The United Nations on Tuesday warned the world to prepare for the effects of El Nino, saying the weather phenomenon which triggers higher global temperatures...

HAMILTON, Bermuda--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 4, 2023--

They aren't eating hot dogs at the hot dog eating contest.

The war over "Taco Tuesday" may be heating up now, but its origins date back several decades.

In a mud-soaked nightdress, the Ukrainian grandmother claws at the fetid water that has swallowed the steps down to her home in Kherson city. Frail and in shock, Antonia Shevchenko, 84 appears unaware of the futility of her attempts to try to drain the swamp drowning her house. Her daughter Svetlana, 64, marooned by the sweltering mud, tries to coax her to stop and calm down. Shelling roars in the background. It is the first time the pair have been back since they evacuated after the Nova Kakhokva dam blew up last month, unleashing the contents of one of Europe’s largest reservoirs over southern Ukraine. The explosion – which Ukraine blames on Russia – sparked the worst ecological disaster on the continent in recent history and will likely impact global food security, according to the United Nations. In Kherson, the capital of the region, it killed dozens of people, submerged whole towns, drowned all the wildlife and turned this street into a canal. “We didn’t even have time to get her clothes, we had to carry her in the slippers and nightie she is still wearing now,” says Svetlana in tears, as her confused mother repeats, “It’s all just mud,” in the background. “It’s impossible to fix this. I feel nothing now. Everything is just empty inside. Now it’s all gone, we have nothing left,” Svetlana adds. A few streets away Oksana Kuzminko, 70, who was also returning for the first time, picks her way through the devastation. “Welcome to zombie land,” she adds with a despairing shrug. Until recently, the only way to navigate these streets was to steer a boat between the tops of the roofs of the submerged houses. Now the waters have receded, the terrifying scale of the damage and the work still to be done has been revealed. Sewage, mud, rubbish, dead animals, bits of masonry and potentially land mines swirl together in the backyards of the partially collapsed houses. The area is still being pounded by Russian forces, stationed on the other side of the swollen banks of the Dnipro River. Anna Gatchecnko, 73, another elderly resident of this district, says the combination of floodwaters and the war is “your worst nightmare”. “We survived the Russian occupation, the shelling, and now this happened,” she says, wearing plastic bags she has tied to her feet in the toxic slush. “They took everything. My house, my belongings were the last things in this world that I had.” The Kakhovka dam – essential for fresh water and irrigation in southern Ukraine – is located in a part of the Kherson region that Moscow illegally annexed in September and has occupied for the past year. The damage is so severe that Ukraine has accused Russia of “ecocide” – believing Moscow’s forces blew it up in an attempt to prevent Kyiv’s troops from advancing in the south as they launched a counteroffensive. Moscow has vehemently denied the accusations and blamed Kyiv. Experts say the dam was so robustly built only an internal explosion could have caused such a catastrophic breach. The tearing floods have wiped out hundreds of towns and villages according to the United Nations, which has warned nearly a quarter of a million people have been left in need of drinking water. Downstream of the dam, towns and villages have morphed into polluted swamps where cholera has been detected. Upstream, the reservoir which once sustained swathes of agricultural land has turned into a salty desert. Residents in those areas queue to get water from fire trucks under shelling. And the repercussions will be felt well beyond Ukraine’s borders, potentially sparking global hunger. Ukraine – a major exporter of grains, oils and vegetables – was already struggling to export its harvest because of war. The ravages of flooding in one of the world’s most important breadbaskets will almost inevitably lead to lower grain exports, higher food prices around the world, and less to eat for millions in need. “The truth is this is only the beginning of seeing the consequences of this act,” Martin Griffiths, a United Nations aid official warned recently. It also raised fears about the stability of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which relied on the waters of the now-dry Kakhovka reservoir to function. Rafael Grossi, head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency which has unsuccessfully attempted to build a safety zone around the facility, was so concerned he travelled to the Russian-occupied plant. There he admitted it was ”grappling with ... water-related challenges”. In Zaporzhizhia’s regional capital, Taras Tyshchenko, head of the Ministry of Health’s Centre for Prevention and Disease Control, said if the Russians were capable of unleashing the waters over Kherson, they would have no qualms in taking out the nuclear power plant. Since the explosion at the dam, his health facility tests the air and waters across the region multiple times a day for radiation and contamination. So far it has detected cholera and remains on high alert for radiation. It has been through three rounds of training in the event there is a disaster at the nuclear power plant and has distributed potassium iodide tablets to those living within the danger zone. The damage from the destroyed dam is unfathomable, he says in front of the city’s main dock which is now dried out. The sweeping concrete jetty, which once hosted commercial water traffic, stoops forlornly over muddy puddles where his teams take water samples. “It could take well over a decade to fix the dam, refill the reservoirs and restore this region to normal,” he adds grimly. “And that work can only really start after victory.” In the interim, cities, towns and villages along the Kakhovka reservoir will morph into wastelands if no solution is found. Deep fissures criss-cross the cracked riverbeds where dead fish and molluscs slowly crisp in the sun. In one village, a forlorn fisherman drives a scooter across the desert scape in search of a pool of water. “Once the dam exploded we tried to build our own mini dams to try to retain some water,” explains Vitaly Marozov, 29, who works at a 400-hectare farm producing vegetables and fruit just outside of the southern city of Nikopol. He plays us a video of local volunteers building a makeshift barrier out of sacks and soil. “Now we are trying to dig wells but the water is salty,” he adds. This is already destroying crops. Standing by a destroyed field of cabbages, dusted white with salt, he says they will be lucky if they can salvage a fifth of their total yearly yield. The damage, he believes, will cost their farm 22 million hryvnias, or around £500,000, and it will only get worse as the season progresses. “We are just one farm, this is the case all around this area. This will impact global food security unless someone does something drastic,” he continues. Back in the waterlogged regions, volunteers deliver aid by boats to the communities now cut off from help. Others bring pumps to try to drain the pools of stagnant water from the worst-hit areas. But all it does is expose the irreparable damage done to the entire southern sweep of Ukraine. We find Olha Mosyk, 70, who was forced to swim to safety with a litter of newborn kittens, islanded by destruction in her home in the Mykolaiv region. Sodden muddy piles of dirt mark the remains of the walls of her house. “You need steel teeth to break Ukrainians. That won’t work on me,” she says, pulling up the remains of rotten potatoes from her destroyed field which is the same tyranny of blackened mud. “All we can do is try to pull ourselves together,” she adds with a pause. Back in Kherson city, Svetlana tries to comfort her mother, Antonia, who is on the cusp of a panic attack. “How do I feel? Crying all the time. My whole body is shaking,” the 84-year-old says faintly, her red floral nightie a flash of colour in the grey water. “It’s all flooded. My whole life is under water.” Read More Zelensky accuses Russia of plotting ‘radiation leak’ attack at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant Ukraine's president tells other countries to act before Russia attacks nuclear plant Ukrainian soldiers rescue Russian troops left to drown after Kakhovka dam destruction Russia-Ukraine war live: Moscow ‘arrests General Armageddon’ over Wagner rebellion Recapping the revolt in Russia, through the words of 4 presidents and a mutinous warlord

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Sandwiches have become increasingly elaborate creations: pillows of golden focaccia dripping with sumptuous pulled meats, tahini dressings, and spice-crusted roast veg. And yet, back in the day, you were lucky if you got a smear of margarine on yesterday’s white bread with a hunk of pink, pockmarked SPAM slammed unceremoniously in between. Ah yes, SPAM, there’s a reason why it became the butt of a Monty Python sketch and is now most commonly associated with the most annoying type of email correspondence. It’s unsexy, ultimately unhealthy and, at one point, was utterly unavoidable. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter However, as we’ve established, food standards have somewhat evolved since WWII rationing so SPAM doesn’t get as much of a look-in at lunchtime these days. Still, most of us have at least heard of it even if we’ve never actually tried it. Monty Python - Spam youtu.be But now, people have suddenly realised that they don’t actually know what the acronym of its name stands for. Plenty of people have their own theories, though, which they’ve publicly shared on Twitter. “What does SPAM stand for? Salty Piece A' Meat?” one asked. “I often conjectured that 'Spam' was an acronym for 'Spoiled Ham',” wrote another. Another nodded to an old joke made by retired stand-up comedian Bill Endgvall: “I finally figured out what spam stands for – stuff posing as meat.” While another suggested it actually connotes “scientifically processed animal matter”. To clarify, SPAM itself is processed meat made of a pork and ham mixture, salt, sugar, potato starch, water, and sodium nitrite. The meat is ground and combined with the other ingredients before it is transferred to its signature rectangular can, vacuum-sealed, and cooked inside, the Encyclopedia Britannica notes. And despite the plethora of alternative suggestions, the name is, in fact, a portmanteau for spiced ham. It was coined in 1937 by its creator, New York actor Ken Daigneau, whose brother was an executive at the manufacturer Hormel Foods. According to Britannica, Daigneau later confessed that he’d come up with the name before he’d even conceived of the product, thinking it was memorable. Well, he sure hit the money on that one. SPAM continues to be loved by millions of households across the world, with more than 10 varieties of meat available on the market. Indeed, in Hawaii where it is perhaps best loved by consumers, it is enjoyed in a number of unique ways, including as an alternative to raw fish or egg in a sushi-style dish called musubi. And sure, we love our kimchi cauliflower milk rolls and slow-cooked lamb flatbreads but, credit where it’s due, SPAM has proven that it's the truly simple things that often stand the test of time. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Whenever a celebrity appears on BBC Radio One's "Unpopular Opinion" segment, there's always at least

Ken Loach, the acclaimed director known for creating socially conscious and politically charged films, is

Apparently lettuce has a use other than being eaten in salads and sandwiches, according to a new TikTok trend. Apparently some people swear that lettuce water can help you fall asleep. TikToker, Shalpa Hoque tried the hack out for herself and documented her process. You can watch her video in full here. “So apparently drinking lettuce water makes you sleepy, sis don’t sleep so imma try it out,” she wrote in the clip. Shalpa then ripped up some of the leafy greens and stuffed them into her mug before pouring in some boiling hot water. She mixed her lettuce water with peppermint tea because she was “scared it was going to taste like sh*t.” After leaving it to soak in the water for 10 minutes, she then takes the lettuce out and takes a sip, “it takes like nothing,” Shalpa says. Later she provides an update on how she’s feeling after the drink. “Update, I do feel slight drowsy, not hella sleepy like knockout, but I do feel sleepy.” Cut to some time later, and in another update the drink seems to have affected Shalpa more. “Another update, lettuce has crack because your sis is gone,” she said in bed with her eyes closed. TikTok users seemed to be intrigued by this so-called sleep hack, as the video now has 7.2m views, and over 1.4m likes. However, Marie-Pierre St-Onge, an associate professor of nutritional medicine and the director of the Sleep Center of Excellence at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told Insider that there is no research to prove that lettuce water helps us fall asleep. However, this has been found to be the case for rats where lettuce has helped them doze off. In a 2017 study, researchers looked at whether low and high doses of red romaine lettuce extract helped mice stay asleep longer. Results show that it worked for the rats, but it’s unclear whether TikTokers were using this particular lettuce to improve their sleep. St-Onge also questioned how effective stewing the lettuce in boiling water would be - even if it was the red romaine TikTokers were using. “How much of those lettuce extracts are you getting from water? I’m not sure,” she said. But those on the app insist they’ve been able to fall asleep quicker from it - so what’s the possible reason for this? This may be caused by the placebo effect, according to St-Onge. It’s when you convince yourself and your body that a treatment is working - even if that is not the case. “If you expect something to work, then you probably feel more sleepy,” St-Onge added. While consuming and getting wrapped up in these bizarre trends, it’s easy to forget the simple steps we can take to improve our sleep that are scientifically proven to work on humans. From reducing our screen time, to reducing light, to mindfulness and physical exercise - soggy lettuce doesn’t seem quite as appealing somehow.