Florida Keys residents say they feel a strong sense of community and see a fast recovery as restaurants reopen and cleanup crews remove debris caused by the powerful storm that struck the state on September 10.

A sperm whale has cracked the hull of a yacht sailing in the remote South Pacific, forcing four sailors into a day-and-night fight for survival on the high seas. Crew members on the 16-metre Tai Tam tell AFP of their encounter with a pod of sperm whales 250 nautical miles north of tiny Norfolk Island. At 1 pm New Zealand time, about 30 minutes after the whale collision, they activated an emergency beacon. A container ship, the MV Sofrana Surville, rescued the sailors at 6 am Sunday -- about 18 hours after their encounter with the sperm whale.

On day seven of his solo dance marathon, Benjamin Daniel Gabriel -- popularly known as Ben Dancer -- shimmies and shuffles towards a world record in Nigeria, dancing non-stop for 176 hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds. The current record of 127 hours was set by Indian dancer Srushti Sudhir Jagtap in 2023. Still waiting for the official ratification of his record, Gabriel is already itching to play a bigger cultural ambassador role to promote African culture and dances. "The idea of the Guiness World Record was never for the Guinness World record itself," he says. "It was to get the global attention for people to look more towards African indigenous dances".

Members of animal welfare group Humane World for Animals Korea rescue dozens of dogs from a dog meat farm in Gangjin County, South Korea, in what the NGO says is its last such operation before the country's dog meat ban takes effect in February 2027. "We are hoping that across Asia, other countries where the dog and cat meat trade still exists, can really learn a lesson from the fact that South Korea has phased out a really substantial dog meat industry in about three years," says Wendy Higgins, director of international media at Humane World for Animals.

After 28 years and 50,000 km, British adventurer Karl Bushby is facing one last hurdle in his bid to trek home from South America without using any form of transport -- the English Channel. When he set off in November 1998, Bushby set himself two rules: not to use any form of transport to advance, and not to return home -- near Hull in northern England -- except on foot. The 57-year-old had originally hoped to use a service corridor in the Channel Tunnel on foot, but he said the authorities seemed "set against" this idea.

In Noida, just outside New Delhi, Swami Prem Parivartan, long known as India's 'tree father', presses a young tree into the earth, continuing a nearly half-century mission to restore the country's vanishing green cover. "It is not about planting one tree or two trees or thousand trees or 500 trees. It's about how you manage the land on which those plants have been planted," the 60-year-old says. His 'Give Me Trees' trust estimates it has planted or preserved 26 million trees, restoring vegetation across an area about 3.5 times the size of New York City.