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7/4(月)の放送の英文記事と英単語：軟体動物、破片、根絶する

The Giant African Land Snail Has Been Spotted Again in Florida

eradicate　根絶する、撲滅する
invasive　侵略的な
debris　破片、瓦礫
clingy　粘着性の、べったりの
mollusks　軟体動物

著者：Patricia Mazzei
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

MIAMI — The giant African land snail, which can grow to the size of a fist and carry a parasite that causes meningitis, was declared eradicated from South Florida last year after a decadelong battle of people versus pests.

They’re baaack.

The dreaded snails — known to invasive-species connoisseurs as GALS — were spotted in June by a gardener in Pasco County, north of Tampa, the first time a population of them has been detected outside South Florida.

To try to contain them, state officials placed a portion of Pasco County in the New Port Richey area under quarantine this week. No plants, yard waste, debris, compost or building materials can lawfully be moved out without permission, for fear that the clingy mollusks will spread. The quarantine extends from a radius of about a half-mile from the identified snail population and may change or grow if more snails are found.

“Pasco County is quite a bit drier than South Florida because you’ve got that large area of scrub habitat,” said Bill Kern, an associate professor at the University of Florida who specializes in nuisance wildlife management. Giant African land snails typically “like humid, and they like dense vegetation.”

“Of course, in areas that are irrigated, like in nurseries or in home landscapes, they will be perfectly happy,” he added.

Giant African land snails are “one of the most invasive pests on the planet,” according to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. They eat more than 500 types of plants — and also feed on stucco, “as a source of calcium.” They hide in cool, damp places during the day, feed at night and lay many thousands of eggs over their lifetimes. Some snails can grow to 8 inches long and 5 inches wide.

They can also carry a parasite, rat lungworm, that causes meningitis in humans and animals — if, say, people eat unwashed lettuce or other produce that the carrier snail has slid across, leaving behind a trail of slime.

On Wednesday, the state began treating the quarantine area in Pasco County with a snail bait that contains metaldehyde, a pesticide approved for use in vegetable and ornamental crops, fruit trees and other plants that disrupts the giant African land snails’ digestive systems and kills them.

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7/5(火)の放送の英文記事と英単語：熱中症、周到に、停電

Japan Swelters Through a Punishing Heat Wave

swelter 　暑さにうだる、汗だくになる
ward off　(危険・病気など)を避ける、…から身をかわす
heat stroke　熱中症
streak　連続
scorching　猛烈に熱い、焼けつくほどの (=sweltering)
disproportionate　不釣り合いな
scrupulously　周到に、きちんと
outage　停電 (= blackout)

著者：Hisako Ueno and Karan Deep Singh
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

TOKYO — Japan is enduring one of its worst heat waves on record, raising concern about potential power shortages amid surging demand, even as officials urged people to keep their air conditioners running to ward off heat stroke.

In Tokyo on Saturday, temperatures exceeded 95 degrees for the eighth straight day, a streak the capital has seen only once before since 1875, when record-keeping began. Scorching heat has descended on cities across Japan, like Isesaki in Gunma prefecture, which passed the 104-degree mark on Friday, nearly breaking a record set only two years ago.

A number of deaths have been attributed to the heat, as well as a surge in people being treated for heat stroke and exhaustion. Over 4,500 people with such symptoms were taken to hospitals in ambulances in recent days, more than four times the number from the same period a year ago, according to Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency.

Most of those patients were 65 or older. Senior citizens, who are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, make up a disproportionate share of Japan’s aging population.

Authorities have been issuing daily heat alerts for a week, asking people to stay indoors as much as possible and to use umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. Officials have also urged people not to wear face masks, which most residents of Japan have used scrupulously throughout the COVID pandemic, in many outdoor situations.

“I’d like to ask people to take their masks off when walking, jogging and cycling to work,” Seiji Kihara, the deputy Cabinet secretary, said Friday.

Power companies have warned that the heat wave would put the grid under strain, though there had been no outages as of Saturday. Tohoku Electric Power Co., which serves six prefectures in northern Japan, said this past week that it would be “extremely difficult” to keep electricity flowing for all of its customers.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other officials have urged people to keep their air conditioning on for their own safety, but to cut back on other uses of power.

Japan’s Ministry of Economy said on Friday that the heat wave was likely to ease up soon, along with the pressure on the electricity supply.

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7/6(水)の放送の英文記事と英単語：主義、不滅の、お持ち帰り

California Requires Plastics Makers to Foot the Bill for Recycling

foot the bill for　(…の) 責任を引き受ける
compostable　堆肥化可能な
tenet　主義、教義
takeaway　お持ち帰り
indestructible: 破壊できない、不滅の

著者：Winston Choi-Schagrin
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

In one of the most ambitious statewide attempts to reduce dependence on plastics, California instituted a new requirement that makers of packaging pay for recycling and reduce or eliminate single-use plastic packaging.

The law, signed by California’s governor Thursday, is the fourth of its kind to be passed by a state, although experts say it is the most significant because it goes further in requiring producers to both make less plastic and to ensure that all single-use products are recyclable or compostable. Last summer, Maine and Oregon passed the country’s first such requirements, known as producer-responsibility laws.

A key tenet of the laws: The costs of recycling infrastructure, recycling plants and collection and sorting facilities, will be shifted to packaging manufacturers and away from taxpayers, who currently foot the bill.

The California law requires that all forms of single-use packaging, including paper and metals, be recyclable or compostable by 2032. However, this is most significant when it comes to plastic products, which are more technologically challenging to recycle. In addition, it is tougher for people to figure out which plastics are recyclable and which aren’t.

Unlike in other states, California will require a 25% reduction across all plastic packaging sold in the state, covering a wide range of items, whether shampoo bottles, plastic utensils, cushioning material or takeaway cups.

“We know that to solve our plastic pollution crisis, we need to make less plastic and reuse more of the plastic we do have,” said Anja Brandon, a policy analyst at the Ocean Conservancy.

Recycling is important for environmental reasons as well as in the fight against climate change. There are concerns that the growing global market for plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, could support demand for oil, contributing to the release of greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the state’s law, manufacturers would pay for recycling programs and will be charged fees based on the weight of packaging, the ease of recycling and whether products contain toxic substances, such as PFAS, a type of virtually indestructible chemicals that have been linked to increased risk of some cancers.

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7/7(木)の放送の英文記事と英単語：タイアップ、クチコミ、目新しさ

How TikTok Became a Bestseller Machine

tie-in　抱き合わせの、タイアップ
gushing about　しゃべり立てる、褒めちぎる
novelty　目新しさ
word-of-mouth　クチコミ
out of the gate　始めてすぐに、しょっぱなから

著者：Elizabeth A. Harris
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

Many of this year’s bestselling books have something in common, but it’s not any of the usual factors: a famous or long-established author, a tie-in with a movie or TV show.

It is TikTok.

Early last year, the publishing industry began to notice that the books readers were gushing about on TikTok — the social media platform that traffics in short videos — were showing up on bestseller lists. Publishers were surprised, authors were surprised, even the readers making those TikTok videos were surprised.

A year later, the hashtag #BookTok has become a sustained and powerful force in the world of books, helping to create some of the biggest sellers on the market.

Books by Colleen Hoover, for example, became a sensation on TikTok, and Hoover is now one of the bestselling authors in the country. NPD BookScan, which tracks the sale of most printed books in the United States, said that of the 10 bestselling books so far this year, Hoover has written four.

TikTok has “made the transition from a novelty to a real anchor for the market,” said Kristen McLean, executive director of business development at NPD Books.

Now one of the commanding forces in adult fiction, BookTok has helped authors sell 20 million printed books in 2021, according to BookScan. So far this year, those sales are up another 50%. NPD Books said that no other form of social media has ever had this kind of impact on sales.

BookTok is not dominated by the usual power players in the book world such as authors and publishers but by regular readers, many of them young, who share recommendations and videos of themselves talking about the books they love.

In essence, BookTok supercharges something that’s always been essential to selling a book: word-of-mouth.

Books that take off there are mainly fiction, and are generally a few years old. This is unusual in publishing, where most titles, if they have a burst of sales at all, see it right out of the gate.

Sales were initially concentrated among young adult titles, but BookTok is now even more powerful in adult fiction, according to BookScan. Even classics like “Wuthering Heights” and “The Great Gatsby” get some TikTok love.

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7/8(金)の放送の英文記事と英単語：干渉主義、素直に、渦巻く

France, Hoping to Weather Energy Crisis, Will Renationalize Electricity Giant

Sovereignty 　統治権
Swirling　渦巻く
Blunt　和らげる
Interventionism　干渉主義
Avowedly　素直に

著者：Constant Méheut and Aurelien Breeden
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

PARIS — France said Wednesday that it would renationalize its state-backed electricity giant to help ensure the country’s energy sovereignty as Europe faces a worsening energy crisis from Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The move would give the government more control to fix a swirling storm of problems that have plagued France’s nuclear energy program, the biggest in Europe, at a time when President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to blunt the pain of increasing living costs by shielding consumers from soaring energy prices.

Élisabeth Borne, the French prime minister, told lawmakers Wednesday for her first major speech before Parliament that the shift was needed to ensure France’s energy independence while also meeting a major goal of combating climate change.

“The energy transition requires nuclear power,” she said.

Although France gets about 70% of its electricity from nuclear power, a bigger share than any other country in the world, Borne said it could also no longer count on Russian oil and gas.

The government must ensure its energy sovereignty by holding 100% of the capital in the company, Électricité de France, or EDF, she said, up from 84% currently. The company is France’s main electricity producer and operates all of its nuclear plants.

Economic interventionism by the government is a strong tradition in France, even as it has mostly moved away from the sweeping nationalizations of the 1980s under François Mitterrand, the Socialist president at the time.

Still, the step was a symbolic one for President Emmanuel Macron. A former investment banker, he had been elected in 2017 on an avowedly pro-business platform that promised to cut regulation and reduce government spending. But it did not take long for him to follow in his predecessors’ footsteps.

In 2017, his government nationalized France’s largest shipyard, STX France, to prevent an Italian competitor from taking over. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine have accelerated his pivot from free-market reformer to state intervention advocate.

In February, Macron announced a 51.7 billion euro blueprint to overhaul France’s nuclear program that included plans for EDF to construct the first of up to 14 mammoth next-generation pressurized water reactors by 2035.

EDF is one of France’s most prominent industrial giants. Last year, the company employed more than 165,000 people and earned a revenue of about 85 billion euros, or about $86 billion.

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7/9(土)の放送の英文記事と英単語：宝庫、装置、不名誉

Chinese Police Database Was Left Unsecured Long Before Hackers Seized It

trove　宝庫
apparatus　装置
scouring　あさり回る
amass　大量に集める
lax　緩んでいる
black eye　不名誉・目の痣

著者：Amy Qin, John Liu and Amy Chang Chien
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

A Shanghai police database with a vast trove of personal data that was seized by a hacker or group had been left online, unsecured, for months, security researchers said, in what is probably the largest known breach of Chinese government computer systems.

The leak, which came to light after an anonymous user posted in an online forum offering to sell the personal information of as many as 1 billion Chinese citizens, exposes the privacy risks of the Chinese government’s vast surveillance and security apparatus.

Authorities in China collect vast amounts of data on citizens by tracking their movements, scouring their social media posts, and recording their DNA and other biological markers. Yet even as the state amasses ever greater amounts of personal data, it has sometimes been lax in erecting safeguards.

Chinese citizens have in recent years expressed growing demands for personal privacy and data protection from companies. This leak, if it became widely known within China, would most likely fuel public resistance to the collection of private data by the government as well. But news about the leak has been swiftly censored and removed from the Chinese internet and social media platforms, a sign that the government recognizes the explosive nature of the apparent breach.

“It’s left a big black eye for the Chinese public security world, and by extension the Chinese government,” said Paul Triolo, senior vice president for China at Albright Stonebridge Group, a strategy firm. “It’s not surprising they’ve gone into full censorship mode given how sensitive this issue is for the public.”

While large data leaks are not uncommon, the Shanghai police database stands out both for its scale and the highly sensitive nature of some of the information included, security researchers said.

Two cybersecurity researchers said they had separately verified the anonymous user’s claims that the database included over 23 terabytes of data covering as many as 1 billion individuals, noting that one of the leaked files appeared to contain nearly 970 million records. They did not rule out the possibility of duplicate entries.

The government has kept silent on the matter. The Cybersecurity Administration of China did not respond to a faxed request for comment. Shanghai’s public security bureau declined to respond to questions about the database.

It is unclear if anyone has paid for and downloaded the entire database.

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7/10(日)の放送の英文記事と英単語：早食いする、欠場する、聖歌隊

At Nathan’s Hot Dog Contest, One Champion Keeps His Title and Another Reclaims Hers

Gobble　早食いする
Sit out　欠場する
Wolf down　ガツガツ食べる
Parquet　寄木細工
Flock　(動詞)集まる (名詞) 群れ、群衆
Hail　歓迎して迎える
Choir　聖歌隊

著者：Mckenna Oxenden and Maria Cramer
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

NEW YORK — One competitor won his 15th contest in a row and another reclaimed her title as the world’s top ranked female eater during the Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest on Monday.

Joey Chestnut, 38, who is known as “Jaws” and holds 50 world records in eating competitions, finished first after gobbling 63 hot dogs.

Miki Sudo, the world’s No. 1 ranked female eater, who sat out the women’s contest last year because she was pregnant, came in first after wolfing down 40 hot dogs in 10 minutes. She beat Michelle Lesco, 38, who won in 2021.

“What better place to take the title back?” Sudo said from the stage after the competition, as she held her son, Max. “This has been an amazing comeback.”

The contest, which was held at alternate locations the past two years because of the pandemic, returned to Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island, a venue as storied as “the parquet floor of Boston Garden,” said Rich Shea, the president of Major League Eating, on ESPN, which broadcast the competition.

The return of the contest to the traditional Coney Island site attracted thousands of spectators who flocked to the original Nathan’s location to watch the competition.

Spectators carried signs that read, “Don’t Throw Up” and “Tastes Like Freedom” and others wore hot dog costumes as they cheered on the eaters, who came from around the country, as well as Australia and the United Kingdom to compete.

George Shea, the host of the contest and a founder of Major League Eating, hailed the competition as “a battle of the titans, the early gods,” as a choir of singers in white robes sang behind him.

Sudo, who competed with an injured wrist, did not beat her personal record of 48.5 hot dogs, but she kept well ahead of the 12 other challengers during the contest.

The crowd chanted “Joey! Joey!” as Chestnut beat 15 other men, including a war veteran who fought in Afghanistan, a Chicago man who once ate 275 jalapeños in eight minutes, and Nick Wehry, Sudo’s fiance and a diet coach from Tampa, Florida, who last year finished 50 hard-boiled eggs in 3 minutes and 4 seconds.

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