レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

It's been a choppy year for restaurants that lean into lettuce.

Lettuce prices rose sharply in the first half of 2026 due to hot weather in Arizona, where about one-third of America's lettuce is grown. Now, restaurants are dealing with the fallout from a Cyclospora outbreak linked to shredded lettuce that has sickened thousands of Americans.

Yum! Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, said that Taco Bell's U.S. same-store sales are down 2% so far in the July-September period due to customers' concerns over the outbreak. That compares to a 7% same-store sales increase in the April-June period.

Federal health officials first tied the diarrhea-causing outbreak to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. Later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said customers in Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania were also affected.

Taco Bell removed shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms from its U.S. restaurants on July 17. The following day, Taylor Farms recalled iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico.

Taco Bell's sales bottomed out the weekend of July 18-19 but have been steadily improving since then, Yum! Brands Chief Financial Officer Ranjith Roy said in a conference call with investors. Taco Bell's U.S. sales have climbed halfway back to their year-ago level, he said.

Yum! Brands CEO Chris Turner said Taco Bell's quick action to contain the issue and its clear communication on social media helped bring diners back. The brand also enticed fans with daily specials like a $1 Mexican Pizza.

With respect to the consumer sentiment, we've seen real improvement as consumers have understood better the nature of the issue, Turner said. They understand that it is not a Taco Bell-specific issue.

Other chains are also feeling some impact from the outbreak even though they haven't been named in government investigations. Chipotle Mexican Grill said that it expects its same-store sales to rise only 1% in the July-September period because of lower traffic due to the outbreak. It had previously expected same-store sales to rise 3% in that period.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Researchers are working on a project to develop an AI-powered app for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). COPD is a lung condition that can cause breathing problems, including shortness of breath, coughing, wheezing, chest tightness, and frequent chest infections.

The idea is that an algorithm can analyze what a patient's voice sounds like on any given day and detect dangerous flare-ups before symptoms become severe. The technology is based on the idea that indirect changes in breathing and lung function can affect the sound of a person’s voice before symptoms worsen.

The project, led by pulmonologist Dr. Sami Simons at Maastricht University Medical Centre, asks patients to record short voice samples. The app, which is still under research, then uses artificial intelligence to analyze the recordings and identify patterns that may signal declining respiratory health.

“A flare-up of asthma COPD means that people suddenly become worse. So, they get more dyspnea, more phlegm, more cough. So, what usually happens is that they are at home. Or they are at work. So, they need to contact the healthcare provider. And so, there's a delay in a way of getting the right care. And that delay can last up to a couple of days,” says Dr. Simons.

The team hopes the technology will reduce hospital visits and provide patients with a simple way to monitor their condition from home.

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly common in healthcare, privacy concerns remain a major issue for patients. Because the app analyzes a person’s voice, researchers say protecting that sensitive data has been a priority from the start.

Dr. Simons says the app was developed with the help of privacy experts to ensure voice recordings remain in a secure environment.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Mark Ragsdale's phone rings off the hook with neighbors asking the same question: Where can I find water?

During the day, he works as the state's water commissioner for Norwood, Colorado, where his cousin Snyder ranches. But morning, afternoon, and evening, he hauls water to his small herd of 45 cow-calf pairs. He counts his luck that his solar-powered well is still producing water and his herd is nearby.

“It was a no-snowpack winter,” he said. “Maybe a snow or two of five or six inches and it would be gone in a day.”

Hauling water across rugged landscapes has become a daily chore for many ranchers in the U.S. Rockies. They historically relied on snowmelt to sustain stock ponds, springs, and creeks for livestock to drink throughout the summer, but this year's snowpack was the worst on record in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which includes Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. Human-caused climate change made the snow drought about 14 times more likely, a new study confirms.

Coping with the impacts of minimal snow and a so far lackluster monsoon season is requiring more time, money, and stress from producers who are already struggling to maintain family legacies and meet America's demand for beef.

As water shot into an open stock tank atop a high-country mesa, a trickle soaked the dusty earth below. Scott Snyder rose from the shade to fasten a hose and stop the spillage.

It took eight trips in three vehicles over nine hours in sweltering heat before the 800 cow-calf pairs finally had enough water to make it through to the next day—maybe two.

He can adapt, said Snyder, who operates Mex and Sons Ranch in Norwood, Colorado, with his family. But there’s a huge cost. “It's every bit of money, every bit of time, every bit of effort, and a lot of sleepless nights of trying to control what is really not controllable,” he said.

Like many other ranchers, Snyder and his brother Monte already shrunk their herd, bought hay to supplement what little they could grow, shuttled cows farther to reach grazable land, and are constantly monitoring whether wildfires are blowing their way. And now, they are hauling drinking water.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Conflicts and disruptions to global energy markets could push millions more people into hunger by driving up fuel, fertilizer, and food costs, the head of the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) warned, as a new United Nations report showed global progress against hunger remains fragile.

The U.N. food security report, released last month, found global hunger has eased modestly in recent years but projected that more than 500 million people could still face chronic hunger by 2030. Africa is expected to bear the largest share of that burden.

In an interview with The Associated Press on July 10, IFAD President Alvaro Lario said geopolitical tensions and potential disruptions to shipping and energy supplies, including uncertainty surrounding the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran war, could leave an additional 9 to 18 million people facing hunger if the shocks persist.

We are in a current era where we have the highest number of conflicts and are still increasing, Lario said. Whenever there is a conflict, also hunger, displacement, refugees increase.

Conflict remains one of the biggest obstacles to reducing hunger worldwide, Lario added.

Wars and geopolitical tensions can disrupt shipping, energy supplies, and agricultural inputs, increasing costs across food systems already strained by inflation. Lario stressed that hunger and conflict often reinforce one another, creating a cycle that is difficult to break without greater stability.

Higher energy prices are already affecting fertilizers and agricultural production, he said. The impact is especially significant for small-scale farmers, many of whom rely on diesel fuel to pump water, harvest crops, and transport goods to market.

Rising fuel costs increase production expenses and can feed directly into higher food prices.

The new report identifies affordability as one of the world's biggest food security challenges. While food production continues to grow, roughly a third of the global population still can't afford a healthy diet. In low-income countries, that figure rises to about 77%, according to Lario.

The biggest challenge is no longer simply producing enough food, but making healthy diets affordable, he said.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Snow-capped for much of the year, Mount Olympus, mythological home of ancient Greece’s 12 Olympian gods, has captured the imagination through the millennia. Rising to 2,918 meters (9,573 feet) from a base practically at sea level, the ancient Greeks believed the throne of Zeus, king of the gods, stood on the highest of its craggy, often mist-shrouded peaks.

Modern-day Greeks hoped their tallest mountain would be inducted into UNESCO’s World Heritage List as a mixed cultural and natural site. The nomination was discussed when the World Heritage Committee met in Busan, South Korea.

“Olympus is our life. It is the place we grew up in,” said Evagelos Geroliolios, mayor of Dion-Olympus, based in Litochoro, the mountain’s main town. “It is the place we see every day, but at the same time, it is also a place which carries with it myth, history, biodiversity, extraordinary beauty, and a very great cultural weight.”

Few locations are as central to ancient Greek mythology as Mount Olympus. It was here that Zeus was said to have established his court after overthrowing his father, Cronus, in a 10-year war that ended the reign of the Titans.

On one of Olympus’s lower peaks, excavations have uncovered an open-air sanctuary, with the oldest finds dating to the Hellenistic period, which ran from 323 B.C. to 30 B.C. According to Greece’s original UNESCO nomination, the sanctuary is believed to have been one mentioned by the ancient philosopher and historian Plutarch, who in the 2nd century wrote of processions to one of Olympus’s peaks for animal sacrifices to Zeus.

The mountain retained religious significance into the Christian era. Α chapel on the peak of Prophet Elias, at 2,803 meters, is believed to be the highest altitude chapel in the Christian Orthodox world. The mountain’s Enipeas Gorge holds the remains of a monastery founded in 1542, while a roughly 20-minute walk from there leads to the Holy Cave of St. Dionysios, a chapel built into a cave from where a small spring flows, believed to carry holy water.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

FBI Director Kash Patel held talks with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet on joint efforts to combat international online scam operations that cheat victims out of billions of dollars each year.

A report issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that scams caused losses in the Asia-Pacific region alone of as much as $114 billion in 2025. It warned that even as authorities conduct raids on industrial-sized scam centers mostly located in border regions of Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, criminals have responded by shifting to other parts of the world or operating on a smaller scale.

Patel arrived in Cambodia from neighboring Thailand, which co-hosted a two-day summit with the U.S. on scam centers that was attended by representatives of nearly 20 countries and hundreds of law enforcement officials.

The head of the top U.S. law enforcement agency met with Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul for talks on joint cooperation to tackle scam centers and other transnational crimes, such as human trafficking and drug trafficking, particularly through information sharing and intelligence exchanges.

Cybercrime has flourished in Southeast Asia, where law enforcement is weak, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar. Scam centers are also linked to human trafficking. Thousands of foreign nationals, who are employed to run “romance” and cryptocurrency scams to swindle victims, are often recruited with false job offers and then forced to work in conditions of near-slavery.

Cambodia this year claims to have accelerated a crackdown on the scam operations, whose proliferation there is “a top priority for the U.S. government,” according to a U.S. Embassy statement. Washington appreciates Hun Manet’s pledge to counter this problem and is coordinating closely with the Cambodian government to battle the problem, it said.

The embassy said Patel’s visit “reinforces the need for strong, joint efforts to combat transnational cybercrime, including increased efforts to hold high-level scam bosses accountable and for improved information sharing regarding complicit officials and scam compound owners.”

The U.S. also “fully supports efforts to ensure justice for victims and criminal accountability for online scam operators, those who enable or protect them, and those complicit in related human trafficking crimes,” it added.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.” “We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media.

AI startup Hugging Face said that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own. “We suspected the cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent,” Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a statement. Turns out it did!”

The disclosure comes amid heightened concerns about the cybersecurity capabilities of powerful models that led President Donald Trump in June to sign an executive order creating a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release.

“AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities,” OpenAI said in its statement. “The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities.”

Delangue said he spent the past 24 hours working with OpenAI, “and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!

Delangue added that it “might be the first incident of its kind.”

OpenAI said the intrusion was caused by a combination of its AI models, including its newly released GPT 5.6 Sol and an “even more capable” model that is still being tested internally.

OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers. It went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation,” the company said.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Virginia, the world’s largest data center hub, has released a long-delayed study that examined the state’s eastern region groundwater supply and the resource-hungry industry’s possible impact on it, finding declines are likely in a critical aquifer due to population growth and industrial use, and urging stricter regulations.

Produced by environmental scientists, the report—which the state had refused to release for more than six months—said regulators should have more authority to reject industrial water withdrawal permits, force entities to examine alternative sources of water and clamp down on users who might be using more water than they should.

The report noted limits around publicly available information on data center water use but did not lay blame on the industry for the concerns raised about the aquifer.

The groundwater supply in Virginia’s populous eastern coastal plain region “is constrained, and current projections indicate declining availability in the near future,” said the report, which Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s office provided to The Associated Press.

Data centers use water, sometimes in large amounts, to cool their servers. Worries about data centers' impact on the quality and supply of both ground and surface water—and about tech companies’ failures to be as transparent as the public would like—have dogged projects around the country. The issues have become politically explosive heading into the midterm elections.

Perhaps nowhere are those topics more resonant than in Virginia, home to hundreds of data centers with more under development and where the sustainability of groundwater, the supply stored naturally under the earth's surface, in the coastal eastern region has been a long-running concern.

A wide range of interest groups had begun to publicly admonish the governor's administration for withholding the report; those reviewing it said its findings were sobering.

“We’re standing on the ledge,” said Jay Ford, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Virginia policy manager.

Virginia enacted its first groundwater law in 1973, but legislators acknowledged it was “too permissive” and tightened it in 1992, the report said. The law remains in effect, but the report warns it should be strengthened again.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Veteran Labour Party politician and popular former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham became Britain’s prime minister in July, formally taking over from Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation last June.

Burnham was the only candidate to secure enough support from his fellow Labour lawmakers to replace Starmer as leader of the governing party. Because Labour holds a majority in government, its leader also becomes the U.K. prime minister.

Burnham received support from 349 out of 401 Labour Party lawmakers and was announced Labour leader at a special party conference. He didn't officially become prime minister right away, though—that happened when he met King Charles III at Buckingham Palace for a formal go-ahead.

Britain’s parliamentary democracy allows governing parties to change leaders midterm, with the winner becoming prime minister without the need for a general election. Prime ministers can be replaced if one has resigned as leader of their party, or been forced out by a leadership challenge. The next national election does not have to be held until 2029, five years from the last election in 2024.

Starmer announced he was quitting as Labour leader on June 22 after barely two years in power, ending a tenure marred by a series of political missteps—most notably his decision to appoint a man with close ties to the controversial figure Jeffrey Epstein as Britain’s ambassador to the United States. Heavy losses suffered by Labour in a midterm set of local elections in May prompted many lawmakers to demand Starmer's resignation. And when Burnham—favored by many within Labour to lead the party and the country—won a special election for a seat in Parliament, Starmer gave in to the mounting pressure to quit.

His resignation automatically triggered a Labour leadership contest. Under Labour rules, a lawmaker can challenge the leader if they have the backing of a fifth of the party's House of Commons lawmakers. There was no other contestant other than Burnham, who comfortably surpassed that threshold.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Smoke from wildfires—which are burning more of the Northern Hemisphere as Earth warms—attacks nearly every system in the human body, killing tens of thousands of people a year, numerous medical studies show.

It attacks the body immediately, spiking asthma cases with increased ambulance runs within hours, swamps emergency rooms in a day or so with people suffering from heart attacks and other cardiovascular and lung issues, as well as mental health issues, doctors and scientists told The Associated Press.

Smoke also harms pregnant women, increasing the risk of premature births and low-weight babies who could have breathing problems the rest of their lives, doctors and studies said. And then there are long-term risks connecting prolonged smoke and other air pollution exposure to some cancers and dementia.

After huge global fires in 2018 and 2019, the medical and science communities started looking at the health effects from the burning trees with more and more studies coming out finding that there’s all types of impacts that may not have been so obvious before,” said Harvard School of Public Health environmental health scientist Dr. Mary Johnson.

Smoke causes inflammation by triggering the body's immune system to go into overtime to fight the irritant. Scientists have found it can harm the brain and skin, with almost no system of the body spared, Johnson said. People over 60 become more prone to stroke in wildfire smoke, she said.

“Wildfire smoke is the toxic product of combustion of whatever burned,” which could include houses and cars, said Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician, chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance and president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association.

“So really it's a big giant toxic soup of particles and gases.”

Scientists have counted at least 1,000 toxins in wildfire smoke, said Colorado State University environmental toxicologist Luke Montrose.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.