音声プラットフォーム「Voicy」で毎朝6時30分に更新中の英語ニュースチャンネル「Voicy News Brief with articles from New York Times」。このチャンネルでは、The New York Timesの記事をバイリンガルのパーソナリティが英語で読み上げ、記事と英単語を日本語で解説しています。英語のニュースを毎朝聴いて、リスニング力の向上と英語学習にお役立てください。

このVoicy Journalでは、毎週月曜日に前の1週間分のスクリプトをまとめて紹介しています。放送はアプリやWebページからいつでもご視聴いただけます。Voicy News Brief Season3の記事は2/7(月)以降をご覧ください！

10/31(月)の放送の英文記事と英単語：至上主義者、儲かる、おとり

Adidas Ends Partnership With Kanye West at a Considerable Cost

supremacist　至上主義者
condemnation　非難、球団、罪の宣告
lucretive　儲かる、有利な
polarize　偏向する、二極化する
provocateur　おとり、扇動者

著者：Vanessa Friedman, Michael J. de la Merced and Melissa Eddy
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

Adidas said on Tuesday that it was cutting ties with Kanye West, ending what may have been the most significant corporate fashion partnership of the rapper and designer’s career after he made a series of antisemitic remarks and embraced a slogan associated with white supremacists that earned him widespread condemnation.

The company, which had faced increasing calls in recent days to terminate its relationship with Ye, as West is now known, said the move would cost it 250 million euros ($246 million) this year.

The end of their nearly decade-long partnership — which was seen as enormously lucrative for both Ye and Adidas — raised questions of what would come next for Ye, who has been one of the most influential pop stars of recent decades but has become increasingly polarizing and unreliable in recent years. CAA, Ye’s former talent agency, no longer represents him and Def Jam, his longtime record company, said that his contract had expired last year.

“Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech,” the company said in a statement. “Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.”

The company, based in Herzogenaurach, Germany, said it would terminate the partnership immediately, end production of Yeezy branded products and stop payments to Ye and his companies.

Over the past month, Ye tested the boundaries of acceptable behavior even for a noted provocateur like himself. At his YZYSZN9 Paris Fashion Week show, he wore a shirt with the slogan “White Lives Matter,” which the Anti-Defamation League has identified as hate speech and has been adopted by the white supremacist movement. He made antisemitic remarks on social media and in interviews shortly after, including a post on Twitter that said he would go “death con 3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE.”

Blowback quickly followed.

Instagram and Twitter suspended Ye’s accounts. Ari Emanuel of Endeavor, the parent company of the talent agency WME, called on entertainment companies to stop working with Ye. Balenciaga, the fashion house that had partnered with Ye in his Yeezy Gap project and opened its runway show in Paris this month with a modeling stint by Ye, deleted him from its pictures and videos of the show. Vogue magazine said it would no longer work with Ye, who often attended the Met Gala.

音声はこちら

11/1(火)の放送の英文記事と英単語：回復する、連続する、焦点を絞る

S&P 500 Rebounds After a Week of Mixed Messages From Big Tech

rally　[動]回復する
consecutive　連続する、引き続く
the Federal Reserve　(= the Fed)　連邦準備制度
headwind　向かい風　(⇔　tailwind 追い風)
zero in　焦点を絞る、 狙いを定める
market capitalization　時価総額
fall (far) short of…　…に (到底) 達しない、(全然)届かない

著者：Isabella Simonetti
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

Stocks rallied Friday, finishing a second consecutive week of gains and adding to a recovery that has come as investors hope the Federal Reserve might indicate next week that it is preparing to slow down on interest rate increases next week.

The S&P 500 rose 2.5%, bringing its gains for the week to 3.95%. The benchmark index is down more than 18% since the start of the year as interest rate increases and worries about a recession weigh on the markets.

Investors have been closely watching company earnings reports this week for signs of economic headwinds. The biggest technology companies, including Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, reported earnings this week, and the results were mostly discouraging.

But Friday, investors zeroed in on better-than-expected results from Apple. The company reported record sales for the third quarter, and its shares rose 7.6% on Friday, even though Apple executives pointed to a slowdown in business at the end of the year.

The company is the largest by market capitalization, which means big gains or losses in its shares can influence indexes such as the S&P 500.Amazon, conversely, tumbled 6.8% after it warned that growth would be weak, with estimates for sales at the end of the year that fell far short of Wall Street’s expectations.

Profits at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, declined more than 50% compared with one year ago, the company said Wednesday. After plunging earlier in the week, its shares rose 1.3% on Friday.

Next week’s focus will be on the Fed and its efforts to tackle inflation. Central bankers are expected to announce Wednesday an interest-rate increase of three-quarters of a percentage point. Although Wall Street seems certain of next week’s increase, for investors, the question now is whether the Fed will begin to slow its increases.

Optimism that it might indicate it is prepared to do so has helped fuel the recent gains in shares, although stock investors have built up their hopes on this front before only to see them dashed by the Fed.

Treasury yields also moved higher Friday, with the 10-year note rising to 4.01% while the two-year note moved up to 4.41%.

In other markets, the Stoxx 600 rose 0.1% and Britain’s FTSE 100 closed with losses of 0.4%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell by 3.7% and Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 lost 0.9%.

音声はこちら

11/2(水)の放送の英文記事と英単語：矛盾、詰まらせる、インフラストラクチャー

Aging Infrastructure May Create Higher Flood Risk in LA, Study Finds

Infrastructure　(道路・学校・交通[通信] 機関など) インフラストラクチャー、(国家・社会などの経済的 存続に必要な) 基本的施設
LA　ロサンゼルス 　　　　　　
discrepancy　(陳述・計算などの) 矛盾、 不一致、食い違い
clog　(管などを) 詰まらせる
Angelenos　ロサンゼルス出身の人/住民

著者：Raymond Zhong
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

Hundreds of thousands of people in Los Angeles could experience at least 1 foot of flooding during a 100-year disaster, a new scientific study has found, highlighting the hazards of aging infrastructure in America’s second-largest city.

This is a much higher estimate of flood exposure in Los Angeles than the one produced by the federal government. That estimate classifies areas of the city containing about 23,000 residents as being at high risk in a 100-year event, or an event with a 1% chance of occurring in any year.

The discrepancy is explained, in part, because the new study takes a more realistic view of the city’s water infrastructure, said lead author Brett Sanders, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

Many of Los Angeles’ flood-control channels have become clogged with sediment and vegetation, reducing the amount of water they can transport, Sanders said. Rather than assume these channels are good as new, he and his colleagues used survey data collected with lidar, a technology for creating detailed 3D maps, to examine how well the city’s waterways would handle a severe storm in their actual state.

“Let’s not assume perfect performance from our infrastructure; let’s look at the most likely performance,” Sanders said. “When we do this in Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the United States, the risk is actually more than an order of magnitude bigger than what FEMA said it was,” he said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The study found that Black and Hispanic residents were disproportionately at risk, largely in neighborhoods south of downtown Los Angeles near the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers.

These are not the Angelenos typically assumed to be most exposed to flooding, said Nicholas Pinter, an earth scientist at the University of California, Davis, who didn’t work on the study. “The iconic and widespread view of flood hazard in LA is of movie-star beach houses on the Malibu coast,” Pinter said.

Disadvantaged communities often struggle more than others to bounce back from floods, said Nícola Ulibarrí, an associate professor of urban planning and public policy at the UC Irvine and an author of the study. People who rent their homes are less likely to be able to cover rebuilding costs; hourly workers are more likely to lose income because flooding prevents them from getting to work.

音声はこちら

11/3(木)の放送の英文記事と英単語：逮捕する、重罪、強盗

Intruder Wanted to Break Speaker Pelosi’s Kneecaps, Federal Complaint Says

House Speaker　下院議長 　
apprehended　〔犯罪者などを〕逮捕する
felonies　重罪
attempted murder　殺人未遂
burglary　強盗
convicted　有罪判決を受ける

著者：Glenn Thrush, Kellen Browning and Luke Vander Ploeg
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

Federal prosecutors charged the man accused of breaking into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with attempting to kidnap Pelosi and with assaulting a relative of a federal official, according to charging documents filed Monday.

The suspect, David DePape, 42, was apprehended by police at the Pelosi home in the early morning hours Friday. Police said he forcibly entered through the back door of the house, encountered Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, 82, and, following a struggle over a hammer, struck him with it.

DePape was looking for Nancy Pelosi, who was in Washington at the time, to interrogate the speaker on an unspecified political matter, according to the federal complaint. If she told the “truth,” he would let her go; if she “lied,” he intended to break her kneecaps because he saw her as “the ‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party” and wanted her to be wheeled into Congress as a lesson to other Democrats, DePape told police officers in an interview.

He had “a roll of tape, white rope, a second hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves, and zip ties” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, which filed the charges.

Later on Monday, Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, announced additional state charges. DePape was charged with six felonies: attempted murder, residential burglary, elder abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment of an elder and threatening family members of public officials. DePape was expected to be arraigned in superior court Tuesday.

Paul Pelosi, who alerted police, underwent surgery Friday after sustaining a fractured skull and serious injuries to his hands and right arm, according to a spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi. Paul Pelosi remains in the intensive care unit of a San Francisco hospital, surrounded by his family, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Law enforcement officials said that DePape sustained “minor injuries” and was treated at a hospital.

If convicted, DePape would face a maximum of 20 years in prison for the attempted kidnapping of a federal official in the performance of official duties, and up to 30 years for assaulting an immediate member of a federal official’s family and inflicting a serious injury with a dangerous weapon.

音声はこちら

11/4(金)の放送の英文記事と英単語：露骨な、裸、描写

Tumblr Says Clothing Is Optional Again

Nudity　裸
Explicit　露骨な
Depict　描写
Genital　性器

著者：Claire Fahy
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

Tumblr, a once-popular social media platform, is again allowing nudity, four years after announcing a ban on explicit content.

“We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form),” the company wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

That content, according to the company, can include “nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes,” as long as those posts are tagged with the appropriate community labels, a system Tumblr rolled out in September. However, as the post noted, “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr.”

The announcement amounted to an about-face for the company, which banned sexually explicit content in 2018. It defined the banned content at the time as photos, videos or GIFs that “show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content — including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations — that depicts sex acts.”

“There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content,” Jeff D’Onofrio, Tumblr’s CEO at the time, wrote in a blog post announcing the ban in December 2018. “We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.”

After the ban, Tumblr lost about one-third of its users, accelerating a decline for the sharing and blogging site.

“A bunch of people immediately did not trust the platform,” said Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies online communities.

Ownership of Tumblr has changed hands three times since it was founded by David Karp in 2007. The site was purchased by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion. In 2017, Verizon bought Yahoo, and Tumblr with it. In 2019, Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, for $3 million.

In the 2018 announcement, D’Onofrio wrote that Tumblr was “relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check.” According to Fiesler, those automated tools overshot their goals.

“The automated system was really, really bad,” she said. “It was flagging everything. You know, cartoons and random photos and all kinds of stuff.”

音声はこちら

11/5(土)の放送の英文記事と英単語：作成する、追放、無作為

Elon Musk Begins Layoffs at Twitter

Blockbuster　大きな影響を与えた物や人 　
Draw up　作成する
Loaded　背負った
Advocacy Organization　擁護団体
Arbitrary　無作為
Purge　追放

著者：Kate Conger
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk will begin laying off Twitter employees Friday, according to a companywide email, culling the social media service’s 7,500-person workforce a little over a week after completing his blockbuster buyout.

Twitter employees were notified in the email that the layoffs were set to begin, according to a copy of the message seen by The New York Times. Workers were instructed to go home and not go to the offices Friday as the cuts proceeded. The message, which came from a generic address and was signed “Twitter,” did not detail the total number of layoffs.

“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global work force,” the email said. “We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”

About half of Twitter’s workers appeared set to lose their jobs, according to previous internal messages and an investor, although the final count may take time to become clear.

Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Oct. 27 and immediately fired its CEO and other top managers. More executives have since resigned or were let go, while managers were asked to draw up lists of high- and low-performing employees, likely with an eye toward job cuts.

The world’s richest man faces pressure to make Twitter work financially. The deal was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. The billionaire also loaded about $13 billion in debt on Twitter for the acquisition and is on the hook to pay about $1 billion a year in interest payments.

Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Jesse Lehrich, a founder of Accountable Tech, an industry advocacy organization, said the layoffs amounted to an arbitrary purge.

“There is nothing visionary or innovative about summarily firing” workers by email, he said, especially people who have “specialized expertise and deep institutional knowledge” and before Musk “even seems to have a basic grasp of the business.”

While federal and California laws require companies to provide advance notice of mass layoffs, it was not clear whether Musk had done so. A spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department said Thursday evening that it had received no such notices from Twitter, which is based in San Francisco.

音声はこちら

11/6(日)の放送の英文記事と英単語：準備不足の、大国、もつれ

How a Festive Night in Seoul Turned Deadly

reveler　お祭り騒ぎをする人
tangle　もつれ
powerhouse　大国
makeshift shrine　仮設の祭壇
underprepared　準備不足の

著者：Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon, Paul Mozur, Victoria Kim, Lee Su-Hyun and Jin Yu Young
(c) 2021 The New York Times Company

SEOUL, South Korea — It was supposed to be a festive evening, throngs of raucous youngsters dressed as zombies, princesses and super heroes converging on one of Seoul’s most popular nightlife districts for their first restriction-free Halloween celebration since the pandemic began.

Late Saturday evening, they crowded into bars and nightclubs pumping out the latest K-pop hits and spilled out into the tight alleys that wind through the city’s Itaewon neighborhood.

As the night grew more frenetic and the mass of revelers swelled, many of them crammed into an alleyway barely 11 feet wide, in a bottleneck of human traffic that made it difficult to breathe and move. There were few police officers around, and from within the crowd came calls to “push, push” and a big shove, according to witnesses. Then, they began to fall, a tangle of too many bodies, compressed into too small of a space.

In the end, more than 150 people, most of them in their 20s and 30s, died, crushed under the surge of the crowd.

The tragedy — one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters — and questions about the authorities’ responsibility to manage the crowd has marred the image of South Korea, a thriving technology and pop-culture powerhouse that is chronically prone to man-made disasters. It has also added to political woes of the country’s beleaguered president, Yoon Suk Yeol, already suffering low approval ratings with a growing number of people out on the street demanding his resignation.

As the sun set on Itaewon on Sunday evening, a mournful and subdued atmosphere suffused the neighborhood. Police closed the streets to traffic in the area, where shuttered bars and restaurants put up signs of condolences. On the sidewalks, impromptu memorials of flowers and liquor formed makeshift shrines to the victims.

In briefing after briefing Sunday, officials, including the president and the Seoul mayor, Oh Se-hoon, vowed to do everything they could to make South Korea safer. But they offered little explanation for the lack of crowd control, what went wrong in the Itaewon alley and why the country has had recurring disasters.

On Sunday, the home minister, Lee Sang-min, admitted that police were underprepared.

“The crowd this year was not worrisomely bigger, compared with past years,” Lee told reporters. “But our police forces were scattered to various protests across the city.”

音声はこちら

「Voicy News Brief with articles from New York Times」は毎朝6時30分にVoicyで更新中！いつでも無料で聴けるVoicyの英語チャンネルを活用して、英語力向上にお役立てください。