A POPULAR theme park in Turkey will be home to a new Nickelodeon Land when it opens next year.

Dubbed Turkey’s answer to Disneyland, the gates to Nickelodeon Land and Nickelodeon Hotel & Resorts will open at Antalya’s The Land of Legends in January.

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The park will consist of three unique areas; the underwater Bikini Bottom from SpongeBob SquarePants, intergalactic Star Trek: Wild Galaxy, based on Star Trek: Prodigy, and the open-air Adventure Bay PAW Patrol. 

Guests will be able to enjoy a range of experiences such as “riding the giant Jellyfish Jam swing” in Bikini Bottom, to experiencing an adventure through space in the Star Trek: Wild Galaxy 5D cinema.

At the Nickelodeon-themed hotel, each guest can continue to enjoy hanging out with their favourite Nikelodeon legends.

The hotel rooms have been specially designed in one of five concept themes – DORA, PAW Patrol, SpongeBob SquarePants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Trek.

Each room is complete themed interiors such as Spongebob bedside tables as well as kid-friendly facilities to make each member of the family feel at home.

Younger guests will also be looked after with an array of experiences on offer at the hotel.

There’s Character Dining to Club Nick, where kids can play, learn and develop with their new friends.

The outdoor pool area features an Aqua Tower, Spray Area and in true Nickelodeon style, a chance to be Slimed.

Away from the family areas, parents can find the time to switch off at Anjana Spa.

Inside which will offer holistic therapies, massages and traditional Turkish Hammam or let off steam in the hotel’s fully-equipped gym with yoga and Pilates studios.

The park experience begins at the iconic Chateau in The Land of Legends Shopping Avenue, the centre of nightly entertainment.

Guests can mingle with their favourite Nickelodeon characters and shop for souvenirs, including clothes, mugs, keyrings and toys.

The new park and hotel will open on January 15th.

The Land of Legends in Antalya already has three parks – Adventure Land, Aqua Land, and Tropic Lagoon.

Adventure Land is full of adrenaline-inducing rides, like Typhoon Coaster, Skyfighter and Hurricane,

Aqua Land has a host of water-themed rides, including 40 water slides.

Use these tips on your next theme park trip

Next time you visit a theme park, you may want to use our top tips to make the most of your adrenaline-inducing day out.

1. Go to the back of the theme park first. Rides at the front will have the longest queues as soon as it opens.
2. Go on water rides in the middle of the day in the summer – this will cool you off when the sun is at its hottest.
3. Download the park’s app to track which rides have the shortest queues.
4. Visit on your birthday, as some parks give out “birthday badges” that can get you freebies.
5. If it rains, contact the park. Depending on how much it rained, you may get a free ticket to return.

And Topic Lagoon has one of the world’s longest water slides, a heated pool, wave pool, and plenty of sunbathing areas for relaxing.

The Land of Legends is also located close by to the beachside resort of Belek, with sister properties, Rixos Premium Belek and Rixos Park Belek, for those wanting a day relaxing by the ocean.

The Sun’s Kate Ferguson recently visited the park.

She said: “Known among Brits as “the Turkish Disneyland” it has dare-devil rides and water park attractions that would satisfy the biggest thrillseekers.

“There are six pools on site — the massive one just behind the beach which tends to be where families decamp for most of the day.

“When they’re not at the pool, little ones and teens can head to The Rixy Kids Club, jam-packed with activities like arts and crafts, kids’ yoga and boxing, film showings, mini discos . . . the list goes on.”

Here’s everything else you need to know about the hotel.

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Just a stone’s throw away from Vienna’s Stephansdom cathedral, the Austrian far right has put up its campaign billboards with a religious verse next to the giant portrait of their leader, Herbert Kickl: “Thy will be done.”

It is a biblically-inspired profession of democratic humility, insists Kickl’s Freedom party (FPÖ). But Kickl is a strong critic of the Catholic Church and his opponents detect more sinister resonances: “Thy kingdom come”, the preceding verse of the Lord’s prayer translates as: dein Reich komme.

Such ambiguities, which tilt at, and sometimes overtly borrow from, the language of Austria’s dark Nazi past, have been a hallmark of the FPÖ’s electioneering this summer.

This Sunday, the FPÖ is facing a potentially historic electoral breakthrough. For the first time in postwar Austrian history, it is expected to beat the other parties to first place at the ballot box.

Its supporters hope that such a victory could even propel Kickl — who also calls himself Volkskanzler or people’s chancellor, a phrasing used by Adolf Hitler — into the top job.

Just five years ago, when the country last held parliamentary elections, the FPÖ’s popularity was in tatters. Its leadership was shamed by a corruption scandal that forced it out of a coalition government.

Now, opinion polls put it on course to secure 27 per cent of the vote, narrowly beating the mainstream conservative People’s party — the dominant force in Austrian politics for the past 70 years — which currently governs in partnership with the Greens.

The FPÖ has achieved this comeback under Kickl by pursuing a political platform that has tacked hard to the right, as its provocative sloganeering attests.

Austria’s even more extreme identitarian movement, which the FPÖ’s previous leadership deemed too toxic because of its views on racial and cultural purity, was just a “rightwing NGO” in the orbit of the party in the same way that Greenpeace was for the Greens, Kickl said last year.

His party has since embraced identitarian concepts such as remigration — sending people with a migrant background, even if they are Austrian citizens, back to their origin country.

“The thinking used to be that to be part of government, you had to make yourselves palatable to the political centre. Kickl hasn’t followed that logic one bit,” said Bernhard Weidinger, a specialist on rightwing movements at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, a historical research institute.

“He has taken an increasingly hardline ideological course and the interesting thing is, it seems to be working.”

Weidinger said that when Kickl took over the leadership of the party in 2021, people doubted he would appeal to voters beyond his hardcore base. The polls have been telling a different story.

In 2023, Austria had the fifth-largest gross domestic product per capita in the EU, and the ninth-lowest score on the Gini index, a measure of income inequality. Despite a mild recession last year and persistent inflation, its economy is otherwise robust and growing, its welfare system one of the best resourced in the world and its unemployment rate is touching historic lows.

The FPÖ’s resurgence, analysts note, seems to belie the notion that populism is a protest vote or a product of economic disenfranchisement.

Kickl has appeared to mobilise support thanks to a deeper set of social anxieties and grievances for which pollsters lack a full explanation, though they believe it has been stoked by rapid technological and social change in recent years that has destabilised many people’s sense of identity.

Opposition to illegal immigration — which hit its highest-ever level in Austria in 2022 — remains at the centre of the FPÖ’s appeal, but it is no longer the all-encompassing topic it once was for the party. It gets its first mention on page 17 of the manifesto.

“Immigration is still at the core of FPÖ concerns, but Kickl has also created a whole theme park of other ideas that reinforce two key messages,” said Thomas Hofer, an Austrian political consultant. “[Namely] that they are the party of the ‘real’ Austrian people, and that they are the party of freedom.”

One topic instrumentalised with apparent success, to the surprise of political analysts, was the Covid-19 pandemic.

Conspiracy theories regarding the spread of the virus, criticism against mandatory vaccination and governments’ alleged authoritarian use of lockdowns have featured prominently in the FPÖ’s campaign. The pandemic was also the first topic Kickl raised in his recent TV debate with the current chancellor, Karl Nehammer.

“Never forget,” the party literature declares, inviting Austrians to recall the trauma of the pandemic years.

“The pandemic has had a very strange collective impact on politics I don’t think we have really fully appreciated yet,” said Marcus How, head of research at VE Insight, a Vienna-based political risk consultancy. “The FPÖ has been very good at really mobilising the heterodox thinking which the pandemic fuelled.”

What seemed like “electoral suicide” to many in the political mainstream, said How, recalling Kickl’s promotion of horse medication as a cure for Covid, conspiracy theories and strident opposition to government fiat, actually turned out to be a foundation for building support among an entirely new constituency of voters from across the political spectrum.

Chief among them was the young — the demographic group most affected by pandemic-era restrictions and least in need of them. In regional elections in June, the FPÖ was the most popular political party among 18 to 29 year olds.

Kickl has also depicted the war in Ukraine as mainstream political do-goodery gone mad, threatening to draw Austrians into a conflict against their will. He argues that “climate communism” is taking away the choice for people in rural areas to buy affordable cars, while “woke” culture is policing the liberty to joke among friends in the pub.

Born in a working-class family in the southern Austrian state of Carinthia, Kickl has been a life-long outsider in a country where political success is typically built with family connections and through backdoor deals. Even in his party, Kickl never easily fitted in either of its main ideological wings and their associated networks of clubs and fraternities: the libertarians and the German nationalists.

A dropout of journalism and philosophy studies, his ascent through the ranks of the FPÖ was propelled by his talent for political communication. He became speechwriter to the FPÖ’s most successful leader, the flamboyant Jörg Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008.

Only with the fall of Haider’s successor, Heinz-Christian Strache, who was caught in a corruption scandal known as “Ibizagate” in 2019, in which he was filmed soliciting Russian money in return for political favours, did Kickl move into the political centre stage.

One key lesson he took from Strache’s failure was not to rely on Austria’s established press. When Strache was in charge, the goal was to win support from the country’s biggest tabloid, the Kronen Zeitung. Under Kickl, the FPÖ has thumbed its nose at the paper and quickly built a large social media presence, including on YouTube and Facebook.

Still, for some, the party’s renaissance owes as much to enduring structural issues in Austrian electoral politics, as it does Kickl’s leadership.

The FPÖ had always been the third force, said Lothar Höbelt, a prominent Austrian historian — biographer of Haider — and sometime supporter of the party. Its success, he said, could perhaps most straightforwardly be read as a failure of the mainstream parties.

The conservative People’s party has been mired in corruption scandals since the departure of chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats have elected a left-leaning leader who is unloved by more moderate party colleagues and unpopular with voters.

For Höbelt the result on Sunday is, despite all the noise, unlikely to amount to any great ruction.

“Let’s face it, we are probably looking at a result where the FPÖ is not really all that far from where it was in 1999 or 2017,” he said, when the party won 26.9 per cent and 26 per cent of the vote respectively. The political memory of a liberal mainstream, he said, was short, and prone to catastrophising.

Topics such as Covid and Ukraine, Höbelt noted, had no actionable policy dimension, as they were simply about stoking emotions. On other issues, such as migration, mainstream parties had already tacked right, adopting the FPÖ’s ideas. The far-right party meanwhile had tried to present a more mainstream set of economic policies on issues such as tax and spending.

“There’s very little discussion of actual policy issues at all, and very little in the FPÖ programme of substance that separates it from the People’s party.”

BRITS have been scrambling for tea bags after strikes at Tetley’s factory sparked fears of a shortage. 

After last week’s news of a potential tea drought, thousands rushed to supermarkets to secure their beloved cuppa. 

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The alarm was triggered when almost 150 GMB members working at Tata Consumer Products, which makes Tetley Tea in Teesside, announced they would lay down tools in anger at “poverty pay” on Friday and Monday. 

The factory is Tetley’s biggest in the world, and it supplies 30 percent of the UK’s tea.

As panic-buying kicked in, Iceland Foods and The Food Warehouse supermarkets reported a dramatic surge in sales.

On Thursday alone, Tetley’s original bag sales shot up by 100 per cent compared to the previous day.

And over the following four days, sales of Tetley’s tea, decaf, peppermint, and green tea bags spiked by 250 per cent compared to the previous week.

More than a million tea bags were sold, driven by offers on peppermint and green tea, according to the supermarket chain. 

An Iceland spokesperson said: “Britain loves a brew and the threat of a tea shortage sparked some small panic amongst shoppers over the past four days.

“As soon as the news broke that there could be a tea shortage, our customers immediately made sure they were fully stocked, just in case stock levels drop.”

They also reassured shoppers they have enough stock for Britain’s brews, adding: “Fear not tea drinkers, despite the rush, we still have enough tea bags in stock to keep Britain’s thirst quenched. Whether it’s Tetley’s, Yorkshire Tea, PG Tips or Typhoo, we have a proper brew waiting for you!”

Members of the GMB union at the Eaglescliffe factory, near Stockton, voted to take industrial action after being offered a 4.4 percent pay rise, compared to the 7 per cent they received last year.

Tata Consumer Products said: “We are disappointed with the decision to strike particularly when we have two offers on the table.

“We are not immune to the difficult economic circumstances facing families and businesses, but we do believe the pay award offers made by us to be fair.”

It is not the first time fears of a tea shortage hits Britain.

Earlier this year, Sainsbury’s cautioned shoppers in some stores that there are “nationwide” problems which could impact the availability of black tea.

But retail bosses have said the problems are “temporary” and stressed that the impact on consumers is expected to be “minimal”.

A sign in one Sainsbury’s store read: “We are experiencing supply issues affecting the nationwide supply of black tea. 

“We apologise for any inconvenience and hope to be back in full supply soon.”

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The yen carry trade that spectacularly reversed in August already feels long ago, but Bank of America thinks it’s found another potential landmine: International corporate deposits.

The bank’s analysts point out that companies in Europe and Asia have been accumulating a huge trove of FX deposits since 2019, initially as a precaution after Covid-19 and afterwards because higher US interest rates and the dollar’s strength made them attractive.

Even after dipping a bit lately, that stash now exceeds $1tn.

Of this they estimate that somewhere in the range of $260bn to $480bn are de facto carry trades, with dollar deposits exceeding dollar loans particularly starkly in China.

If this starts to unwind as the Federal Reserve cuts rates and the dollar weakens then it will add even more pressure on the greenback, BofA argues. From their note:

Monetary tightening by global central banks, in particular the US Federal Reserve, made it more attractive for corporates in the euro area and Asia to hold onto FX receipts and benefit from the associated higher rates, rather to convert these receipts to the local currency. The large FX carry position has sustained even as some corporates started to pay down FX loans

. . . A potential unwind of carry position by corporates may extend the broad US dollar weakness that we expect. To bring corporates’ FX carry position down to the average 2019 level, we estimate this may imply an unwind of c. USD 250bn-300bn in their FX carry position.

This doesn’t seem like a massive risk. Estimates vary but the yen carry trade was much larger, and the dollar is an even more liquid currency. The latest comprehensive BIS study estimated that there’s about $7.5tn of FX trading volumes daily, and the US dollar was on one side of 88 per cent of all trades.

That said, a dollar carry trade unwind sounds like it would be fun, so we’re rooting for it.

A winking owl greets drivers pulling in for petrol, snacks and drinks across Quebec — the logo of Alimentation Couche-Tard, which from a single outlet in 1980 has become a $53bn company with 16,700 owned or licensed convenience stores worldwide.

Couche-Tard, French for night owl, is now in pursuit of the world’s largest convenience store chain after swooping in with a rejected preliminary offer of $39bn for 7-Eleven owner Seven & i Holdings of Japan. 

The driving force behind Couche-Tard’s strategy is Alain Bouchard, the man who opened the first store, according to industry executives, bankers and analysts.

Bouchard retired as chief executive of Couche-Tard a decade ago but people who know the 75-year-old, now executive chair, say he remains deeply involved in the business. 

As Couche-Tard’s largest shareholder with a 12.9 per cent stake worth C$9.2bn (US$6.8bn), he is one of Canada’s richest people. Yet outside of Quebec province, where he lives and is a philanthropist with his wife, he is hardly known. 

“What he’s done is incredible,” said Sylvain Charlebois, a management professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax. “He’s a victim of his own sector not being seen as a sexy one.”

Acquaintances describe Bouchard as modest and down to earth, the kind of executive who visits stores daily and picks up litter from the forecourt. 

The billionaire had a financially precarious adolescence, according to his biographer Guy Gendron. 

When he was 9, his father was forced to take work in the distant mines of Labrador after his company went bankrupt, and the family moved into a mobile home. Bouchard’s mother temporarily entered a psychiatric institution and his 12-year-old sister became the primary caregiver to him and their other four siblings.

“Bouchard, because of that, was looking for revenge on life,” Gendron told the Financial Times. “He’s a pathological entrepreneur.”

He opened his first store outside Montreal in 1980 and five years later bought 11 more around Quebec City that bore the name Couche-Tard, branding he retained. The company gobbled up more chains around Canada including Perrette, Provi-Soir and Mac’s. 

Bouchard and his three founding partners moved into the US in the 2000s, doubling Couche-Tard’s footprint overnight with the purchase of Circle K’s 1,600 stores from ConocoPhillips for $830mn. All the company’s stores outside Quebec now carry a Circle K banner. 

When Norway’s Statoil, now Equinor, sold the company its Scandinavian service stations in 2012, Couche-Tard gained a beachhead in Europe. A 2020 deal in Hong Kong and Macau expanded its presence into Asia. 

Couche-Tard’s stores rang up $69bn in sales worldwide in its last fiscal year, with earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of $5.6bn. Almost three-quarters of its stores were accumulated through mergers and acquisitions, chief financial officer Filipe Da Silva said in an investor presentation in late 2023. 

The company is targeting $10bn in ebitda by 2028, of which $1.1bn should come from new M&A, according to its annual report. Centre stage will be the US. 

The largest operator by far in the US is 7-Eleven, with more than 12,500 US stores to Circle K’s 7,100, according to Technomic. Seven & i rejected Couche-Tard’s offer this month as “grossly” undervaluing its business. 

Bouchard is known for his dealmaking. “He would be involved at the highest level,” said Michael Van Aelst, a Montreal-based consumer staples analyst at TD Cowen. 

Henry Armour, chief executive of the National Association of Convenience Stores, said that since Bouchard stepped down as CEO “it is my perspective that Alain has been a very hands-on executive chairman. I think he very much concentrated far less on operations and far more on acquisitions, real estate, really high-level strategy of the organisation”. 

People who know and have done business with Bouchard say his approach to M&A has evolved. 

The group has a long history of audacious unsolicited approaches, including failed moves in 2010 for Casey’s General Stores, the third-biggest US convenience store chain, and in 2021 for Carrefour in France — an effort that was abandoned after opposition from Paris.

“If you go back and look at his history over the last 20 years, he’s cheap,” said one senior businessman who has dealt with Bouchard. “And you have to give him credit for that . . . for trying to get the best assets he can as cheaply as he can.”

One fund manager who has followed the Seven & i offer said he could not believe Couche-Tard or Bouchard were prepared to walk away this time. “The opening offer from Couche-Tard was laughably low,” he said. “He must have known it would be rejected . . . You would bet it’s just a starting position.”

After Seven & i rejected its initial offer this month, Couche-Tard said it remained “highly focused” on pressing ahead with a friendly takeover.

Couche-Tard and Bouchard declined to comment. The company has previously said that combining with Seven & i would create a “leading global retail platform” with more than 100,000 sites spanning Asia, North America, Australia and Europe. 

JPMorgan analysts estimate a combined entity — even if 10 per cent of shops were closed to clear competition concerns — would have a market share of 12.5 per cent in the US, “which would put it in a dominant position with seven times the number of stores” of Casey’s.

Analysts say that kind of opportunity, and the ability to curtail the risk of 7-Eleven becoming ever stronger in the US, is why Couche-Tard has been circling Seven & i since for years, making repeated overtures in the hopes of paving the way for a friendly deal.

“In the end perhaps this is a defensive bid,” said Michael Causton, co-founder of retail research agency JapanConsuming. “Because if Seven & i applies the logistics prowess and relentless product development schedules of its Japan business to the US . . . then it will hammer competitors, like Couche-Tard.”

Associates say Bouchard will not be rushed. 

“The logo of Couche-Tard is a night owl with one eye closed and one open,” Gendron said. “It’s a symbol of the way the company operates: it’s patient like a night owl, waiting for prey.”