レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

U.S. airlines began canceling hundreds of flights on November 6 due to the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) order to reduce traffic at the country's busiest airports starting on November 7 because of the government shutdown.

More than 790 planned November 7 flights were cut from airline schedules, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight disruptions. That number, already four times higher than November 6’s daily total, was likely to keep climbing.

The 40 airports selected by the FAA spanned more than two dozen states and included hubs such as Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, and Charlotte, North Carolina, according to the agency's order. In some metropolitan areas, including New York, Houston, Chicago, and Washington, multiple airports were impacted.

The FAA said in the order that the reductions were to begin on November 7 at 4% and ramp up to 10% by November 14. They were in effect between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. local time and impacted all commercial airlines.

The decision to reduce service at high-volume markets was meant to maintain travel safety as air traffic controllers exhibited signs of strain during the shutdown. It also came as the Trump administration continued to ramp up pressure on Democrats in Congress to end the shutdown.

With continued delays and unpredictable staffing shortages, which are driving fatigue, risk is further increasing, and the FAA is concerned with the system's ability to maintain the current volume of operations, the order read.

Hours before the reductions went into place, airlines were scrambling to figure out where to cut. American Airlines said it reduced its schedule at the listed airports by 4% from November 7 through November 10, about 220 cancellations each day, and planned to move from there toward the 10% target. The carrier said its international schedule was expected to remain untouched.

Passengers with plans for the weekend and beyond waited nervously to see if their flights would take off as scheduled. Some travelers began changing or canceling itineraries preemptively.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

A robotic food truck is cooking up fresh Korean stir-fries without the need for a human chef. At the crossroads of robotics and restaurants, one Silicon Valley startup says it’s serving up the future. It's a new kind of food truck hitting the road that might change the way we think about food delivery. In a world where delivery robots are dropping off food, Kish Shin is flipping the script.

Kish Shin, CEO co-founder of Shin Starr Presents, says, We thought we wanted to disrupt and enhance the food delivery service market by a food truck that is able to cook food autonomously whilst in driving conditions.

Inside the truck, the magic happens through a system called Autowok, a modular, AI-powered robot that automates cooking, serving, and even cleaning. Once a human preps the ingredients and stocks the truck, the robot takes over from there. Shin says, So the value of the truck is it's able to provide freshly cooked food, which is obviously more tasty, better quality food because it's freshly cooked.

As the truck drives to your location, the system retrieves ingredients and drops them into a heated, rotating canister, like a high-tech wok. The Autowok fires into life, and hot meals are stir-fried en route. Once the food is finished, the Autowok dispenses the finished food into the bowl, and the bowl is passed on to the driving section, says Shin.

What's more, the robot is even able to clean itself—so no more laborious pot-washing. Shin says, The Autowok is able to clean itself, to, I want to say, a perfect clean condition.

Shin Starr also envisions someday partnering with an autonomous vehicle company. We're definitely very open to working closely with the likes of delivery bots, as well as driverless trucks, so in which case our next generation trucks wouldn't even require a human driver, he says.

The company isn’t stopping at food trucks. Shin Starr is preparing to open its first micro restaurant inside a California airport, a fully automated kitchen that serves guests 24/7.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Indian authorities carried out a cloud-seeding experiment over smog-choked New Delhi in an attempt to induce rainfall and clear the city’s toxic air, which has sparked anger among residents.

A plane sprayed chemicals into clouds over some areas of the Indian capital to encourage rain and wash pollutants from the air, which remained in the “very poor” category, according to air quality monitors.

Cloud seeding—a weather modification method that releases chemicals into clouds to trigger rain—has been used in drought-prone regions, such as the western United States and the United Arab Emirates, though experts say its effectiveness remains uncertain.

Delhi Minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa said that the trial was done in collaboration with the government’s Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, with more planned in the coming days.

He said that authorities were expecting a brief spell of rainfall in some parts of the city in the following hours.

Auto-rickshaw driver and Delhi resident Munna Lal was skeptical. “What difference will it make if it rains one day? It won't make that much of a difference, he said. But yes, at least the dust and pollutants will be suppressed for the time being. New Delhi and its surrounding region, home to more than 30 million people, routinely rank among the world’s most polluted.

India has six of the 10 most polluted cities globally, and New Delhi is the most polluted capital, according to a report from Switzerland-based air quality monitoring database IQAir earlier this year.

Air quality worsens in New Delhi every winter as farmers burn crop residue in nearby states and cooler temperatures trap the smoke, which mixes with vehicle and industrial emissions.

Pollution levels often reach 20 times higher than the World Health Organization’s safe limit.

Authorities have imposed construction bans, restricted diesel generators, and deployed water sprinklers and anti-smog guns to control the haze.

However, critics say there needs to be a long-term solution that drastically reduces pollution itself, instead of actions that aim to mitigate the effects after it has already plagued the region.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The World Central Kitchen began distributing food to furloughed federal workers in Washington, D.C., during the government shutdown that started on October 1, 2025.

Founded by Chef José Andrés in 2010 after Haiti was hit by a catastrophic earthquake, the World Central Kitchen adheres to its mission of feeding those in need. Their global reach has led them to Gaza and Ukraine, but they also swoop in to help domestically, most recently deploying their efforts to Texas following fatal flooding that devastated the region in July.

Furloughed federal workers from across the nation's capital lined up to take food that the World Central Kitchen provided by teaming with local restaurants across the District of Columbia.

Elizabeth Anderson, a furloughed NASA employee, said it’s tough being a federal worker at this moment. “I'm thankful for the work that World Central Kitchen's doing, just to give us a little extra cushion for the furlough,” Anderson said.

Humberto Lopez, a furloughed federal worker with the Department of Defense, said he is starting to feel the financial squeeze of the shutdown. “It's starting to get real. You know, we just missed the paycheck, so definitely moving money around, playing money games, and you know you can't sustain this for much longer,” Lopez said.

Megan Fortier, a furloughed FEMA employee, said she was walking through the Navy Yard neighborhood when, by chance, she saw the food distribution tents. “It's just tough that the people who are supposed to be supporting us and showing up for us aren't showing up,” Fortier said.

The World Central Kitchen is distributing fresh food, fruit, and water, ranging from vegetarian to meat options to accommodate workers’ dietary restrictions.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Ever wondered what history smells like? Or ponder the odor of love, or the stench of medieval Paris, or the sacred fragrance of religion?

A new exhibition in Germany allows visitors to discover unknown worlds of smells by sniffing their way through 81 different fragrances across 37 different galleries.

The show The Secret Power of Scents, which opened to the public in October at the Kunstpalast museum in the western city of Düsseldorf, combines fragrances with art, taking visitors on a journey of more than 1,000 years of cultural history.

This exhibition is an experiment—and an invitation for our audience to discover the history of scents with their noses, said Felix Krämer, the museum's director general.

The exhibition follows a chronological order, from religious artifacts of the Middle Ages through to contemporary art of the 21st century. The various galleries are equipped with scent steles, atomizers, and diffusers to create a connection between the art and the smell of a specific time period or cultural context.

It's the first exhibition worldwide to bring scents into a museum in this form, format, and scale, said Robert Müller-Grünow, the show's curator and a leading expert in the field of scent and scent technology.

Certain smells connect to different eras of history. In a gallery dedicated to the Roaring 20s, the room is filled with the uplifting scent of tobacco, vanilla, and leather—a mixture that's a nod to famous early fragrances such as the historic Tabac Blond, which was launched by the fragrance house Caron in 1919.

Moving on to modern art, the museum presents more contemporary smells between works of Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, or Günther Uecker that remind visitors of world-famous brands such as Coca-Cola or German airline carrier Eurowings, which diffuses a pleasant and relaxing scent on the plane when passengers board.

For visitors strolling and sniffing their way through the show, the 81 different scents opened up a whole new world, visitor Kirsten Gnoth said.

“I’ve been to the collection here before, but now it’s completely new with scents that match the pictures and eras,” she said.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Citing a chronic shortage of financial backing for independent publishers and nonprofits dedicated to writing and reading, a coalition of seven charitable foundations has established a Literary Arts Fund that will distribute a minimum of $50 million over the next five years.

The idea for the fund was initiated by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the country's largest philanthropic supporter of the arts. Mellon President Elizabeth Alexander cited literature as a vital source of expression.

“Novelists, poets, and all manner of creative writers have shaped and driven our collective discourse and capacity for invention since the nation’s founding,” Alexander, an acclaimed poet who joined Mellon in 2018, said in a statement. “American philanthropy can and must play a bigger role in strengthening the financial infrastructure of the literary organizations and nonprofits that serve these literary artists.”

Author-bookseller Ann Patchett said in a statement that supporting “the future of literature is a cause for celebration.”

The other participants are the Ford Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, Lannan Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, and an anonymous foundation. The project will be overseen by Jennifer Benka, whose previous experience includes serving as executive director of the Academy of American Poets. The application process began on November 10.

During a telephone interview with The Associated Press, Alexander emphasized that the literary fund had been in the works well before the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities drastically cut back their support this year for virtually every art form. She referred to a 2023 study from the research organization Candid that found literary organizations and individuals were receiving less than 2% of some $5 billion in arts grants awarded in the U.S.

Parameters have not yet been established for the size of grants, but Alexander said support will likely extend across a wide range of recipients, from poetry festivals to writer residencies to small publishers.

“Support for literature goes a long way,” she said. “And language in its highest form is the best of humanity.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Character.AI is banning minors from using its chatbots amid growing concerns about the effects of artificial intelligence conversations on children. The company is facing several lawsuits over child safety.

Character Technologies, the Menlo Park, California-based company behind Character.AI, said it will be removing the ability of users under 18 to participate in open-ended chats with AI characters. The changes will go into effect by November 25, and a two-hour daily limit will start immediately. Character.AI added that it is working on new features for kids, such as the ability to create videos, stories, and streams with AI characters. The company is also setting up an AI safety lab.

Character.AI said it will be rolling out age-verification functions to help determine which users are under 18. A growing number of tech platforms are turning to age checks to keep children from accessing tools that aren't safe for them. But these are imperfect, and many kids find ways to get around them. Face scans, for instance, can't always tell if someone is 17 or 18. And there are privacy concerns around asking people to upload government IDs.

Character.AI, an app that allows users to create customizable characters or interact with those generated by others, spans experiences from imaginative play to mock job interviews. The company says the artificial personas are designed to “feel alive” and “humanlike.”

“Imagine speaking to super intelligent and lifelike chatbot characters that hear you, understand you, and remember you,” reads a description for the app on Google Play. “We encourage you to push the frontier of what’s possible with this innovative technology.”

Critics welcomed the move but said it is not enough, and should have been done earlier. Meetali Jain, executive director of the Tech Justice Law Project, said, “There are still a lot of details left open.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

One viral video shows what appears to be four sharks swimming in a Jamaican hotel's pool as floodwaters allegedly brought on by Hurricane Melissa swamp the area. Another purportedly depicts Jamaica's Kingston airport completely ravaged by the storm. But neither of these events happened; they’re just AI-generated misinformation circulating on social media as the storm churned across the Caribbean several weeks ago.

These videos and others have racked up millions of views on social media platforms, including X, TikTok, and Instagram. Some of the clips appear to be spliced together or based on footage of old disasters. Others appear to be created entirely by AI video generators.

I am in so many WhatsApp groups, and I see all of these videos coming. Many of them are fake, said Jamaica's Education Minister Dana Morris Dixon. And so we urge you to please listen to the official channels.

Although it's common for hoax photos, videos, and misinformation to surface during natural disasters, they're usually debunked quickly. But videos generated by new artificial intelligence tools have taken the problem to a new level by making it easy to create and spread realistic clips. In this case, the content has been showing up in social media feeds alongside genuine footage shot by local residents and news organizations, sowing confusion among social media users.

Experts noted that Hurricane Melissa is the first big natural disaster since OpenAI launched the latest version of its video generation tool Sora last September. Now, with the rise of easily accessible and powerful tools like Sora, it has become even easier for bad actors to create and distribute highly convincing synthetic videos, said Sofia Rubinson, a senior editor at NewsGuard, which analyzes online misinformation.

AI expert Henry Ajder said most of the hurricane deepfakes he's seen aren't inherently political. He suspects it's much closer to more traditional kind of click-based content, which is to try and get engagement, to try and get clicks.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The most widely used COVID-19 vaccines may offer a surprise benefit for some cancer patients—revving up their immune systems to help fight tumors. People with advanced lung or skin cancer who were taking certain immunotherapy drugs lived substantially longer if they also got a Pfizer or Moderna shot within 100 days of starting treatment, according to preliminary research reported in the journal Nature.

And it had nothing to do with virus infections. Instead, the molecule that powers those specific vaccines, mRNA, appears to help the immune system respond better to the cutting-edge cancer treatment, concluded researchers from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Florida.

The vaccine “acts like a siren to activate immune cells throughout the body,” said lead researcher Dr. Adam Grippin of MD Anderson.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has raised skepticism about mRNA vaccines, cutting $500 million in funding for some uses of the technology.

But this research team found its results so promising that it is preparing a more rigorous study to see if mRNA coronavirus vaccines should be paired with cancer drugs called checkpoint inhibitors—an interim step while it designs new mRNA vaccines for use in cancer.

A healthy immune system often kills cancer cells before they become a threat. But some tumors evolve to hide from immune attack. Checkpoint inhibitors remove that cloak. It's a powerful treatment—when it works. Some people’s immune cells still don’t recognize the tumor.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is naturally found in every cell, and it contains genetic instructions for our bodies to make proteins. While best known as the Nobel Prize-winning technology behind COVID-19 vaccines, scientists have long been trying to create personalized mRNA “treatment vaccines” that train immune cells to spot unique features of a patient's tumor.

Dr. Grippin and his Florida colleagues had been developing personalized mRNA cancer vaccines when they realized that even one created without a specific target appeared to spur similar immune activity against cancer.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

A decade after a landmark study proved that feeding peanut products to young babies could prevent the development of life-threatening allergies, new research finds the change has made a big difference in the real world.

About 60,000 children have avoided developing peanut allergies after guidance first issued in 2015 upended medical practice by recommending introducing the allergen to infants starting as early as 4 months.

“That’s a remarkable thing, right?” said Dr. David Hill, an allergist and researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and author of a study published in the medical journal Pediatrics. Hill and colleagues analyzed electronic health records from dozens of pediatric practices to track diagnoses of food allergies in young children before, during, and after the guidelines were issued.

The researchers found that peanut allergies in children ages 0 to 3 declined by more than 27% after guidance for high-risk kids was first issued in 2015 and by more than 40% after the recommendations were expanded in 2017.

The effort hasn't yet reduced the overall increase in food allergies in the U.S. in recent years. About 8% of children are affected, including more than 2% with a peanut allergy.

Peanut allergy is caused when the body’s immune system mistakenly identifies proteins in peanuts as harmful and releases chemicals that trigger allergic symptoms, including hives, respiratory symptoms, and, sometimes, life-threatening anaphylaxis.

For decades, doctors had recommended delaying feeding children peanuts and other foods likely to trigger allergies until age 3. But in 2015, Gideon Lack at King’s College London published the groundbreaking Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) trial.

Lack and colleagues showed that introducing peanut products in infancy reduced the future risk of developing food allergies by more than 80%. Later analysis showed that the protection persisted in about 70% of kids into adolescence.

Advocates for the 33 million people in the U.S. with food allergies welcomed signs that early introduction of peanut products is catching on.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.