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12/12(月)　AMラジオは置き去りにされる？

In a Future Filled With Electric Cars, AM Radio May Be Left Behind

crackle　パチパチ音を立てる 　
staple　定番、ホチキスの針
deprive　奪う、剥奪する
interference　干渉、妨害
hum　ぶんぶん音を立てる、鼻歌を歌う

著者：Michael Levenson
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

For nearly 100 years, drivers have been listening to AM radio, an American institution crackling with news, traffic, weather, sports and an eclectic variety of other programs.

But that dashboard staple could be going the way of manual-crank windows and car ashtrays as electric vehicles begin to grab more of the U.S. marketplace.

An increasing number of electric models have dropped AM radio in what broadcasters call a worrisome shift that could spell trouble for the stations and deprive drivers of a crucial source of news in emergencies.

Carmakers say that electric vehicles generate more electromagnetic interference than gas-powered cars, which can disrupt the reception of AM signals and cause static, noise and a high-frequency hum. (FM signals are more resistant to such interference.)

“Rather than frustrate customers with inferior reception and noise, the decision was made to leave it off vehicles that feature eDrive technology,” BMW said in a statement, referring to the system that powers its electric vehicles.

Tesla, Audi, Porsche and Volvo have also removed AM radio from their electric vehicles, as has Volkswagen from its electric SUV, ID.4, according to the carmakers and the National Association of Broadcasters. Ford said that the 2023 F-150 Lightning, its popular electric pickup truck, would also drop AM radio.

If more electric vehicles drop AM radio, some broadcasters say they could lose a connection to their core listeners.

Brian Winnekins, the owner of WRDN in Durand, Wisconsin, which has seven hours of farm-related programming available every weekday on AM and FM, said he has been urging listeners to tell carmakers not to drop AM, noting that it can reach farmers in remote areas.

“If you can make a vehicle drive by itself,” Winnekins said, referring to the driver-assistance systems in Teslas and other vehicles, “you can make a decent radio receiver.”

Many AM broadcasters say their stations’ news reports are the quickest way for drivers to find out about tornadoes, flash floods and other severe weather. Diane Newman, operations and brand manager at WWL in New Orleans, said that during Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, the station carried vital information about rescue and recovery efforts.

“There was no Wi-Fi; there were no phone connections,” Newman said, adding, “You take away AM radios in cars and you take away a lifeline, a connection when the community needs you most.”

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12/13(火)　合併症リスク、レーシック手術患者に警告すべき

LASIK Patients Should Be Warned of Complications, FDA Draft Says

complication　[医] 合併症
cornea　角膜
retina　網膜
weigh in　議論に加わる
go on the offensive　攻勢に出る
ophthalmologist　眼科医
optometrist(US) optician(UK)　検眼医
incision　切開

著者：Roni Caryn Rabi
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

Patients considering LASIK surgery should be warned that they may be left with double vision, dry eyes, difficulty driving at night and, in rare cases, persistent eye pain, according to draft guidance by the Food and Drug Administration. After surgery, patients might still need eyeglasses, the document warns.

If put into effect, the agency’s warnings are likely to come as a surprise to many Americans, who view the procedure as safe and commonplace. Every year, more than half a million adults undergo LASIK surgery to correct poor vision.

The operation involves reshaping the cornea, the clear round dome that covers the front of the eye and focuses light on the retina at the back of the eye. The surgeon cuts a thin flap in the cornea and folds it back, and then uses the laser to sculpt the cornea. Afterward, the surgeon replaces the flap.

The operation normally takes less than 15 minutes per eye, and patients usually must pay thousands of dollars out of pocket, since the procedure is not covered by insurance and is considered cosmetic. LASIK surgeons, who point to surveys showing that 90% to 95% of customers are satisfied, often promote the procedure by offering free consultations and steep discounts.

The FDA document is not final. More than 600 individuals and professional groups have weighed in with comments since the draft of the guidance was made public in July, and the agency is now reviewing the input while preparing the final documents, officials said.

Organizations representing surgeons and medical device manufacturers have gone on the offensive, accusing the FDA of meddling in the practice of medicine and saying the information is one-sided and will needlessly frighten patients.

Many ophthalmologists say LASIK is the safest procedure done on the eye and that serious, long-lasting complications are rare.

But according to the FDA’s draft guidance, a few LASIK patients have become severely depressed, even considering suicide, after experiencing complications from the surgery. Certain chronic conditions, like diabetes, and some medications may put patients at risk for poor outcomes, the document says.

The FDA is proposing a patient “decision checklist” that describes LASIK surgery, noting that corneal tissue is “vaporized” and that corneal nerves “may not fully recover” from the incisions, “resulting in dry eyes and/or chronic pain.”

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12/14(水)　再生可能エネルギーは2025年初頭までに石炭を追い抜く

Renewables Will Overtake Coal by Early 2025, Energy Agency Says

Renewables　(様々な)再生可能エネルギー(= Renewable energy　再生可能エネルギー)
generation　発生 　　　　　 　
electricity generation　発電 　
soar　舞い上がる、上昇する、高騰する 　　　 　
lengthy　(時間的に)長い、長々しい 　
upfront　前もって、先行投資の(前もって　beforehand、in advance、ahead of time)

著者：Elena Shao
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

Worldwide, growth in renewable power capacity is set to double by 2027, adding as much renewable power in the next five years as it did in the past two decades, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.

Renewables are posed to overtake coal as the largest source of electricity generation by early 2025, the report found, a pattern driven in large part by the global energy crisis linked to the war in Ukraine.

“This is a clear example of how the current energy crisis can be a historic turning point toward a cleaner and more secure energy system,” Fatih Birol, the IEA executive director, said in a news release.

The expansion of renewable power in the next five years will happen much faster than what the agency forecast just a year ago in its last annual report, said Heymi Bahar, a senior analyst at the IEA and one of the lead authors of the report. The report revised last year’s forecast of renewable growth upward by 30% after the introduction of new policies by some of the world’s largest emitters, like the European Union, the United States and China.

While there has been a wartime resurgence in fossil fuel consumption as European countries have scrambled to replace gas from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February, the effects are likely to be short-lived, the agency said.

Instead, over the next five years, the global energy crisis is expected to accelerate renewable energy growth as countries embrace low-emissions technology in response to soaring fossil fuel prices, including wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps. Heating and cooling buildings with renewable power is one of the sectors that needs to see larger improvement, the report said.

The main obstacles in wealthy countries are lengthy permitting procedures and lack of improvements and expansion to grid infrastructure, the report said.

For low-income countries, the report said, the challenge is both weak grid infrastructure and the lack of access to affordable financing for renewable projects, which require higher upfront costs for capital than they do for maintenance and operation.

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12/15(木)　FTX元CEO、バハマで逮捕

FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Said to Be Arrested in the Bahamas

cryptocurrency exchange 暗号通貨交換所 　
filed criminal charges 刑事告発する 　
extradition （容疑者・犯罪者の管轄国への）引き渡し 　
indictment 起訴、告訴 　
fraud 詐欺、不正行為 　
conspiracy 陰謀、共謀 　
taken into custody 収監される、拘留される

著者：David Yaffe-Bellany, William K. Rashbaum and Matthew Goldstein
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday after U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges, according to a statement by the government of the Bahamas.

“SBF’s arrest followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition,” the statement said.

Bankman-Fried has been under investigation by the Justice Department over the sudden implosion of FTX, a $32 billion company that filed for bankruptcy Nov. 11.

Prosecutors for the Southern District of New York confirmed that Bankman-Fried had been charged and said an indictment would be unsealed Tuesday. The charges included wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and money laundering, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

Bankman-Fried, who was the only person charged in the indictment, was taken into custody by Bahamian authorities, the person said.

Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment.

Prosecutors have been examining whether FTX broke the law by transferring its customers’ funds to Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund that Bankman-Fried also founded and owned.

“Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. government, based on a sealed indictment,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. “We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”

Lawyers involved in the case were surprised at the suddenness of the news, which came the evening before Bankman-Fried was scheduled to testify in a House committee hearing.

A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.

Once a golden boy of the crypto industry and a major donor to the Democratic Party, Bankman-Fried has seen his vast business and political empire collapse with stunning speed. His exchange filed for bankruptcy last month, and his personal fortune has dwindled to virtually nothing.

FTX’s collapse began in early November, when a run on deposits exposed an $8 billion hole in the company’s accounts. Bankman-Fried sought a lifeline from a rival company, the giant crypto exchange Binance, but the deal fell through after Binance examined FTX’s finances.

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12/16(金)　NASAの月探査が成功に終わり、SpaceXに注目が集まる

Successful End of NASA Moon Mission Shifts Attention to SpaceX

uncrewed　無人の 　
coincide　一致する 　
price tag　値札 　
reenter　再突入 　
maneuver　操縦

著者：Kenneth Chang
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

Suspended under parachutes, an astronaut capsule without astronauts made a gentle splash in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, bringing NASA’s Artemis I moon mission to a close.

The end of the uncrewed test flight coincided with the 50th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 17 on the moon, the last time that NASA astronauts walked there.

The Artemis program is the successor to Apollo, and after years of delays and a mounting price tag, the new rocket and spacecraft that will take astronauts back to the moon worked about as smoothly as mission managers could have hoped.

“This was a challenging mission,” Mike Sarafin, the Artemis mission manager, said during a news conference after the splashdown. “And this is what mission success looks like.”

With the conclusion of Artemis I, more attention will shift toward SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Elon Musk. NASA is relying on a version of Starship, the company’s next-generation spacecraft that has not yet flown to space, to land astronauts on the moon.

On Sunday, just after noon Eastern, the Orion crew capsule — where astronauts will sit during future flights — reentered the Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 mph. This was the mission’s last major objective: to demonstrate that the capsule’s heat shield could withstand the temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

By design, the capsule bounced off the upper layer of air before reentering a second time. It was the first time that a capsule designed for astronauts had performed this maneuver, known as a skip-entry, which enables more precise steering toward the landing site. As expected, there were two blackouts in communications as the heat from the capsule’s encounter with the atmosphere created electrically charged gases that blocked the radio signals.

Before and after the blackouts, live video from outside Orion’s window showed impressive views of Earth getting larger and larger.

At 12:40 p.m. Eastern, the capsule settled in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico’s Baja peninsula.

Over the next few hours, recovery crews worked to pull Orion out of the water. It will head back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for detailed inspection.

The capsule and the Space Launch System, a giant new rocket, are key pieces of Artemis, which aims to land astronauts on the moon near its south pole as early as 2025.

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12/17(土)　ドナルド・トランプ氏オリジナルトレカを販売

Trump Sells a New Image as the Hero of $99 Trading Cards

audaciously　大胆に
perplexed　困惑させた
akin　同種の
aides　側近者達
sweepstakes　抽選 　
memorabilia　記念品

著者：Michael C. Bender and Maggie Haberman
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

Donald Trump’s political opponents have long criticized him as something of a cartoon character. On Thursday, the former president made himself into one — but with the aim of turning a profit.

In his first significant public move since opening his 2024 presidential campaign last month, Trump announced an online store to sell $99 digital trading cards of himself as a superhero, an astronaut, an Old West sheriff and a series of other fantastical figures. He made his pitch in a brief, direct-to-camera video in which he audaciously declared that his four years in the White House were “better than Lincoln, better than Washington.”

The sale of the trading cards, which Trump had promoted a day earlier as a “major announcement” on his social media website, Truth Social, perplexed some of his advisers and drew criticism from some fellow conservatives.

“Whoever told Trump to do this should be fired,” Keith and Kevin Hodge, two Trump supporters and stand-up comedians, posted on Twitter.

The digital trading cards cost far more than the $20 that Trump often asks his supporters to contribute.

But Trump’s campaign won’t earn any money from the digital cards, which he describes as akin to baseball cards but are actually non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, that effectively allow a person to claim ownership of a digital file.

Money from the digital cards will instead be pocketed by Trump under a licensing deal, a fact that some of his aides acknowledged and expressed concern about. They worry that the move could dilute small-dollar donations to his presidential effort.

Incentives to buy the cards include entry into a series of sweepstakes to meet Trump or golf at one of his properties. Customers who buy 45 cards can receive a ticket to a gala at a Trump resort in South Florida.

“I’ll also be doing Zoom calls, one-on-one meetings, autographing memorabilia and so much more,” Trump says in the video.

At the same time, Trump’s aides released, to a friendly Twitter user, a video of the former president in which he makes promises about cracking down on online censorship if he reclaims his old office. But Trump’s direct pitch for the trading cards underscored how secondary his campaign for president has seemed to his personal efforts over the past month.

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12/18(日)　ハーバード、黒人初の新学長を決定

Harvard Names a New President, an Insider and Also a Historic First

dean 学部長 　
pivotal 中枢の、重要な 　
bolster 支持する 　
profoundly 深く、大いに 　
plantain プランテン／プランテイン

著者：Stephanie Saul and Vimal Patel
(c) 2022 The New York Times Company

Harvard University on Thursday announced that its new president would be Claudine Gay, the dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She will be the first Black leader of Harvard, and the second woman to hold the position, succeeding Lawrence Bacow.

Gay will take office in July, just as the university faces a pivotal Supreme Court decision that may force it to revise its long-standing admissions processes, which have been criticized for considering factors that favor white and wealthy candidates while also using affirmative action to bolster enrollment by Black and Hispanic students.

As a proponent of increased diversity in hiring, as well as an expert on minority representation and political participation in government, Gay may be ideally suited to the task, supporters said.

“Claudine is a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence,” said Penny Pritzker, the chair of the presidential search committee.

Harvard made “academic history” with the announcement, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

“This is a victory for diversity and excellence,” he said in an email.

Gay has been a professor of government and of African and African American studies at Harvard since 2006. To a standing ovation Thursday afternoon, Gay reintroduced herself to the Harvard community, the place where she started as a graduate student three decades ago, lugging a futon and a cast-iron skillet to fry plantains into Haskins Hall.

“That Claudine could have not possibly imagined her path would lead here,” she said.

Before joining Harvard’s faculty in 2006, Gay was an assistant professor and associate professor of political science at Stanford University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in economics. She earned her doctorate from Harvard in 1998.

Her tenure as dean has not been without controversy. Earlier this year, several dozen Harvard professors, including some of the university’s most prominent, signed an open letter to Gay following the decision to discipline John L. Comaroff, a professor of African American studies and anthropology. He had been placed on academic leave following allegations of sexual misconduct.

An investigation by the university found that Comaroff had engaged in verbal conduct that violated university policies, but it did not confirm claims of unwanted sexual contact. A lawsuit against the university was filed by three women who said they were victims.

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