レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

One of the most recognizable pieces of Japanese art: Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. The 18th-century woodblock print famously shows three boats being tossed around in a storm. It's one of more than 200 works by the painter and engraver on show in Rome.

The exhibition is the most comprehensive dedicated to the undisputed master of Japanese art ever to be staged in Italy. It marks the 160th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Italy and Japan and traces the artist’s entire creative career, from works rooted in tradition to his most revolutionary pieces.

Francesca Villanti, an art historian and scientific advisor to the exhibition, says it is a “rich, comprehensive collection, assembled by a great admirer of Hokusai, and thus selected with rigor, care, and a genuine love and passion for this Japanese artist’s prints.”

Hokusai was the undisputed master of Ukiyo-e. It's a distinctive Japanese art style whose name means ‘pictures of the floating world,’ referring to the vibrant and dynamic socio-economic and cultural milieu that emerged in the early 17th century.

Through his woodblock prints, Hokusai celebrated the beauty of the ephemeral, capturing the everyday life and landscapes of the Edo period with a dynamic realism that, at the time, seemed revolutionary.

“What strikes us is his deep understanding of nature–partly because it is such an integral part of Japanese culture–and his grasp of its sheer scale and grandeur,” says Villanti.

The works come from the prestigious collection of the National Museum in Kraków. For the first time, the museum has loaned its works to Italy for the first major monographic exhibition on Hokusai outside Poland.

The Polish museum holds such a large collection of Japanese works thanks to Feliks Jasieński, a 19th-century Polish exile and collector who developed a deep passion for Japanese art while in Paris. He donated some 20,000 items to the museum in 1920.

“I believe that we present quite a good range of different (aspects) of his art creations. For example, watching people, traveling people, different ways of showing a person and object from different perspectives,” says Beata Romanowicz, curator of the exhibition.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Cambodian lawmakers unanimously adopted a new law targeting online scam operations with up to life in prison, following a government pledge to shut them down by the end of April.

All 112 members of parliament present voted to approve the legislation, which marks Cambodia’s first legal framework specifically aimed at a lucrative, illicit industry that has transformed the country into a global hub for cybercrime.

The scam operations typically involve bogus investment schemes and feigned romances that collectively extort tens of billions of dollars from victims around the world every year.

Justice Minister Keut Rith noted that thousands of people, especially from other Asian nations, are lured with fraudulent job offers and forced to work in scam centers in conditions of near-slavery.

Keut Rith told lawmakers that these crimes threaten public security and significantly damage Cambodia’s global reputation.

The legislation awaits review by the Senate and final approval by King Norodom Sihamoni.

Directing what’s described as a technology fraud site would carry five to 10 years in prison and fines reaching $250,000. For cases involving human trafficking, illegal confinement, or violence, the prison term is 10 to 20 years. If a worker dies, as is often associated with failed escape attempts, offenders face 15 to 30 years or even life imprisonment.

Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, who leads the Commission for Combating Online Scams, recently announced that authorities have targeted 250 suspected locations since July, successfully shutting down 200. He said the enforcement efforts resulted in 79 legal cases against nearly 700 ringleaders and associates. Over the same period, the government has repatriated nearly 10,000 scam center workers from 23 countries.

Experts are skeptical. Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center, pointed out in response to Chhay Sinarith’s remarks that past crackdowns often failed because they left financial and protection networks intact, allowing criminal operations to quickly start again.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The price of a PlayStation is going up by another $100, the second time in less than a year that Sony has upped the price tag on its popular gaming console.

Citing continued pressures in the global economic landscape, the Japanese company said that the PS5 is now $649.99 in the U.S. The price for its digital edition was also raised by $100, to $599.99. The PS5 Pro is now $899.99, a $150 increase.

The company raised prices similarly for other regions, including the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan.

Global trade has been upended by U.S. tariffs imposed on all of the nation's trading partners, and Sony bumped up the price for the PlayStation by $50 just last August. The war in Iran has created a massive bottleneck of energy and manufacturing supplies, creating more price pressures for everyday goods, including electronics.

The cost of a Sony PlayStation is now about 30% more than it was at this time last year.

We know that price changes impact our community, and after careful evaluation, we found this was a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming experiences to players worldwide, Sony said in a blog post on its website.

Though Sony did not specifically cite it as a cause, Iran's attack on Qatar's natural gas export facility forced it to shut down, threatening supplies of helium, a key ingredient used to produce computer chips. Qatar supplies a third of the world's helium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Qatar's state-owned gas company said the shutdown would slash helium exports by 14%. Lower supply means higher prices, especially if the war drags on for months or longer, analysts said.

While most people know of helium as the gas that makes party balloons float, it is also essential for manufacturing semiconductors used in computers and an array of other tech devices.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The World Health Organization (WHO) marked World Tuberculosis Day on March 24. This year’s slogan is ‘Yes! We can end TB!’

Medics diagnosing tuberculosis (TB) in the Philippines are now using portable X-ray machines equipped with Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) software powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the screening, early detection, and treatment.

“It is a game changer, for the simple reason that this artificial intelligence are equipped to know the landmarks and then the parameters to check if an X-ray film has possessed or has a characteristic of a TB patient,” says Dr. Clarissa Dayrit-Halum, Technical Officer of the World Health Organization in the Philippines.

“So, these are all installed in our machines, in our X-ray machines, and then the reading … The doctors will still evaluate all the readings of our AI. Don't get me wrong. They still read the results. It's just that it’s faster. The accuracy and specificity of our AI is very high, no less than 99%,” Dayrit-Halum adds.

Currently, TB in the Philippines is a high burden. The country is in the number 3 slot globally, second to Indonesia. India holds the top spot with 26% of global cases, according to the WHO.

“This mobile X-ray will help in the screening. It will accelerate the screening of the patients, and it will lead to a faster and even increase the volume of patients for a given regular time as compared to the conventional regular screening on X-rays,” says Dr. Camilio Cesar Baluyot.

About 8.3 million people across the globe were newly diagnosed with TB in 2024. Not all infections are diagnosed, and the new numbers represent 78% of the estimated number of people who actually fell ill that year, according to WHO figures. WHO officials see the increase as an indication that screening and treatment are improving after health care disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Globally, the number of deaths caused by TB fell in 2024 to 1.23 million, down from 1.25 million the year before.

Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria that attack the lungs and is spread through the air when an infectious person coughs or sneezes.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The ongoing conflict in the Middle East threatens to cripple Kenya’s floriculture sector as growers now report up to $1.4million in weekly losses. Following the attack on Iran by the U.S. and Israel, and the consequent spread of hostilities across the Middle Eastern region, global trade has taken a hit, and the effects are beginning to be felt in the Kenyan horticulture sector.

Growers in the sector worth over $800 million, according to the Central Bank of Kenya, said that flower exports have been largely affected by both a reduction in demand and shipping disruption, both to the Middle East and Europe.

At Isinya Flower Farms, located 56 kilometers (35 miles) south of Nairobi, Marketing Manager Anantha Kumar said exports have dropped by more than 50 percent.

“Previously, we used to export 450,000 stems per day, and currently we are doing about 150,000 to 200,000 stems a day. So, we are discarding almost 50 percent,” Kumar told the Associated Press. Ideally, direct flower exports to the Middle East account for about 30 percent at Isinya Flower Farms and up to 15 percent nationally; the largest market being Europe, accounting for up to 70 percent.

However, while the Middle East isn’t Kenya’s main flower market, the disruption of cargo freight to Europe has resulted in reduced exports as well as higher costs.

Kumar said the freight costs have almost doubled as the unavailability of freight made it unviable for business.

According to the Kenya Flower Council, a private sector organization representing growers and exporters of cut flowers and ornamentals in Kenya, the ongoing conflict has resulted in over $4.2million in losses over the last three weeks.

This has been attributed mainly to the interruption of the markets and disruption in shipping, as well as an increase in freight fees.

“The Middle East remains a very important market and the disruption has an immediate impact on us. We see a reduction in movement, delays in movement of produce, and longer routes, and pricing is really high, said Kenya Flowers Council Chief Executive Officer Clement Tulezi.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The assignment involves no laptop, no chatbot, and no technology of any kind. In fact, there's no pen or paper, either. Instead, students in Chris Schaffer's biomedical engineering class at Cornell University are required to speak directly to an instructor in what he calls an oral defense.

It's a testing method as old as Socrates and making a comeback in the AI age. A growing number of college professors say they are turning to oral exams and combining a variety of old-fashioned and cutting-edge techniques to help address a crisis in higher education. You won't be able to AI your way through an oral exam, says Schaffer, who introduced the oral defense last semester.

Educators are no longer naively wondering if students will use generative AI to do their homework for them. A big question now is how to determine what students are actually learning.

College instructors across the U.S. are noticing troubling new trends as generative artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated. Take-home essays and other written assignments are coming back perfect. But when students are asked to explain their work, they can't. The long-term impact of AI use on critical thinking remains to be seen, but educators worry that students increasingly see the hard work of thinking as optional.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Hammer, an associate professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, now pairs oral exams with written papers in her seminar classes. It comes across as if we're trying to prevent cheating, Hammer says. That's not why we're doing this. We're doing this because students are actually losing skills, losing cognitive capacity and creativity.

Hammer forbids AI use on all writing assignments but tells her class she knows she can't enforce that. However, if they haven't written their papers themselves, defending the material face-to-face will likely be a very stressful situation.

Hammer's class is part of a massive shift toward in-person assessments, both written and oral, at Penn, says Bruce Lenthall, executive director of the school's Center for Teaching and Learning. The Ivy League school is one of a small but growing number of universities that have started running faculty workshops on oral exams.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Meteorite hunters fanned out across a wide swath of Ohio in March, hoping to collect fragments of an estimated 7-ton (6,350 kilograms) space rock that crashed into Earth after a dazzling fireball that was seen from hundreds of miles away.

The meteoroid broke apart around 9 a.m. on March 17 over Valley City, a half-hour south of Cleveland, after it sped through the atmosphere at about 45,000 miles (72,420 kilometers) per hour. It caused a sonic boom that rattled buildings and caused fears of an explosion. The fireball was seen from Wisconsin to Maryland, and NASA confirmed it was a meteoroid nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) in diameter.

Medina resident December Harris didn't have to go looking—her cousin and roommate, Ambra Sinclair, found a small black rock they suspect is a meteorite when she was leaving for work. They had heard the sonic boom in the morning but figured it might have been noise from a nearby airport.

Harris said her roommate found the rock in a 4-foot (1.2-meter) area between the garage and the house. She described it as somewhat triangular-shaped, less than 2 inches (5 centimeters) in diameter—and “very, very black”—with pits on the surface, grooves, and a melted texture on its exterior.

The sight of the black rock stuck out at Harris’ house. She had heard she should avoid touching a meteorite with bare hands, so they picked it up with a napkin and placed it inside a jar. She looked for a way to authenticate it, but no one answered the NASA phone number she called seven times.

After he learned of the meteor sightings, meteorite collector and dealer Roberto Vargas hit the road to drive for hours from his home in Bristol, Connecticut, to Ohio.

In nearly a decade of collecting, Vargas had found only about 20 meteorites in the wild. He's among the hunters speculating that there might be a much larger piece out there—perhaps 20 pounds (9 kilograms) or more.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit that controls the artificial intelligence company OpenAI and its flagship product ChatGPT, pledged to grant out $1 billion over the next year and to build up its capacity as a philanthropic funder.

The pledge represents a major development in OpenAI's philanthropic activities and offers insight into how the company, which started as a nonprofit, plans to carry out its charitable mission to develop AI to benefit “all of humanity.”

“We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives—while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances,” OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement.

The new funding will support life science and health research and will seek to mitigate some of the impacts of AI technologies on jobs, the economy, and mental health, especially of children, the nonprofit said. It follows a commitment to spend $25 billion to support similar causes that the OpenAI Foundation made in October, though without providing a time frame.

OpenAI Foundation will also recruit a new executive director to oversee its grantmaking, it said.

In 2025, OpenAI made an effort to revitalize the nonprofit. It convened a temporary nonprofit advisory board to offer it nonbinding guidance about how to structure its philanthropic activities while it continued to negotiate with regulators and its investors about the extent to which the nonprofit board would remain in charge of its business.

The advisory board, which included labor leader Dolores Huerta, eventually recommended that OpenAI significantly increase the resources it provided to its nonprofit and to consult extensively with communities about how AI is impacting them as it shapes its grantmaking.

OpenAI's new vision for its charitable grantmaking comes at the same time that communities around the country worry about data centers increasing electricity costs, lawsuits accuse AI chatbots of exacerbating mental health crises, and companies and advocates question the fitness of new AI technologies to be used in war.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Melania Trump called on nations to work together to improve access to education and technology for children around the world, delivering her plea as she addressed a gathering of her counterparts from more than 40 countries.

The first lady's Fostering the Future Together initiative, which she announced last year, and an inaugural two-day summit that she opened on March 24 are examples of how Melania Trump has expanded her portfolio to embrace global issues.

“As people, we dream. As leaders, we progress. As nations, we will build,” she said in opening remarks. “Beginning today, let’s accelerate our new global alliance, this bond, to positively impact the progress of our children.”

She called on participants to host regional meetings, conduct research studies, begin new partnerships, and collaborate with other member countries “to cultivate the skills young people need to be successful in this rapidly evolving world.”

She said the goal of empowering children will be achieved by creating innovative programs, advocating for supportive education policies, sponsoring tech-focused legislation, and building strong public-private partnerships.

“This room is filled with extraordinary human capital,” the first lady said. She urged the leaders seated around a large U-shaped table in a State Department auditorium to “harness it to elevate your children, to empower your people, and to accelerate your economies.”

The first lady departed the summit after her remarks. A spokesperson, Nick Clemens, said she looked forward to hosting the group for a roundtable at the White House.

Participants came from countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The gathering also included technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI, who were meeting with attendees during a lunch that was closed to press coverage.

Among those participating were Olena Zelenska, the spouse of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The working session featured panelists making presentations about what their countries are doing in four areas: AI in education, education technology tools, digital literacy, and online safety.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Federal health officials posted a warning about misleading statements made by biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who recently told podcast listeners that his company's bladder cancer drug may be able to treat, cure, or even prevent other types of cancers.

The warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) takes issue with a TV advertisement and a separate podcast episode promoting Anktiva, the lead product of ImmunityBio Inc. The drugmaker is one of several biotech firms acquired by Soon-Shiong, who also owns the Los Angeles Times.

Anktiva was approved by the FDA in 2024 for patients with a hard-to-treat form of bladder cancer. ImmunityBio has been working to win FDA approval to expand the drug's use to a number of other conditions, including forms of lung and pancreatic cancer.

Soon-Shiong's controversial statements came during a January episode of The Sean Spicer Show podcast titled Is the FDA blocking life-saving cancer treatments? At one point during the interview, Soon-Shiong described his company's drug as the most important molecule that could cure cancer. A few minutes later, Soon-Shiong—who is the company's executive chairman and chief medical officer—said that while the drug is approved for bladder cancer, it actually can treat all cancers.

Later in the episode, he said, We have the therapy to prevent cancer if you were exposed to radiation, and that's Anktiva.

FDA regulators said the statements violate federal drug marketing rules because they create a misleading impression of the drug.

Regulators also noted that the podcast didn't contain any information about risks and side effects of the drug, which can include urinary tract infections, pain, chills, and pyrexia. Under FDA law, drug promotions are required to give a balanced view of a drug's risks and benefits.

The FDA warning, addressed to ImmunityBio CEO Richard Adcock, raises similar concerns with a TV advertisement for Anktiva. Both the ad and the podcast refer to the company's drug as a cancer vaccine, which the FDA said is false.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.