that mindset that pushed them to found and operate their 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Studios for Schools with the goal of providing recording equipment to underprivileged schools.

Their DIY work ethic in entertainment was also the driving force behind Happy Sundays, a free Long Beach-based music festival. Running for 10 years, the fest created a block party in the city’s Zaferia neighborhood that eventually expanded into a full weekend of shows across stages set up at local businesses to host a diverse lineup of veteran and up-and-coming area bands. Though the event was paused this year so they can focus on the new album and book, the couple plan to bring it back in 2027.

“It was like a statement in that way of like f— these giant prices, VIP experiences and all of that stuff,” Kugel says. “It’s the anti-music festival and a celebration of community.”

Keeping with that spirit, and drawing from the experiences of their two-decade careers, last month the pair released a book titled “How to Be Self-Reliant in the Music Business.” The genesis of this self-published guidebook occurred when the pair realized they were not receiving a portion of a royalty stream they were owed. They knew that if they were in the dark on the issues they thought they knew, others likely were as well.

“We decided to turn it into a book because we realized there’s so much stuff that few artists know about on their own,” Montoya says. “I want people to understand the scope of what they’re actually getting into, and the reality of their situations.”

“It’s a very thorough overview,” Kugel adds.

The book includes information beyond what one would find in Donald S. Passman’s longstanding industry bible “All You Need to Know About the Music Business.” With assistance from a lawyer friend and a CPA family member, the pair addresses topics ranging from backstage etiquette to managing social media to dealing with record labels and publishing companies. They hope that it will provide a blueprint for bands old and new to better navigate music’s notoriously choppy waters. Their accessible, snack-size chapters move fluidly as they explain the realities artists face in 2026.

Battling through the disappointment of the first part of the decade allowed Kugel and Montoya to find their creative way. Armed with this infusion of activity across various disciplines, the couple is inspired to continue to shake their way out of the past. Though focused on their impending U.S. and European tour, the duo promise that the next Soft Palms album won’t take as long and are mulling over their next music-industry book project. For now.

“It’s a lot to keep up with all of these projects,” Montoya says. “We work all day, every day. And it’s been cool to see signs that it’s paying off.”