Latest news with #coastal
Washington Post
12 hours ago
- Health
- Washington Post
Friday briefing: Trump's Iran decision; National Guard; Dodger Stadium; listeria outbreak; ‘Jaws' 50th anniversary; and more
President Donald Trump will wait as much as two weeks to decide on striking Iran. An appeals court allowed Trump to keep the National Guard in Los Angeles. A man was accused of knocking on the Memphis mayor's door with a Taser. Three people died in a listeria outbreak linked to packaged meals. Plastic bag fees and bans help limit coastal litter, a new study found. Archaeologists spent three months piecing together a huge Roman 'puzzle.' 'Jaws' was released 50 years ago today. And now … hot where you are? Here are five things that may make you feel worse during extreme heat. Want to catch up quickly with 'The 7' every morning? Download The Post's app and turn on alert notifications for The 7 or sign up for the newsletter.
The Independent
a day ago
- The Independent
The best beach hotels in the UK for 2025, reviewed
Summer's here, and the seaside is calling. But there's no need to head to the Med or brave the airport queues; with more than 11,000 miles of coastline, Britain has plenty of beaches on offer, from the South Coast's wide, sandy bays to dramatic cliffs in Wales and Scotland 's wild shores. Some look as if they've been lifted from European climes, complete with turquoise coves and Blue Flag credentials. Others are pure postcard nostalgia: wind in your hair, a Mr Whippy ice cream, and the scent of salt in the air. Better still, scattered all along our shores are some remarkable beach hotels, from family-friendly resorts to secluded escapes and dog-friendly retreats. So book somewhere fast, pack your bucket and spade, and jump in the car. Wherever you head, there's a coastal escape to suit you. Jane Knight from The Good Hotel Guide picks Britain's best seaside hotels. South Sands Location: Salcombe, Devon Stay just steps away from a sheltered beach at this smart contemporary hotel. Head out on a boat, take the sea tractor linking South Sands to quaint Salcombe, or just relax in the sun at this dog-friendly haven. When you're hungry, there's something for everyone, from a cream tea on the terrace to fish 'n' chips or Salcombe's best seafood. If you're a curry fan, make sure you're there on a Wednesday. Rooms are decked out in nautical colours; the best has a Caesar-size bed, its own balcony and two slipper baths in a bay window, perfect for admiring the sea view. The Albion Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight There are few better settings on the Isle of Wight than the one enjoyed by this recently refurbished hotel, which looks out over the sea and pebbly shore of Freshwater Bay, with Tennyson Down rising up behind. The glorious sands of Compton Beach are just minutes away. Some of the coastal-chic bedrooms open onto a sea-facing terrace, and you can dine on delicious seafood right by the waves – the seafood linguine is particularly good. Dogs are treated as part of the family, with treats by reception and some great walks in the downs. B&B doubles from £140 ( Hotel Portmeirion Location: Portmeirion, Gwynedd Enjoy a beach stay with a difference at the hotel that visionary architect Clough Williams-Ellis designed as the focal point for his ideal village. Overlooking the golden sands of the Dwyryd estuary in Snowdonia, and with a swimming pool on the lawn and an Art Deco bar and dining room recreated by Sir Terence Conran, it makes a great base from which to explore the Italianate resort (and if you stay in the hotel, you don't have to pay the £20 village entry fee). As well as 14 traditional rooms in the hotel proper, there are more contemporary ones in Castell Deudraeth, and others scattered around the village. Scarista House Location: Scarista, Western Isles It feels like you're on the edge of the world at Scarista, with miles of remote, crowd-free sands on the south western coast of South Harris. Yes, the sea might be a tad nippy for a dip, but you can go surfing, kayaking or sailing as well as walking. Once you've worked up an appetite, return to a three or four-course gourmet dinner. The menu changes each day, with everything possible made from scratch, from bread and cakes to pasta and ice cream. Two of the traditionally styled bedrooms have sea-facing sitting areas and there's a self-catering cottage if you want to take the dog. The Gallivant Location: Camber Sands, Sussex A cool New England feel and a chic laid-back 'Camberfornia' vibe characterise this hotel just over the road from glorious Camber Sands. Start the day with yoga in the studio or on the spectacular dunes, followed by a swim in the sea. Bedrooms come with wood panelling, white-painted rafters and jazzy headboards; most have a terrace. Elsewhere, there are slouchy sofas and book-lined walls, with English wines on the menu at the copper-topped bar. If you book the full package, it includes not only breakfast but also wine at 5pm, an exquisite dinner at new restaurant Harry's, and daily morning yoga. Feel free to take a small dog but not your kids; only over-16s are allowed. The Seaside Boarding House Location: Burton Bradstock, Dorset It feels like a mix between Edward Hopper's Cape Cod and an Edwardian seaside hotel in this white-painted villa above Chesil Beach. Owners Mary-Lou Sturridge and Tony Mackintosh, who created London's Groucho Club, have filled the stripped-down interiors with marine salvage, seascapes and antique-shop booty. Enjoy a drink on the terrace with its views over Lyme Bay (they have happy hour every evening) before eating here or moving into the candlelit dining room. The bright, light rooms have views of the coast along with a retro dial phone and radio. Dogs are welcome in some bedrooms for no extra charge. Polurrian on the Lizard Location: Mullion, Cornwall The spectacular setting of this white clifftop edifice with mesmerising sea views through its walls of windows takes some beating. You can walk down to the hotel's own little beach, just ten minutes away, or take a longer hike along the South West Coast Path, which runs alongside. Bedrooms are simple, with a contemporary style, and there's an all-day menu catering for every taste, whether you want just a sandwich or a juicy steak. It's a great place for children and the hotel can supply potties, changing mats and bottle sterilisers. No. 33 Location: Hunstanton, Norfolk It may not be on the seafront, but Jeanne Whittome's B&B is still a top spot to stay in this Victorian seaside town, the only west-facing resort on England's east coast. A concierge service can arrange everything from bike hire to birdwatching and you can walk the Coast Path from 'sunny Hunny' to Cromer, or cheat and take the CoastHopper bus. Stylish interiors feature a palette of soft greys, sea blues and white. There are also self-catering cottages plus suites at nearby Thornham Deli, where No. 33 guests receive a discount on breakfast. The Nare, Cornwall Location: Veryan-in-Roseland A self-styled country hotel by the sea, The Nare has beautiful gardens leading to the sands of Carne beach. You can enjoy breathtaking views from some of the bedrooms, or fully immerse yourself in the picture by taking one of the hotel's two boats out to explore the Cornish coast. There's even an artist in residence. Owned by the Ashworth family for more than 30 years, the hotel is traditional yet luxurious; expect daily complimentary cream teas, flowers, fruit, and an hors d'oeuvre trolley in the fine-dining restaurant. You'll be hard pushed to find a tennis court with a better view. Book now Trefeddian Hotel Aberdovey, Wales Family-run for more than a century, this imposing white hillside hotel commands views across the golf course to Cardigan Bay. Although neither hip nor boutique, the hotel's rooms are nevertheless welcoming and nicely done out in marine colours. This is a great place for children: under-fives stay and eat for free while under-16s get reduced rates. There's a playroom and outdoor play area, an indoor pool and a putting green. After a day crabbing on the jetty, paddling or building sandcastles, there's early supper for the young ones and a nightly changing menu for those who prefer to stay up later.
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Elio' Review: Pixar's Fantastical, Familiar World
Colors pop, lines flow and an alien world shimmers like the Vegas strip after dark in Pixar's latest, 'Elio,' a lackluster science-fiction adventure about a lonely boy and extraterrestrials who come in peace, except when they don't. By turns appealing and drearily familiar, the movie offers the expected visual pleasures and characters who range from the gently exaggerated to the hyperbolic. Some have rubbery countenances and curious appendages; others have enormous eyes that water with emotion. Yours may glaze over in boredom. A morality tale with far-out friendlies and a glowering, growling Marvelesque villain, 'Elio' has predictable Pixar bright spots, but the story is a drag. It tracks the title character (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), an 11-year-old who's been recently and mysteriously orphaned. He now lives with his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force Major who monitors space junk at the coastal California base where she's stationed. Loving yet clueless, she is at a loss on how to raise a child, especially one who's unhappy and feels out of place with her or anywhere. (Her parenting book is studded with a rainbow of sticky notes.) Less comically, Olga is especially ill-equipped to deal with a grieving child, a failing that she shares with the filmmakers. Orphans are a storybook staple — from Disney's original 'Snow White' to 'Lilo & Stitch' — though not on Planet Pixar. Yet to judge by this movie's at times abruptly fluctuating tones and eagerness to dry every tear, Elio's greatest issue isn't that his parents are dead but that the filmmakers are uncomfortable with his grief. Early on, while out with his aunt, he hides under a table and weeps. Soon, though, the story has revved up, and he's humorously sending messages into space begging to be taken away from Olga, Earth, everything. 'Aliens abduct me!!!,' Elio scrawls on a beach, before lying down and grinning hopefully at the sky. After some more narrative busyness, character development and scene changes, the filmmakers grant Elio's wish and send him off on his hoped-for cosmic adventure. One evening, while Olga is at work and Elio waits for deliverance, he is pulled from the beach on a beam of light, an image of alien abduction with a suggestively rapturous religious undertone. Once he achieves liftoff, the movie starts to as well. It grows more vividly hued and nicely unbound, and Elio is soon careering through bursts of color and graphic forms, much like the astronaut in the oft-copied lysergic star gate sequence in '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Elio predictably exits our solar system and ends up in the Communiverse, a sparkly, kaleidoscopic alternative realm where the directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi modestly cut loose. (The script is by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones.) A jumble of landscapes rich in lightly phantasmagoric embellishments, it functions as a kind of hangout and otherworldly United Nations for extraterrestrials. There, Elio zips past terrains with an array of biomorphic and geometric forms. He also, via a translator, chats up others, including a talking, floating blue supercomputer, Ooooo (Shirley Henderson), a kind of A.I. Jiminy Cricket, if one that tends to look like a dialogue bubble with eyes and a mouth. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Waterfront' Brings More Murder to Netflix
'The Waterfront,' a Netflix drama created by Kevin Williamson, is set in North Carolina in a small coastal town. The Buckleys are local royalty — not only in the sense that they're well known and powerful, but also in that they're tortured by their circumstances and deeply resent one another, even as they feel a duty to protect the family. The show is one of many to follow the 'Yellowstone' model, a family saga of violence and secrets, of huffy men and sly women, of distinctive names (Cane, Harlan, Diller, Hoyt). It is also about land that's been in this family for generations, gosh darn it — land that's our legacy if only the cruelties of debt and developers would abate. Our gruff patriarch is Harlan (Holt McCallany), a drunk and a womanizer with heart troubles and a shady past. His wife, Belle (Maria Bello), has her own valuable secrets and runs the family restaurant. Their son, Cane (Jake Weary), meddles with the fishing side of the business, and their daughter, Bree (Melissa Benoist), tenuously sober and trying to rebuild a relationship with her surly teenage son (Brady Hepner), wants more responsibility in the family's enterprises. But Belle isn't so sure she's ready. Cane has gotten himself into a spot of trouble with a drug ring, and suddenly his side hustle is a bigger and bigger problem. Only three of the eight episodes of 'The Waterfront' were made available for review, so I cannot speak to its stamina or big arcs. But these early chapters do a few things well. Whatever its flaws may be as it goes on, 'The Waterfront' does not start slow — it knows how to escalate. The bodies start piling up quickly and surprisingly, the double-crossing starts right away and the flirtatious glances turn to naughty trysts within an episode. Mysterious strangers do not remain so mysterious or strange for too long. The show often lacks texture, but it compensates with earnest momentum. The series also has dark fun with its setting, and its moody crimes include murder by fishing net, intimidation by dunking someone as shark bait and hiding a body in a swamp in the hopes that alligators will take care of the rest. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
50 years after ‘Jaws,' researchers have retired the man-eater myth and revealed more about sharks' amazing biology
The summer of 1975 was the summer of 'Jaws.' The first blockbuster movie sent waves of panic and awe through audiences. 'Jaws' – the tale of a killer great white shark that terrorizes a coastal tourist town – captured people's imaginations and simultaneously created a widespread fear of the water. To call Steven Spielberg's masterpiece a creature feature is trite. Because the shark isn't shown for most of the movie – mechanical difficulties meant production didn't have one ready to use until later in the filming process – suspense and fear build. The movie unlocked in viewers an innate fear of the unknown, encouraging the idea that monsters lurk beneath the ocean's surface, even in the shallows. And because in 1975 marine scientists knew far less than we do now about sharks and their world, it was easy for the myth of the rogue shark as a murderous eating machine to take hold, along with the assumption that all sharks must be bloodthirsty, mindless killers. But in addition to scaring many moviegoers that 'it's not safe to go in the water,' 'Jaws' has over the years inspired generations of researchers, including me. The scientific curiosity sparked by this horror fish flick has helped reveal so much more about what lies beneath the waves than was known 50 years ago. My own research focuses on the secret lives of sharks, their evolution and development, and how people can benefit from the study of these enigmatic animals. My own work has focused on perhaps the most terrifying aspect of these apex predators, the jaws and teeth. I study the development of shark teeth in embryos. Sharks continue to make an unlimited supply of tooth replacements throughout life – it's how they keep their bite constantly sharp. Hard-shelled prey, such as mollusks and crustaceans, from sandy substrates can be more abrasive for teeth, requiring quicker replacement. Depending on the water temperature, the conveyor belt-like renewal of an entire row of teeth can take between nine and 70 days, for example, in nurse sharks, or much longer in larger sharks. In the great white, a full-row replacement can take an estimated 250 days. That's still an advantage over humans – we never regrow damaged or worn-out adult teeth. Interestingly, shark teeth are much like our own, developing from equivalent cells, patterned by the same genes, creating the same hard tissues, enamel and dentin. Sharks could potentially teach researchers how to master the process of tooth renewal. It would be huge for dentistry if scientists could use sharks to figure out how to engineer a new generation of teeth for human patients. As a group, sharks and their cartilaginous fish relatives – including skates, rays and chimaeras – are evolutionary relics that have inhabited the Earth's oceans for over 400 million years. They've been around since long before human beings and most of the other animals on our planet today hit the scene, even before dinosaurs emerged. Sharks have a vast array of super powers that scientists have only recently discovered. Their electroreceptive pores, located around the head and jaws, have amazing sensory capabilities, allowing sharks to detect weak electrical fields emitted from hidden prey. Their skin is protected with an armor of tiny teeth, called dermal denticles, composed of sensitive dentin, that also allows for better drag-reducing hydrodynamics. Biologists and engineers are also using this 'shark skin technology' to design hydrodynamic and aerodynamic solutions for future fuel-efficient vehicles. Some sharks are biofluorescent, meaning they emit light in different wavelengths after absorbing natural blue light. This emitted fluorescent color pattern suggests visual communication and recognition among members of the same species is possible in the dark depths. Sharks can migrate across huge global distances. For example, a silky shark was recorded traveling 17,000 miles (over 27,000 kilometers) over a year and a half. Hammerhead sharks can even home in on the Earth's magnetic field to help them navigate. Greenland sharks exhibit a lengthy aging process and live for hundreds of years. Scientists estimated that one individual was 392 years old, give or take 120 years. Still much about sharks remains mysterious. We know little about their breeding habits and locations of their nursery grounds. Conservation efforts are beginning to target the identification of shark nurseries as a way to manage and protect fragile populations. Tagging programs and their 'follow the shark' apps allow researchers to learn more about these animals' lives and where they roam – highlighting the benefit of international collaboration and public engagement for conserving threatened shark populations. Sharks are an incredible evolutionary success story. But they're also vulnerable in the modern age of human-ocean interactions. Sharks are an afterthought for the commercial fishing industry, but overfishing of other species can cause dramatic crashes in shark populations. Their late age of sexual maturity – as old as 15 to 20 years or more in larger species or potentially 150 years in Greenland sharks – along with slow growth, long gestation periods and complex social structures make shark populations fragile and less capable of quick recoveries. Take the white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), for example – Jaws' own species. Trophy hunting, trade in their body parts and commercial fishery impacts caused their numbers to dwindle. As a result, they received essential protections at the international level. In turn, their numbers have rebounded, especially around the United States, leading to a shift from critically endangered to vulnerable status worldwide. However, they remain critically endangered in Europe and the Mediterranean. 'Jaws' was filmed on the island of Martha's Vineyard, in Massachusetts. After careful management and the designation of white sharks as a prohibited species in federal waters in 1997 and in Massachusetts in 2005, their populations have recovered well over recent years in response to more seals in the area and recovering fish stocks. You might assume more sharks would mean more attacks, but that is not what we observe. Shark attacks have always been few and far between in Massachusetts and elsewhere, and they remain rare. It's only a 'Jaws'-perpetuated myth that sharks have a taste for humans. Sure, they might mistake a person for prey; for instance, surfers and swimmers can mimic the appearance of seals at the surface. Sharks in murky water might opportunistically take a test bite of what seem to be prey. But these attacks are rare enough that people can shed their 'Jaws'-driven irrational fears of sharks. Almost all sharks are timid, and the likelihood of an interaction – let alone a negative one – is incredibly rare. Importantly, there more than 500 species of sharks in the world's oceans, each one a unique member of a particular ecosystem with a vital role. Sharks come in all shapes and sizes, and inhabit every ocean, both the shallow and deep-end ecosystems. Most recorded human-shark interactions are awe-inspiring and not terrifying. Sharks don't really care about people – at most they may be curious, but not hungry for human flesh. Whether or not 'Jaws' fans have grown beyond the fear of movie monster sharks, we're gonna need a bigger conservation effort to continue to protect these important ocean guardians. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Gareth J. Fraser, University of Florida Read more: Before Shark Week and 'Jaws,' World War II spawned America's shark obsession Oceans without sharks would be far less healthy – new research Rare access to hammerhead shark embryos reveals secrets of its unique head development Gareth J. Fraser receives funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
