Betty Mack

Work has begun on replacing and strengthening two coastal defence groynes at a popular Dorset beach.
The project at Hengistbury Head in Bournemouth is expected to take between six and eight weeks, depending on weather and tides.

Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council said the new structures would be the same length as the existing groynes but made from "a hybrid of timber and rock".
It said a section of the beach would be closed to the public for safety reasons.
The council advised beachgoers to follow a diversion route.

'Door flew off' - Florida reels after hurricane devastation
Crystal Coleman sits outside the remnants of her home in St Lucie County, Florida, and wonders where she and her daughter will spend the night.
One of at least a dozen tornadoes spawned by Hurricane Milton tore through this low-income community in south Florida, killing at least five residents. At least 16 people are known to have died across the US state.
Crystal is happy to be alive but at a loss over what to do next.
"All of a sudden the door to my attic flew off, all the objects in my house started flying around," Ms Coleman told BBC News on Thursday.

"It was devastating, we were very scared. It felt like the tornado was inside of our house."
Her neighbourhood is one of many across the state that were devastated by Milton as it barrelled across the state, leaving widespread damage and millions without power.
The tornadoes spawned as Milton approached the state Wednesday evening, an occurrence that forecasters say sometimes follows tropical weather.

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Hundreds of people remain missing after catastrophic flooding decimated towns, destroyed roads and cut off power for more than a million homes in the US south-east.
The death toll has continued to rise since Hurricane Helene - which was later downgraded to a tropical storm - tore across the region.
As of Tuesday, 135 people had been confirmed dead across six states, a figure that is expected to grow.
At least 40 of those dead were in the west of North Carolina, where 300 roads remain closed, hampering recovery operations, as well as the delivery of much needed food and water.

On Tuesday afternoon, an old flat red-brick building in Statesville, two hours east of the city of Asheville, North Carolina, was filled with roughly 50 volunteers working to get supplies to the hardest-hit areas of the state.
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A painting of an Edwardian Hull trawler that saved the crew of its sinking archenemy is to go under the hammer on Friday.

Ellesmere sailed out of the Humber between the turn of the 20th Century and the early 1930s and had been involved in numerous brushes with Irish fishery protection vessel Muirchu before coming to her rescue.

Also included in the collection is a painting of the trawler Pharos, whose disappearance remains a mystery, and the trawler Seti, which became an early victim of World War One.

Nine Hours, a chain of 13 hotels across Japan, from Fukuoka in the west to the north-east island of Hokkaido, has an unusual by-product: sleep data. In the Shinagawa Station (men only) and Akasaka branches, guests can sign up for a "9h sleep fitscan" service, where sensors detect everything from breathing to facial expressions to generate a sleep report that tracks their heart rate, identifies sleep apnea and even monitors snoring. In a sector where a novel or low-budget stay is often prioritised over comfort, Nine Hours' interest in how well its guests are sleeping sets it apart.
Across the franchise, the white, minimalist decor continues this clinical theme, while its rows of sleek, shiny sleeping pods would not look out of place on the set of a science-fiction movie. The name refers to the hotel's cost-cutting concept that reduces room rental to the essential nine hours, allowing seven hours for sleep and an hour on either side for washing and dressing. Just need a nap? Hourly rates are also available.

From Colombia's upcycled sewer pipes to spheres suspended in the sky in Canada, capsule hotels have been reinvented for a new generation of travellers.

By night, the world's first capsule hotel (founded in Osaka, Japan in 1979) must have looked like a morgue, with neat rows of narrow sleeping capsules each containing a recumbent body. But the following day, the occupants – mostly businessmen who had worked late - would rise up and head back to the office, grateful for this efficient sleep solution that had saved them a commute home in the early hours.
As the concept spread, tourists happy to sleep in a room no bigger than its bed began to bunk up alongside them, eager to sample this unusual aspect of Japanese culture. Fast-forward to today, and high hotel room rates, fuelled by years of rising real estate prices, have supercharged this typically low-cost concept, which offers budget travellers priced out of traditional hotels more privacy than a hostel dormitory and more comfort and connectivity than camping. The capsules, which are predominantly single-occupancy, also answer the current boom in solo travel, with single-sex capsule hotels providing additional security.

For more than 1,700 years, Buddhist temple food in Korea has used local, seasonal ingredients to help Buddhist priests "sustain their bodies in their pursuit of enlightenment", said professor Hyaeweol Choi, who teaches Korean gender history at the University of Iowa. To support a monastic lifestyle, the food is gentle and easy to digest, eschewing five pungent ingredients – onions, garlic, chives, green onions and leeks – that are said to stimulate the body and disrupt spiritual meditation. Meals served at temples on Buddha's birthday adhere to these practices and are strictly vegetarian.
Buddhist monasteries were established deep in the mountainous regions of Korea's southern provinces and survived centuries of oppressive Confucianist policies during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910).

"But I felt a void in what I was doing," Kim said. She could glide through cookbooks written in Korean, handpicking recipes to test. But the ingredients in front of her seemed to stare back in silence as she found her adult self unable to piece together the story of the dishes she grew up eating.
Burying herself in historical Korean cookbooks, Kim fell down a rabbit hole that led her to discover Buddhist nuns and priests who found a way to prepare a version of kimchi that omitted saewoo-jut (the salted, fermented shrimp prized for its savoury umami) and instead leveraged simplicity to deepen its flavours.
"It's difficult to separate fish sauce or saewoo-jutout of kimchi," said Kim. But after seeing that it was possible, Kim began to see how "food evolves over time, and [how] it evolves with the people who cook it and [with] what's available" – a moment she described as "liberation".