뉴스&스피킹(영자신문)
하루 10분이면 영어에 대한 두려움을 극복하고 누구나 유창하게 영어를 구사하실 수 있습니다.
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Chinese City Shuts Down Transport to Fight Coronavirus Chinese state media say officials are canceling flights and trains leaving the city of Wuhan to limit the spread of a new, deadly virus.
The state-owned People's Daily newspaper reported on Twitter Thursday that no one would be permitted to leave the city starting at 10 a.m. The official Xinhua News Agency said that officials also were asking people not to leave without specific reasons.
Wuhan city officials reportedly ordered city buses and boats to temporarily stop operating. Wuhan is a city of several million people in China’s central Hubei province.
Health officials urged people in the city to avoid crowds and public gatherings. They warned that the newly identified coronavirus has infected more than 500 people and killed at least 17. It is believed to have come from a market selling wild animals and seafood.
The coronavirus comes from a family of viruses that can cause the common cold but also more serious sicknesses such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. Between 2002 and 2003, the SARS outbreak spread from China to other countries and killed about 800 people.
Li Bin is deputy director of China’s National Health Commission. He said, "There has already been human-to-human transmission and infection of medical workers.”
Doctor Nathalie MacDermott of King's College London said it is likely the virus can spread through the air through sneezing or coughing.
In Geneva, the World Health Organization (WHO) said its meeting with health experts is continuing into a second day. The WHO is trying to decide whether to declare the outbreak a “global health emergency.” In recent years, the health organization declared emergencies for the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Zika virus in the Americas.
The European Center for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) said the virus was likely to spread to countries “with the greatest volume of people traveling to and from Wuhan.”
Airports around the world have increased screening of visitors from Wuhan. And Singapore is screening all passengers from China.
Officials in Thailand on Wednesday said four people -- a Thai national and three Chinese visitors -- are infected with the virus. Japan, South Korea, the United States and Taiwan have all reported one case. All of the infected people were from Wuhan or had recently traveled there.
In Hong Kong, media have reported the first case in a person arriving from the mainland.
Mexico was investigating a possible case also. And North Korea has banned all foreign visitors.
Doctor Peter Horby is a professor of infectious diseases at Oxford University. He said there are three criteria to decide whether the coronavirus is a global health emergency: the outbreak must be an extraordinary event, there must be a risk of international spread and an international response is required.
"In my opinion, those three criteria have been met," he said.
I’m Jonathan Evans.
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New York Museum Shows Art by Holocaust Victims Michael Morris is a curator with New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. He was trying to fulfill a common request when he uncovered a number of artworks. They were images of the Holocaust, by people who were there.
Using those works, Morris put together a show of art. Many are by some of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s.
The show is “against and educates about the dangers of anti-Semitism, racism, bigotry of any kind,” said Morris.
He added, “We see hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps. These are actual people who had multi-faceted lives.”
Among them was 12-year-old Helga Weissova. She brought art supplies with her when she was sent to Terezin concentration camp, north of Prague, in October 1944. Before she was forced to go to Auschwitz, another prisoner gave the drawings to her uncle. He hid them behind a wall.
Auschwitz was the infamous Nazi concentration camp in southern Poland.
Her 1943 work in colored pencil on paper is called “Transport Leaving Terezin.” It shows guards with guns watching a group of prisoners carrying their few belongings.
Weissova is now in her 90s and living in Prague. But many of the artists never made it out of the deadly camps.
Peter Loewenstein of Czechoslovakia was sent in 1941 to Terezin. He gave 70 drawings to his mother before he was forced to go in 1944 to Auschwitz.
His mother and sister would soon be sent to Auschwitz as well. Before they left, they gave the art to a family friend.
His sister was the only family member who survived the camp. She recovered the works after the war, including “Eight Men in Coats with Stars.” It is a 1944 ink on paper picture of Jews forced to wear a Star of David on their clothing for identification.
There is also a powerful watercolor by Marvin Halye, a member of the 104th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. His division liberated – or, freed – Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany in 1945.
After seeing the few surviving prisoners covering thousands of bodies, he rushed to paint “Civilians Covering Corpses.”
Anti-Jewish hate crimes
The show opens as anti-Semitic hate crimes increase across the United States. Many have happened in New York City, home to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel.
Anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York in 2019 were at a 28-year high, said professor Brian Levin. He is director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino.
In the most recent attack, a man with a machete wounded five people. They were gathered last month for a Hanukkah celebration at the home of a rabbi, just outside the city.
A few weeks earlier, a shooting at a Jewish market in nearby Jersey City, New Jersey, killed two men.
Hate crimes are increasing at a time when many Americans lack general knowledge of the Holocaust.
The largest lack of understanding is people in their 20s and 30s. More than 60 percent of them do not know what Auschwitz is, said a recent study by a Jewish organization.
I’m Dorothy Gundy.View -
Hip-hop Music on the Rise in Thailand New York City, the birthplace of hip-hop music, is thousands of kilometers away and, culturally, very different from northeastern Thailand.
But for Thai rapper RachYo, the language of hip hop is universal.
The 18-year-old artist appears in a recent music video recorded in a rice field. RachYo is sitting on an old truck, rapping about trouble in a love relationship. The video has 57 million views on YouTube.
“I rap about things that really happen to me,” RachYo told the Reuters news agency. Based in Thailand’s Nakhon Ratchasima province, the rapper says he mostly sings about girls.
The rising popularity of hip hop in Thailand has created stars that have drawn the attention of music industry leaders.
Def Jam Recordings is the main hip hop label of Universal Music Group, or UMG, one of the world’s three major music corporations. Dej Jam produces and publishes the work of some of the most popular hip-hop artists in the United States, including Rihanna, 2 Chainz and Kanye West. Last year it opened offices in Thailand and Singapore.
One of the first artists the company employed after expanding there was Thai rapper DaBoyWay. DaBoyWay has 1 million followers on the social media service Instagram, and is releasing a new album on Monday. Def Jam has also made agreements with five others from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Paul Sirisant heads the label’s operations in Bangkok. He says Def Jam plans to employ four more Thai artists this year.
Sirisant noted Thai artists stand out from others in Southeast Asia because the language already includes sounds that rhyme in daily speech. Rhyming, or using words or phrases that end in the same sounds, is a major element of hip-hop. So rapping in Thai sounds natural, he says.
The music has spread outside the nation’s major cities.
“Thailand has already tipped in a big way - it’s the paddy fields and hip hop,” Sirisant said. He adds that highly successful rappers can earn millions of dollars in Thailand.
In 2018, Thai media company Broadcaster Workpoint Entertainment launched a television program called The Rapper. Non-professional performers compete in the show to become the next rap star. The popularity of The Rapper helped connect the public and hip hop.
A group called Rap Against Dictatorship released a song in 2018 that received millions of views on YouTube. The song included the lyric “either eat the truth or bullets,” and criticized the military rule of the country. That rule ended in 2019.
Other new rap in Thailand comes from 19Tyger and H3NRI. Their song, Klong Toey is about life in a poor Bangkok neighborhood of the same name.
Maya Piyapan, 23, says his hip hop group, WARPGVNG, met over the internet and has members from across the country. The group, which will perform on January 31, raps about about getting into trouble and problems fame can cause among friends.
“Labels have reached out to me to help with production and content, but not as an artist” said Maya.
Production agreements, or record deals, are the dream for many artists, but not for RachYo. His recent video Nok, the Thai word for bird, received 80 million YouTube views, more than Thailand’s population of nearly 70 million.
He says he raps to express himself, but he is not interested in a record deal with a label.
“I like being home, in the country. I don’t really like to go anywhere,” he said.
I’m Pete Musto.View -
Teen Discovers Planet on Day Three of Internship Call it luck, but not “dumb luck.”
Just three days into Wolf Cukier’s summer internship with the American space agency NASA, he found a new planet.
The 17-year-old high school student was tasked with looking through data from a telescope in search of evidence of planets outside our solar system.
“I was pretty much spending my summer looking at graphs on a computer screen.”
And on his third day with NASA, Cukier found it -- a previously unknown planet orbiting two stars.
Cukier was looking at data produced by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS. Although he did not see the physical planet, he saw clear evidence of it.
“I couldn't say that I was confident it was a planet because it was day three on the job. And I couldn't say anything with confidence quite yet. But out of the hundred different targets that I looked at, I remember I put about 10 asterisks next to this one, saying this one looks good, we should look at this one first.”
The planet is 1,300 light years from Earth.
What Cukier had found was evidence of changes in the light of the two stars, called binary stars. The way scientists “see” such a distant planet is by changes in light. If a planet is moving between the telescope and the star it orbits, it produces an effect similar to an eclipse that we see here on Earth.
In other words, the planet blocks some of the sun’s light from the telescope. In graphs and other data, this shows up as a dip -- a line that moves down and then up again.
Later that day, Cukier met with his boss, Veselin Kostov, to go over his find.
The high school student was working with a team of scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C.
NASA has about 2,000 interns across the country each year.
Kostov told VOA that Cukier came into his office and told him he had something that “looks interesting.”
It was “a really exciting couple of hours” to make sure what they saw “was real,” Kostov said.
“Once we were pretty confident that they were mostly real, we reached out to the rest of the team,” Kostov said. Other team members found more transits of the planet, giving them more evidence.
Because the planet is so big, NASA scientists believe it is made of gas, like Saturn or Jupiter. Even if it had been rocky, like Earth, the planet seems to be too close to one of the stars to be able to support life.
A team of NASA scientists, including Cukier, submitted the finding to a scientific journal. The work will be published soon.
Reading scientific journals in his classes at Scarsdale High School in New York is what brought Cukier to his internship at NASA. Under the supervision of two high school teachers, he and other students in the program study a science field of their choice. Cukier settled on the field of astrobiology.
He contacted people at NASA to help him gain an internship. While at NASA in the summer of 2018, he studied “Goldilocks” zones—planets that have conditions that could support life.
NASA invited Cukier back the following summer. And that is when he found the planet.
NASA’s Kostov holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University. Both he and Cukier have advice for students wanting to study the stars. First, study physics and math.
Other than that, Cukier says it was both luck and “putting in the hard work” that led to his discovery.
“Yes what I did is impressive, but it also didn't take that many special skills. So, if someone is interested in science, like my age, and even if they don't have training, they should still just reach out to researchers and find something that they can do because almost anyone can look through data looking for dips.
“It just happened to be me, who saw this one.”
Since the news broke earlier this month, Cukier has told his story to many media organizations. He says that even though it has been fun, the attention is a “bit overwhelming.”
As for his future, Cukier plans to study either physics or astrophysics in college. He hopes to attend Stanford, Princeton or M.I.T., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology next autumn.
But first comes his high school graduation this spring.
I’m Anne Ball.View -
Olympic Committee Tries Once Again to Separate Politics from Sports The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced this month that athletes are barred from making political statements at Olympic events. It said banned actions can include making hand signs and bending down on one knee during medal ceremonies and competition.
The warning came as part of new guidelines for rule 50 of the Olympic Charter – the set of rules governing the Olympic movement. The guidelines state: “It is a fundamental principle that sport is neutral and must be separate from political, religious or any other type of interference.”
The president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, noted: “The eyes of the world will be on the athletes and the Olympic games.” The Associated Press reported his comments.
Kirsty Coventry is head of the IOC Athletes’ Commission. She said the goal of the announcement is to bring clarity to an issue that has been around for a long time.
Other areas where political statements are not permitted include the field of play, at the Olympic village and during the opening and closing ceremonies.
The IOC added that athletes may “express their opinions” at press conferences, in team meetings and on digital media while observing local laws.
Many years of dispute
Last year, two athletes from the United States used medal ceremonies at the Pan American Games to make what U.S. officials considered political statements. The head of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee criticized Gwen Berry, who specializes in the hammer throw, and fencer Race Imboden. The two were ordered on probation for 12 months for their actions at the games in Lima, Peru.
Possibly the most famous example of athletes making political statements came at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games. U.S. track and field medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised one fist in the air in what many thought to be a sign of black power.
The IOC barred the two from competing for the remainder of the Mexico City Games.
The athletes’ commission said any punishment for breaking the rules would be given “on a case-by-case basis as necessary.” It said that sports organizations and the athletes’ national governing bodies will have the power to decide the severity of the punishment.
Critics of the IOC policy to limit protests, however, say it is still not clear and not different from the group’s stated policy for many years. Rule 50 of the Olympic charter states that: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted.” It also bans advertising unless permitted by the IOC.
The release of the guidelines takes place at a time when television broadcasts and social media enable athletes to send out messages faster and farther. Two recent examples are former American football player Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, a star of the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
However, critics argue that the IOC does not make clear who will make judgments in individual cases. They also say the guidelines do not say who has the responsibility of carrying out punishment for breaking the rules.
Political history
Politics have appeared in the Olympic Games many times over the years. Yet the stated goal of the Olympic Movement was to keep sports and politics separate. Critics note that Germany, under Adolph Hitler, held the Olympic Games in 1936. They also point to the way former IOC President Avery Brundage dealt with South Africa during its period of racial separation, known as apartheid.
Politics caused many Americans to stay away from the Olympics 40 years ago when the U.S. team boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games. The United States was protesting the invasion of Afghanistan by the former Soviet Union. Four years later, the Soviet team boycotted the Olympics held in Los Angeles, California.
Critics of the latest guidelines say they appear to dispute or make less clear the purpose of the games.
The Charter states: “The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced in accordance with Olympism and its values.”
Possibly with that idea in mind, IOC President Thomas Bach had his picture taken with American and Iranian athletes at the Youth Olympic Games earlier this month.
The Tokyo Olympic Games are set to begin on July 24. More than 10,000 athletes from more than 200 nations and territories will compete in an event watched by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
I’m Kelly Jean Kelly. And I'm Mario Ritter, Jr.View