YOUR trip to Paris or Amsterdam could be much cheaper next year – if you travel by train.

Train regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) had said fares should be cut by 7.7 per cent from April 2025.

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The call comes after a huge demand in Eurostar seats since Covid restrictions lifted.

Feras Alshaker, ORR director for planning and performance, said the high speed train line was a ” vital connection between the UK and continental Europe“.

They added: “[It] makes a crucial contribution to the UK economy, supporting growth.

“The detailed scrutiny and challenge we’ve applied to HS1 Ltd’s plans should see the costs of operating on the line reduce significantly, giving savings for both international and domestic operators over the next five years, with benefits for passengers and freight users.”

And HS1 Ltd chief strategy and regulation officer Mattias Bjornfors said they “welcomed” the five-year plan to reduce fares.

He added: “Our plan for 2025-2030 included several proposals to reduce charges for freight and transport operators which have been accepted.

The fare reduction would see Eurostar tickets around 7.7 per cent cheaper.

It would also affect Southeastern routes, being cut by 10.8 per cent which connects London to many of Kent’s seaside towns such as Margate and Folkestone.

Freight services could be cut by as much as 66 per cent.

Currently, Brits can travel to Europe with Eurostar for as little as £39 each way.

This includes route from London St Pancras to Paris, Lille, Brussels, Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

These fares are in short supply however, and often not at peak times or weekends.

There are also calls for more Eurostar stops in the UK.

Previously stopping at Ashford International, this was paused during the Covid pandemic and is yet to return.

Despite petitions and calls from local MPs for it to return, experts have said it is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

And there are also calls for it to stop at Stratford International, which the Eurostar also travels through.

The station was initially built for international train routes – although has never had them, being just seven minutes from London St Pancras.

A number of train operators have revealed plans to take on Eurostar with UK-Europe routes.

Virgin Trains could launch routes between the UK and Europe for the first time ever.

And start-up Evolyn has revealed plans to launch train services between London to Paris.

Sun Travel’s favourite train journeys in the world

Sun Travel’s journalists have taken their fare share of train journeys on their travels and here they share their most memorable rail experiences.

Davos to Geneva, Switzerland

“After a ski holiday in Davos, I took the scenic train back to Geneva Airport. The snow-covered mountains and tiny alpine villages that we passed were so beautiful that it felt like a moving picture was playing beyond the glass.” – Caroline McGuire

Tokyo to Kyoto by Shinkansen

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“Nothing quite beats the Shinkansen bullet train, one of the fastest in the world. It hardly feels like you’re whizzing along at speed until you look outside and see the trees a green blur. Make sure to book seat D or E too – as you’ll have the best view of Mount Fuji along the way.” Kara Godfrey

London to Paris by Eurostar

“Those who have never travelled on the Eurostar may wonder what’s so special about a seemingly ordinary train that takes you across the channel. You won’t have to waste a moment and can tick off all the top attractions from the Louvre to the Champs-Élysées which are both less than five kilometres from the Gare du Nord.” – Sophie Swietochowski

Glasgow to Fort William by Scotrail

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“From mountain landscapes and serene lochs to the wistful moors, I spent my three-hour journey from Glasgow to Fort William gazing out the window. Sit on the left-hand side of the train for the best views overlooking Loch Lomond.” – Hope Brotherton

Beijing to Ulaanbatar

“The Trans-Mongolian Express is truly a train journey like no other. It starts amid the chaos of central Beijing before the city’s high-rises give way to crumbling ancient villages and eventually the vast vacant plains of Mongolia, via the Gobi desert. The deep orange sunset seen in the middle of the desert is among the best I’ve witnessed anywhere.” – Ryan Gray

by Megan Kenny and Brandon Soderberg
Data analysis by Megan Kenny
Illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher

On the heels of 2023, a year when Baltimore’s annual homicide number significantly declined for the first time in nearly a decade, the Baltimore Police held a press conference to celebrate what public officials and the Department of Justice called “a significant milestone.”

That early 2024 “milestone”: two of the many reforms required by the federal consent decree—the result of a civil rights investigation following the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray—were recently completed to the approval of the Department of Justice. These completed reforms are related to transporting people in police custody and “officer support and wellness practices.”

At the press conference, City Solicitor Ebony Thompson suggested that 2023’s violence reduction was the result of these reforms. “This milestone is occurring at a time when the city is achieving a recent and historic reduction in violent crime,” Thompson said, calling the reforms “a testament to the effectiveness of constitutional and community focused policing.”

Another way of looking at this “milestone”: over the previous seven years, only around 5% of the consent decree-mandated reforms have been completed. Following the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a Department of Justice civil rights investigation revealed a staggering pattern and practice of civil rights violations and discriminatory policing. As a result of that investigation, the Baltimore Police Department entered into a federal consent decree in April 2017. Seven years later, the most significant elements of the consent decree, regarding police misconduct (including use of force), have barely even begun. WYPR reported that “about 15% of the decree hasn’t been touched yet.”

This means the claim being made, really, is that murders have declined because police are reducing the number of “rough rides” and also receiving more wellness support—a specious connection, and an example of how reform is regularly misrepresented to the public by political leaders and police. 

As the Baltimore Police Department goes through another year under the consent decree, with changes to the department slow going, TRNN found that Baltimore data transparency and retention has gotten worse and its numbers have become increasingly unreliable.

This is a story of how much we do not know. 

Deeply Flawed Data

The Baltimore City Police Department provides Open Baltimore, the city’s publicly accessible data hub, with data about crime and police activity. Baltimore’s political leaders and police pride themselves on data access and transparency. These datasets are often used as research tools for citizens, reporters, and those in policy development and law enforcement. Indeed, everyone is encouraged to consult Open Baltimore.

But we found these datasets to be deeply flawed in ways that would make any conclusions drawn from them unsound—especially for governance and policing. The arrest data in Open Baltimore demonstrates that, contrary to what would be expected, data gathering by police has become less comprehensive and more faulty since the implementation of the federal consent decree.

Specifically, there are significant differences between Open Baltimore arrest data and Uniform Crime Report data (UCR). UCR is provided to the FBI by law enforcement offices all over the country each year and was, for decades, the most referenced and most frequently cited dataset about crime. There are flaws with UCR, including the problem with all law enforcement data: it is self-reported by law enforcement. 

That said, UCR data for 1990-2020 was provided to TRNN by Baltimore Police via a public information request, making it the most comprehensive data set available for such a long period of time. 

The number of arrests recorded in Open Baltimore data varies significantly from the numbers in UCR, often by thousands. Baltimore Police provide data to both the FBI and Open Baltimore, making the cause of differences between the two datasets especially confounding. Additionally, there are a significant number of arrests not included in the Open Baltimore dataset, and the differences between the numbers recorded in UCR and Open Baltimore data have widened over time. Arrests seemingly disappear from Open Baltimore.

In February 2023, we pulled an arrest data file from Open Baltimore. In the arrest data between the years 2010-2020, a total of 335,805 arrests were shown. 

That same arrest file was pulled four months later in June 2023. There were 386 fewer arrests. 

An additional data analysis was completed in January 2024. The same trend continued, at a much greater rate. In the course of nearly a year, more than 4,300 arrests were removed from the total for 2010-2020.

When we spoke to Baltimore City employees, including representatives from Open Baltimore and Baltimore Police, their reason for removing previously-recorded arrests from Open Baltimore’s data was unclear. Arrests that are documented but do not result in a charge, or are accidentally duplicated or inaccurately entered are removed during reviews by police. Additionally, the police explained that expungements may have something to do with the lower numbers of arrests. They could not tell us how frequently arrests are removed for either of those reasons.

This arrest data is frequently cited. One recent example of Open Baltimore’s flawed year-to-year data being cited is the Baltimore Banner’s 2022 analysis of arrests. At the end of 2022, the Banner reported that arrests had increased for the first time in nearly a decade. While the broad conclusions are correct—based on the data, arrests did slightly increase in 2022—the year-to-year arrest numbers cited by the Banner are quite different from past UCR numbers and contemporaneous reporting because the number of arrests recorded in those years in Open Baltimore have declined.

Whatever the reason for the lowered arrest numbers, it means that Open Baltimore provides an increasingly incomplete picture of police activity from the past as each dataset gets older. It is not a record of those people who were handcuffed and arrested at a specific point in time—their lives put on hold for weeks, months, or years—but a record of how some of those arrests were processed long after that, based on an unknown and unnamed number of factors.

A recent review of Open Baltimore shows that, months after our year-long analysis, arrest data continues to decline.

TRNN also looked at geographic location data within Open Baltimore’s arrest data. Over the past 13 years, Open Baltimore’s arrest data is missing locations in, on average, 37% of arrests. That percentage increased from 4% in 2010 to as high as 61% in 2022. 

The percentage of missing data has increased significantly since 2015 when the city police were put under increased scrutiny following Freddie Gray’s death (46% missing location data) and in 2017 (49% missing data) when the consent decree was implemented.

It is unclear whether this location-based data is missing from police records as well, or if police records maintain this data with locations and, for reasons unknown, it was not given to Open Baltimore. 

One more example of how poor data entry has been in Baltimore: throughout the ’90s, there are entries in Maryland Case Search in which the officer name is “Officer, Police” or “Police, Officer.” Over 500 of these results are for arrests in Baltimore City where the last name is “Officer.” There are over 300 where the first name is “Police” and nearly 300 where the first name is “Baltimore.”   That data entry in the ’90s was poor is hardly a surprise. That these “Officer, Police” permutations have stood for decades in the database shows that data cleansing and validation has never been prioritized.

Representatives from city government, including Open Baltimore, seemed entirely unaware of these problems with Open Baltimore’s data until we brought them to their attention. After months seeking comment or explanation, Open Baltimore was not able to provide a thorough explanation.

In a city where policing is scrutinized for bias and professionalized for data gathering, and police enforcement itself is informed by targeting “microzones,” the lack of comprehensive location data (nearly 40% is missing) available to the public is troubling.

A History of Dirty Data

While there are problems with the police records provided to Open Baltimore, the unreliability of Baltimore crime data has been a decades-long problem. Collection and reporting of crime data has been a hotly contested issue in Baltimore and the data provided has been frequently insufficient, unsound, and in some cases, manipulated.

In the ’90s—the decade leading up to “zero tolerance”—then-Councilperson Martin O’Malley and others accused Mayor Kurt Schmoke of adjusting statistics to make crime seem lower than it actually was. Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier’s report in the mid-’90s about nonfatal shooting reductions was also challenged. 

After O’Malley was elected mayor in 1999, he commissioned an audit which found violent crime was frequently downgraded. As a result of the audit, thousands of felonies were added to the official number for 1999. This also had the effect of making any decrease in crime during the first year of the O’Malley administration even more dramatic.

O’Malley would later be accused of the same sort of stats manipulation. In 2001, O’Malley said there were 78,000 arrests, but the official number was 86,000. Official arrest numbers for 2005 are around 100,000, while the ACLU claimed the number was 108,000. 

In 2006, WBAL Investigative Reporter Jayne Miller (a TRNN contributor) revealed that police were simply not counting all of the violent crimes reported. For example, Miller found that “police wrote no report of a shooting… despite locating and interviewing the intended target, who was not hurt. Instead, the officers combined the incident with armed robbery that occurred earlier that night in the same area—a practice known as duplicating.”

After 2006, the department shifted away from mass arrest towards what they framed as more “targeted” styles of policing, focused on violent offenders rather than low-level offenders. In Part Two of this series, we noted that the data from these years showed a decrease in low-level offenses but did not show an increase in the enforcement of violent crimes. A policy of greater focus on guns and gun possession during this period is also not reflected in the data. Gun seizures were much higher in the ’90s than in the period where gun policing was supposedly the focus.

Here We Go Again

The short history and long tail of Baltimore’s “zero tolerance” policing.

These problems with data and the lack of transparency are costly. Baltimore spends more per capita on its police department than any other major American city, but the city and department have consistently failed in their oversight of how that money is actually spent, especially on police overtime. Exorbitant overtime is a commonly used indicator when searching for problem police officers and police corruption. For example, members of the infamous Gun Trace Task Force were among the officers who were nearly doubling their salary with overtime. And, as Baltimore Brew reported, the same overtime offenders appeared year after year; the Maryland State Office of Legislative Audits recently found that Baltimore Police “failed to effectively monitor $66.5 million in overtime.”

Police quarreled with the auditor’s conclusions and assured overtime practices would now be reformed and ready by the end of May 2024. They were not. Since 2016, the Baltimore Police has failed overtime audits each year—and each year, police explain that the department needs a little more time to fix overtime.

Melissa Schober, a community advocate, has been calling attention to the failed overtime audit by the Baltimore Police for years. She told TRNN that her concerns extend to the broader metrics used by police, not just overtime. Metrics remain oblique and undefined and, according to police, cannot improve because they are contingent upon a police budget they claim is inadequate. The Baltimore City police budget is nearly $600 million per year, Schober stressed.

“My fury isn’t just at the overtime overspending. It is that years after the Fiscal Year 2016—that’s July 1, 2015, so nearly a decade ago—we are still somehow ‘in progress’ on documenting metrics because carrying those things out are ‘budget dependent’ but they never manage to say how much they’re short and when they expect to complete the work,” Schober said. “Until and unless the BPD can say, ‘Here’s our outcome and here is the numerator and denominator and here’s how we validate those numbers (or counts), here’s our data dictionary and here’s how we train our folks to count things,’ we have no idea what is happening with money.” 

While the city celebrates the “progress” police are making with the federal consent decree, data remains incomplete. Some data-gathering related to the consent decree has not even begun.

The consent decree requires the police to record stop and search data, but, as the Baltimore Banner reported, that has not even started, even though it is perhaps the most crucial way, data-wise, to get a sense of discriminatory and unconstitutional policing. The Baltimore Sun recently reported that Baltimore Police do not keep track of how often their officers get in police chases. Soon after the Sun published their story, police released the data they previously said they did not track.

The refusal to properly share, let alone collect, this data also enables police misconduct. There is no way to determine how often questionable stops occur, because it is only when police stops result in arrests that they are recorded. For defense attorneys, this is not only a gap in data, it’s a convenient way for police not to account for constitutional violations.

The lack of stop and search data means constitutional violations are revealed only when they happen to someone arrested for a crime—at which point the constitutional violation is often ignored by prosecutors and judges because the arrestee was found to have broken the law. 

“Police are never discouraged from crossing the line when they stop and search someone without probable cause—and they are actually encouraged to cross the line any time they find a gun,” defense attorney and former public defender Natalie Finegar told TRNN. 

Since 2017, Baltimore Police have relied on an expansive—and controversial—plainclothes policing unit called DAT (District Action Team) whose primary job is gun and drug interdiction. They do this in part by searching people they deem “suspicious” or representing “characteristics of an armed person.” The Baltimore Police argue that this kind of “proactive policing” and these types of questionable stops are vital to violence reduction. The police lack data to back up this claim.

“While it can be difficult to correlate officer proactivity and visibility to what crimes have been prevented, we have seen that when these units are deployed, they have an impact on crime suppression and calming for the community,” Baltimore Police spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge told TRNN.

According to Schober, the problem is not only the inability of police to provide data, but to even explain why certain data points such as “proactive policing” were even analyzed. 

“When auditors looked at percent of time spent on proactive policing, the BPD was unable to produce documentation detailing how and why they selected that as a performance measure, and then how they monitored, controlled, and analyzed data,” Schober said.

Data’s Inconvenient Truths

Last year, Baltimore recorded 262 murders, a decline of 70 from 2022—a “historic” reduction. This drop in murders is notable and important. Far fewer people died in Baltimore from gun violence last year compared to previous years, and these declines have continued into 2024—as of June, murders had declined by another 36%. 

Our data analysis in Part Two noted that, due to population decline, the current drop in murders puts the city’s murder rate—people killed per 100,000—at almost the exact same place it was in 1990. The use of that 300 number as a benchmark, as we explained in Part One, dates back to the early ’90s when the city first surpassed 300 murders per year, and also had a significantly higher population. When accounting for population decline, 1990’s 300 murders-per-year number is around 240 murders.

In 2024, Baltimore will likely have far fewer than even 240 homicides. At the end of June, Baltimore had recorded 89 homicides, which makes the city on track to endure fewer than 200 murders for the first time since 2011.

The mayor and others have already credited the one-year reduction to its Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) and other interrelated initiatives. But there is simply no way to look at one or two years of data and make any serious determinations as to what caused that decline—especially when violent crime is “dropping fast” nationwide. In 2024, homicides have declined at rates that are even more impressive than last year’s reductions. 

As we saw in the ’90s, New York City’s violence reduction was prematurely credited to “zero tolerance” policies. Within a couple of years, the supposed success of “zero tolerance” meant it was exported to cities such as Baltimore and New Orleans. While many scholars have since questioned if “zero tolerance” had much to do with crime reduction, the policy itself, which led to Baltimore police arresting hundreds of thousands for low-level crimes, inarguably caused irreparable harm—especially to Black communities.

Baltimore’s crime numbers game

For decades, “common wisdom” regarding violence reduction has failed a city that regularly surpasses 300 murders a year and spends the most per capita on policing.

Cities sometimes change the methods they use to measure crime. In 2021, the FBI retired UCR and began using the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) instead. NIBRS categorizes data quite differently than UCR. This means that certain crimes may appear to increase or decrease as an effect of recording them in the NIBRS system, not because of a difference in the number. “This does not mean that crime has increased; it just means the way crimes are reported has changed,” Baltimore Police explain on their website. 

Recent changes to Baltimore’s police districts mean even short-term comparisons between years or areas of the city are going to be much more difficult. The redistricting of Baltimore’s police department’s districts—for the first time in over 50 years—makes it “impossible” to easily compare police metrics going forward. Indeed, at a Public Safety Committee hearing in late 2023, the data on homicides and nonfatal shootings by district that was presented simply stopped in early July because of redistricting. 

Data does not lie, but it often reveals inconvenient truths. But data can only be as truthful as it is complete and accurate. Interrogating the city’s publicly available data reveals ongoing and historic systemic flaws in collection and reporting to such an extent that it’s likely not possible to derive reliable or even usable conclusions from the information shared in the name of transparency.

Epilogue: ‘Excessive Force’

It was May 23 around 1PM when members of Baltimore Police Department’s District Action Team, looking for a robbery suspect, ran up on 24-year-old Jaemaun Joyner. Tackled by police, Joyner lay on his back on the pavement gasping, arms and legs pinned. One of the cops announced that Joyner reached for something. “I ain’t reaching for nothing,” Joyner screamed. “I can’t breathe.” 

Police went through Joyner’s pockets. He asked what they were doing. That’s when Detective Connor Johnson grabbed Joyner by the throat and pressed his service weapon against Joyner’s temple. “He put something in my pocket! He put something in my pocket,” Joyner screamed over and over again with a gun to his head. 

Joyner was arrested on gun and drug charges.

Joyner’s lawyers said that a detective holding a gun to someone’s head was clearly an example of excessive force, and outside the bounds of anything acceptable by a police officer, especially one in a city under a consent decree. “I’ve read the consent decree and BPD policy, and nowhere does it say it’s reasonable for an officer to hold a gun to someone’s temple,” defense attorney Jessica Rubin told the Baltimore Banner. “Point blank, period. That’s the most egregious thing an officer can do.” 

Joyner’s lawyers stressed that the statement of probable cause—a police officer’s written and sworn description of an arrest—did not describe Johnson holding a gun to Joyner’s head at all.

Had the stop not resulted in an arrest, there likely would have been no documentation of the incident.

The police report also suggested Joyner remained a suspect in the robbery even though the victim confirmed he was not involved. After spending 54 days in jail, Joyner was released— his charges dropped only after his lawyers showed the shocking body-worn camera footage to the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office.

Johnson has made the news before. He was involved in a fatal shooting last year. Residents have complained about his questionable traffic stops and searches. His Internal Affairs summary, obtained by TRNN, shows a complaint marked “sustained” for failing to properly seatbelt someone who was arrested. 

In a moment when officials celebrate consent decree “milestones” such as proper seatbelting, Baltimore’s criminal defense attorneys see a department reverting to the very tactics that got the department investigated by the Department of Justice nearly a decade ago.

“This is what we’ve been trying to get away from since Freddie Gray,” defense attorney Hunter Pruette told TRNN. “And they’re trying to walk it back. I think these are the same tactics that led us to the problem we had before.”

Baltimore police appear unconcerned. Police said they had been aware of the incident and saw no reason to suspend Johnson while it was being investigated. When Commissioner Daryl Worley was asked about the incident at a press conference, the 25-plus-year veteran of the department defended Johnson’s behavior.

“He was out there doing his job, in an area where we want him to be, and going after individuals with guns,” Worley said.

Earlier this month, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office announced they would not criminally charge Johnson for holding his service weapon to a restrained man’s head.

This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.

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Billionaires (sometimes) do not let billionaires go bankrupt. For a price, at least.

For a year, some Wall Street vultures dreamt that EchoStar — the satellite TV and telecoms empire assembled by Charlie Ergen — would fall into Chapter 11.

That would have handed control to its creditors, owning more than $20bn of EchoStar debt.

But on Monday, David Bonderman decided to play white knight. The private equity firm he co-founded, TPG Capital, said it would lead a rescue transaction that keeps Ergen’s EchoStar equity afloat.

TPG’s satellite TV provider, DirecTV, will acquire its arch-rival Dish Network from EchoStar. The official purchase price is $1, along with assuming billions in Dish’s currently distressed debt. 

TPG, however, will not make those bondholders whole, conditioning the DirecTV/Dish merger on $11.7bn of bond debt taking a $1.6bn haircut. Those bondholders can decline if they like.

But the bet by Ergen and TPG is that those creditors can live with a modest discount to avoid having to run a complicated business that is in decline. As it happens, the hand of those main bondholders had already been forced.

Nearly all holders of convertible bonds, who are owed around $5bn in principal due soon, agreed to swap their debt at a small discount in exchange for a better coupon, enhanced collateral and the chance to reinvest in EchoStar.

TPG’s bargain contains its own risks. It is providing $2.5bn in the form of debt to solve pending maturities at Dish. It also said on Monday that it would pay $7.6bn over the next several years to buy out AT&T from the 70 per cent of DirecTV still owned by its telecoms partner. 

The combined company will have 18mn pay-TV subscribers, a deterioration of several million in the past decade. But private equity firms care more about cash flow than revenue growth.

The combined company retains almost $10bn of annual ebitda, according to researcher CreditSights, setting its likely enterprise value between $30bn and $40bn. TPG’s risk is largely mitigated by investing at a cheap valuation, and the cash it has and will continue to extract.

Ergen will now concentrate on the EchoStar stub, which is a portfolio of spectrum and a play on building a new mobile phone network.

Its shares fell by more than a tenth on Wednesday, a personal loss for Ergen of a few hundred million dollars. But it could have been far worse, if not for the intervention of Bonderman & Co.    

sujeet.indap@ft.com

DESPITE it only being September, it was hard to not feel the magic of Christmas standing inside Hamleys’ Christmas Grotto.

I’d been invited down to get a sneak peek of all the toys the iconic children’s retailer expects to fly off the shelves this festive season, and walking into the showcase, I knew it would be magical.

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With the holidays less than 100 days away, families may already be overwhelmed trying to figure out what the little ones in their life hope to find under the tree.

But Victoria Kay, head of buying and merchandising Hamleys, reckons toys influenced by children’s films are going to be a big hit this year.

This will probably not come as a surprise to parents.

Last year, the success of the blockbuster Barbie movie sent demand for the plastic doll skyrocketing.

And this Christmas appears to be no different, with a singing Moana doll poised to a fan favourite amongst kids.

Disney will release the sequel to the smash hit film, which follows the journey of a Polynesian princess who sets off on a quest to save her people, at the end of November.

The new Moana doll comes with her own necklace that plays a rendition of Moana’s Disney classic ‘How Far I’ll Go’ every time they press it.

It is recommended for children aged three and up and if you buy it at Hamleys it will set you back £29.99.

If you are hunting for a bargain, Amazon is selling the same doll for £23.49, but you’ll have to factor in delivery costs.

On the same Disney theme, Hamleys also predicts a laughing Stich soft toy will be a success this Christmas.

The 11-inch-high interactive blue alien is activated by a simple shake which then prompts the character to giggle and wobble.

It comes as a new live-action Lilo and Stich is set to land in cinemas next year, over two decades on from the first movie.

Hamleys is charging £24.99 for the plush, which is about four quid cheaper than Amazon’s asking price.

You can also buy the toy from Argos for £25.

Christmas on a budget

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Money will still be tight for many families this Christmas, so I was happy to see that one of Hamleys top toys cost just under £10.

L.O.L Surprise Mermaid Tots are the latest take on the ever-popular L.OL Dolls.

Children can make each of them a tail which changes colour when it is dipped in water.

If the kids in your life enjoy surprise or mystery boxes then they could enjoy this, as you don’t know what the doll will look like until you open the box.

Hamleys is charging £9.99 for the product, which is on par with John Lewis and Very who are also stocking the toy.

The retailer is also selling a selection of large plush toys shaped like cupcakes or chips for £22.

If your children like Squishmallows, then this would be a big hit.

However, if you are looking for a bargain, Dunelm is also selling a selection of similar products for £10.

Keeping it classic

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Nothing screams Christmas like stepping on a piece of Lego, so I was pleased to see this classic find a spot on the list.

Hamleys reckons a £80 LEGO Transformer Bumblebee will also be a hit this year.

The item is considered a collectable item for lovers of the sci-fi series and is only suitable for those aged 18.

This is because it could be a challenge to stick together.

A Play-Doh Hulk Smash and Squish is also expected to be in high demand.

It comes with the heroic green bendy action figure, 360-degree pressing tool and three moulds to create tanks, trucks and other shapes.

This will cost £16.99 at Hamleys, which is the same price as Smyths Toys.

You can check out the other toys Hamleys expects to be a smash below.

Numberblocks Five Musical Superstar Stage

Cost: £49.95 

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An interactive musical playset allows children to join FIVE, the lead singer in the band to singalong to songs and sound effects.

Hamleys appears to be the only UK retailer currently stocking the toy.

The Bulldozer Stunt Bounce Car

Costs £45

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This is also only available to buy at Hamleys and is suitable for children aged eight and up.

The remote control vehicle has lights, three-gear acceleration and a 360-degree rotation and 180 -degree flip modes.

Paw Patrol Rescue Wheels Deluxe Vehicle

Costs: £44.99

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This toy truck comes with one of Paw Patrol’s most loved characters, Chase.

The toy features flashing lights and sounds, as well as a projectile launcher.

If you are on the hunt for a bargain, The Entertainer is currently selling the same product for £17.99.

The retailer has over 160 stores across the UK and is also available online.

Drop Trivia Game 

Costs £24.99

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This game is suitable for children aged six and above and asks players to answer questions quickly.

It is currently out of stock at other toy retailers such as Smyths and The Entertainer.

The Terror Fried Gross Bucket 

Costs £29.99

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This is a set of nine collectable figures from the TerrorFried franchise.

Other retailers such as Smyths, Very and Selfridges are also stocking this product for the same price as Hamleys.

Hamleys Arias Allessandra Fur White Bonnet Baby Doll

Costs £120

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This pricey doll has a soft-touch body and limbs and a lifelike weight so it feels like you are holding a real baby.

She comes with a romper and fleece, a dummy on a wooden chain, a family book and Certificate of Authenticity.

The product is only available to buy at Hamleys.

Israel has notified the US that it intends to launch a limited ground incursion into Lebanon, American officials have said.

The operation could start as soon as Monday, an official earlier told the BBC’s US partner CBS.

Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant earlier implied the army was ready for a ground operation, telling troops near the Lebanese border Israel was prepared to use forces “from the air, sea, and land” to target Hezbollah.

Hezbollah’s deputy leader said the group is prepared for any Israeli operation inside Lebanon.

There have been international calls for restraint, with the head of the UN and the EU’s foreign policy chief calling on Israel to avoid any ground incursion.

The Lebanese army is pulling back troops stationed on its southern border to at least 5km (3 miles) north, according to Reuters news agency, which cited a Lebanese security source.

Gallant told Israeli troops at the border that Israel’s military would use all “the means at our disposal” to allow displaced people to return home in the north of the country.

In a short video, he said the “elimination” of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut on Friday “is a very important step, but it is not everything”.

He added that “everything that needs to be done – will be done” and that “we will use all the forces from the air, sea and land”.

Several explosions were heard over the capital, Beirut, late on Monday.

They came after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ordered residents to evacuate three areas in southern Beirut “immediately” on Monday evening.

In a post on social media, the IDF’s Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee said: “You are located near interests and facilities belonging to the terrorist Hezbollah, and therefore the IDF will act against them forcefully.”

The New York Times earlier reported that Israeli commando units had already made brief incursions into Lebanese territory to prepare for a possible wider invasion.

The mayor of Jdeidet Marjayoun, a Christian-majority Lebanese village less than 10 km (6.2 miles) from the border, told Reuters on Monday that two locals had received calls apparently from the Israeli army telling them to evacuate the area as soon as possible.

Hezbollah’s deputy chief Sheikh Naim Qassem said it was ready for an Israeli ground offensive. He described the group’s attacks on Israel so far as the “minimum”, adding that the battle could be long.

The European Union’s member states have called for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said “any further military intervention would dramatically aggravate the situation and it has to be avoided”.

UN chief Antonio Guterres does “not want to see any sort of ground invasion” of Lebanon by Israel, the secretary general’s spokesman said.

On Monday, US President Joe Biden said “we should have a ceasefire now”.

“I’m more aware than you might know and I’m comfortable with them stopping,” Biden told reporters when asked if he was comfortable with Israeli plans for a cross-border incursion.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy told reporters that “the best way forward is an immediate ceasefire”.

Meanwhile, Israel and Hamas have both confirmed the killing of the head of Hamas in Lebanon, Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, in Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon.

Israel’s military said Sherif was “responsible for coordinating Hamas’s terror activities in Lebanon with Hezbollah operatives”.

Another Israeli strike in the central Beirut neighbourhood of Kola early on Monday killed three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Palestinian armed group said in a statement.

The statement named those killed as military security chief Mohammad Abdel-Aal, military commander Imad Odeh, and fighter Abdel Rahman Abdel-Aal.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) director of communications for Lebanon, Jinane Saad, told the BBC that “we don’t really know where is safe or not” after the strike on the Kola neighbourhood.

“What is safe today might not be safe in an hour or tomorrow,” she said.

Israeli planes also attacked the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeidah in Yemen on Sunday, causing a huge explosion.

The previously sporadic cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah escalated on 8 October, 2023 – the day after the unprecedented attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip – when Hezbollah fired at Israeli positions, in solidarity with the Palestinians.

However, things have escalated dramatically in recent weeks.

Hezbollah has experienced mass casualties from exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, a wave of assassinations of Hezbollah military commanders, devastating air strikes which have killed civilians – and the use of bunker-busting bombs in Beirut, which killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday.

Lebanese officials say more than 1,000 people have been killed in the past two weeks, while up to a million may now be displaced.

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