ポッドキャスト Ireland

If you believe the locals, then Galway is the beating heart of Irish culture. You can’t go far without tripping over a castle or abbey, and parts of the city have strong Latin and Spanish influences.Start with a relaxing stroll round the medieval Latin Quarter. It’s full of charming shops selling arts and crafts. You can look for traditional knitwe…

In this month’s column we look again at common idioms from the animal kingdom.Guinea pigs are very cute pets, and have also often been used in laboratory tests and experiments. Someone may also be called a “guinea pig” if they are a test subject for something new. “We have a new English examination, and this year’s students will be the guinea pigs.…

A robot’s gaze can affect the human brainIt has long been known that making eye contact with a robot can be an unsettling experience. Scientists even have a name for the queasy feeling: the “uncanny valley.” Now, thanks to researchers, we also know it’s more than just a feeling.A team at the Istituto Italiano Di Tecnologia in Genoa has shown how a …

Human rights groups urge broadcasters to not cover Beijing Winter OlympicsHuman rights groups have asked television broadcasters to not cover next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing. The Winter Games are set to open on Feb. 4.The human rights groups — representing minorities in China including Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hong Kong residents — signed an op…

BTS make music video at United NationsFully vaccinated South Korean band BTS danced for the United Nations in a Sept. 20 broadcast promoting global goals tackling poverty, inequality, injustice and climate change ahead of the annual U.N. gathering of world leaders.The seven-member group filmed a music video to its song Permission to Dance in the wo…

The countries of the world are quite different! Each nation has its own values, attitudes and customs. One famous story that illustrates these differences is the “sinking ship” joke. Here’s how it goes.An international cruise ship was sailing across the ocean. Suddenly, it struck an iceberg and began to sink. The captain put the women and children …

Hundreds of birds migrating through New York City over the week from Sept. 13 died after crashing into the city’s glass towers, a mass casualty event spotlighted by a New York City Audubon volunteer’s tweets showing the World Trade Center littered with bird carcasses.The week’s avian death toll was particularly high, but bird strikes on Manhattan s…

Continued from Part 1… Though she never had the opportunity to study English abroad, she did go on an exchange program to Nantes, France, during high school. When she returned, she says she sometimes felt closer to French than English.“I would hear someone talking on the street in French and I could understand it almost like I was hearing Japanese.…

Michiyo Kagami is an English-speaking daikagura performer who also gives lectures on the traditional performing art.“So much of daikagura is rooted in traditional Japanese culture. The art goes back 1,300 years. I’m always pondering how best to explain concepts like medetai and goen to non-Japanese audiences.”She talks about the time she explained …

You’re probably asking yourself: What’s all the fuss about TikTok? Should I try it? If you like short fun videos that open the window into a diverse world of talent, then yes — absolutely.TikTok is where many memes are born and — within days or even hours — die. It’s impossible to remember them all. They come from music videos, politics, sports, TV…

Classic 1992 film The Bodyguard to get a Hollywood remake, but few details so farThe Bodyguard, the 1992 movie that launched the acting career of the late Whitney Houston and featured her most famous song, is getting a reboot.Hollywood movie studio Warner Bros. said that a reimagining of the romantic thriller is in development with a script penned …

An employee cost a New York county at least $6,000 (¥660,000) in electricity bills by allegedly secretly installing dozens of machines at his workplace in a cryptocurrency scheme, authorities said Sept. 8, announcing charges against him.Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy Sini said Christopher Naples, who worked in the county clerk’s office as…

Three Japanese were named in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2021. For one of them, it was her third time on the annual list.The Time 100 was revealed on Sept. 15. Time separated its list of 100 people into categories: icons, pioneers, titans, artists, leaders and innovators.Tennis star Naomi Osaka appeared on the list fo…

Continued from Part 1… We take so many photos in our day-to-day lives that it’s easy to forget how valuable each picture used to be. A century ago, getting a single portrait was an event. Even as recently as the 1990s, photos came at a premium, with film rolls limiting you to a couple dozen pictures that took time and money to have developed. Now, …

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the value I place on certain items.For example, if my house were to go up in flames, which items would I try to save?Let’s pretend that each item weighs the same and is easy to carry, but that I can pick only one thing to bring with me.Would it be something that brings me joy, like the snowboard I bought just l…

France plunged into an unprecedented diplomatic crisis with the United States and Australia on Sept. 17 after it recalled its ambassadors from both countries over a trilateral security deal that sank a French-designed submarine contract with Canberra.The rare decision taken by French President Emmanuel Macron was made due to the “exceptional gravit…

A Michigan man made a striking discovery under his house when he went to demolish his back stairs: about 160 bowling balls.David Olson, 33, said he found one ball buried in the sand behind cinder blocks in July and continued finding more over the following days.“I was actually a little happy about that because it’s a little easier to roll bowling b…

Lots of people have stories about being best friends with dogs, cats, horses, dolphins and other mammals. But in Coventry, England, 13-year-old Lacey Shillinglaw got to be best mates with a bumblebee, and her story is putting huge smiles on people’s faces.Lacey was walking her dog in August when she spotted a large bumblebee lying on the road. The …

Germany’s central bank says it has been inundated with damaged bank notes after deadly floods that hit part of the country in July. The notes are worth more than €50 million (¥6.1 billion), the bank said.The Bundesbank said Sept. 1 that individuals and banks have handed in notes that were soaked in the floods and often also contaminated with oil, s…

Britain’s Emma Raducanu completed a Grand Slam fairy tale Sept. 11 by beating Canadian Leylah Fernandez 6-4, 6-3 in a clash of the teens to be crowned U.S. Open champion.The 18-year-old became the first qualifier to win a Grand Slam title and the first British woman to hoist a major trophy since Virginia Wade triumphed at Wimbledon in 1977.“It’s an…

Continued from Part 1…Line has also striven to become a fully comprehensive social network. As early as 2012, it introduced its Home and Timeline features, similar to features in Facebook. Other profitable services include Line Manga and Line Play, a platform for mobile games like 2014’s monumentally successful Disney Tsum Tsum. And Line Pay remain…

The Line messaging application has been a mainstay during the pandemic. Thousands of businesses, local governments and individuals across Japan use it to keep the public informed. Fittingly, it was developed in response to another national emergency: the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 2011.When telecommunications were disrupted af…

When the U.S. withdrew its military from Afghanistan, it tried to evacuate as many American and Afghan civilians as it could — more than 123,000, by one count. Where will they go?It makes sense to think they will go to neighboring countries like Pakistan and Iran. But those two countries took in massive numbers of Afghans last year — 1.45 million a…

Diabetes surges among US youths: studyThe number of young people with the most prevalent form of diabetes nearly doubled in the U.S. from 2001 to 2017, according to a study published on Aug. 24.The findings showed that the rate of young people ages 10 to 19 with type 2 diabetes increased by 95% over the 16-year period. The estimated rate of youths …

Many people worry that smartphones are taking over our lives. They stop us from focusing on more important things.One answer is to use a simple phone; we looked at that in the column here in August. But why not try an app instead? There are many of these “focus apps,” and they all aim to stop you from constantly checking your phone.The apps are mos…

You never know when the best friend you could ever hope to have will suddenly appear in your life and change it forever. That was what happened to Ohio Sheriff Dan McClelland when he picked out a puppy to train as a drug sniffer. From day one the pair were inseparable, bonded as much by love as mutual respect.McClelland named his little dog “Midge.…

President Tsai Ing-wen got vaccinated with Taiwan’s first domestically developed COVID-19 vaccine on Aug. 23, giving it her stamp of approval as the island begins rolling out the shot, even as critics say its approval has been rushed.The health ministry approved the emergency use of Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corp.’s COVID-19 vaccine in July, part o…

Continued from Part 1…A lot of trust is involved since Audrey pays for everyone first. Also, her neighbours collect the eggs on their own. So far, no one has taken more eggs than they’ve ordered. Only once did someone say that the large eggs she’d ordered were nowhere to be seen. A quick message in the group chat cleared things up. Another neighbor…

Once every fortnight, my friend Audrey has at least a few hundred eggs delivered to her doorstep. They sit neatly in trays, arranged according to weight and type. As you may have guessed, not all of them are for her family. After checking that the order has been correctly filled, she snaps a picture and sends it off with a text message: “Eggs are r…

An Australian farmer couldn’t go to his aunt’s funeral in late August because of pandemic restrictions, so he paid his respects with a novel alternative: dozens of sheep arranged in the shape of a love heart.Drone-shot video of pregnant ewes munching barley in a paddock while unwittingly expressing Ben Jackson’s affection for his beloved Auntie Deb…

At the turn of the 20th century, cars were made almost completely by hand and were very expensive. But two Americans — Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford — brought the car to ordinary people.Olds was the inventor of the Oldsmobile. He thought he could make cars cheaper by building them faster. The way to do this was through mass production.Instead of bu…

Barbie celebrates Elvis Presley with doll dressed in famous jumpsuitBarbie is celebrating the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley, with a collectible doll.The female doll made by Mattel Inc. is dressed in Presley's “American Eagle” jumpsuit, which features colorful rhinestones, a cape and a red scarf. Presley wore the jumpsuit during numerous conc…

As the world scrambles to inoculate people against COVID-19, one store owner in Malaysia is finding his paper vaccines have become popular.Raymond Shieh Siow Leong sells religious goods at his shop in the southern Malaysian city of Johor Bahru. This year, one of his fastest-selling items is a box set with a syringe and two vaccine vials made of pap…

Helaina Alati was browsing the spice aisle of an Australian supermarket when she came face to face with a huge snake.The head of the 3-meter-long nonvenomous diamond python emerged through a space in a shelf above the spice jars in the Sydney store.“I was in the spice aisle just looking for something to put on my chicken that night, so I didn’t ini…

Continued from Part 1…I was fortunate in that I had the opportunity to take my education all the way to college. But I would be lying if I said there was any kind of planning going on for my future. I lived day to day, concerned with grades, tuition and the many challenges facing me: peer pressure, changes in my body and the problems that face ever…

I certainly had no idea that my life would turn out as it did. I look at others and often wonder how they arrived at what they do in life — the whys of who they are. How did this man become a ditch digger while that one is a baker, a salesman or a brain surgeon?Opportunity must play a role, as well as privilege and education, but is that the whole …

Fossil of crocodile’s ‘grandfather’ discoveredA 150-million-year-old fossilized skeleton discovered in the mountains of southern Chile was likely the ancestor of the modern crocodile, the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences announced on July 23.The species, named Burkesuchus mallingrandensis, was found in 2014 in an Andean fossil deposit near the …

Rescuers in boats, helicopters and high-water trucks brought hundreds of people trapped by Hurricane Ida’s floodwaters to safety Aug. 30, and utility repair crews rushed in after the furious storm swamped the Louisiana coast and ravaged the electrical grid in the stifling, late-summer heat.Residents living amid the maze of rivers and bayous along t…

The colorful tins piled high around Belgian collector Yvette Dardenne used to contain goods ranging from chocolates, toffees, coffee and rice to tobacco, talc and shoe polish. They come from as far away as India.The 83-year-old has accumulated almost 60,000 vintage tin boxes from all over the world since starting her collection some 30 years ago.Th…

U.S. President Joe Biden said Aug. 14 that he had approved additional military forces to go to Kabul to help safely draw down the American Embassy and remove personnel from Afghanistan.In a lengthy statement, Biden defended his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, arguing that Afghan forces had to fight back against Taliban fighters s…

The old saying “better late than never” took on new meaning when Keith Farrow, the reverend canon of Sheffield Cathedral in northern England, told an amazing story to UPI News.The story was about a little library book titled The Faith and Practice of a Church of England Man, printed in 1704, that had been returned to Sheffield Cathedral after havin…

Continued from Part 1… In response to changing demands, Tinder announced new tools last month that will allow users to get to know people better online. People will now be able to add videos to their profile and chat with others even before matching with them.“Historically, consumers were reluctant to connect via video because they didn’t see the n…

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, Jennifer Sherlock went out with a few men she met through dating apps. The dates were “weird,” she said, and not just because they were masked, socially distanced and outdoors.On one occasion, a date remained masked while they were out for a stroll, but soon after invited her back to his place, a move Sherlock saw…

A 4,600-year-old boat in Egypt now has a new home in Giza. King Khufu’s Boat was exhibited for decades at a museum in Giza Plateau. But on Aug. 7, the boat —sometimes called the Solar Boat — was moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM.It took 48 hours to move the vessel, according to Atef Moftah, supervisor general of the GEM project. It is 42 m…

Meet “Delta Robot.” It’s built out of household items like pots, pans and an old television monitor. And it’s bringing a smile to COVID-19 patients in a village in Indonesia.The homemade robot was put together by scientists and villagers in Tembok Gede. It has a rice cooker for a head, and is operated by remote control.“With this new delta variant …

The Taliban swept into Afghanistan’s capital Aug. 15 after the government collapsed and the embattled president joined an exodus of his fellow citizens and foreigners, signaling the end of a costly two-decade U.S. campaign to remake the country.Heavily armed Taliban fighters fanned out across Kabul, and several entered its abandoned presidential pa…

Temperatures in the mid- to high-30s. Air so humid it felt like a sauna. For many athletes, the Tokyo Olympics were a slog.So why did they hold the games in the middle of Tokyo’s blazing hot summer? Why not October?That’s what organizers did for the 1964 Games in Tokyo. The 1968 Games in Mexico City and the 1988 Games in Seoul were also held after …

Want to find your inner Matt Damon and spend a year pretending you are isolated on Mars? NASA has a job for you.To prepare for eventually sending astronauts to Mars, NASA began taking applications Aug. 6 for four people to live for a year in Mars Dune Alpha. That’s a 158-square-meter Martian habitat, created by a 3D printer and housed inside a buil…

Continued from Part 1…White elephants are rare albino elephants that are seen as sacred and venerated in parts of South Asia. White elephants were sometimes kept by kings and queens to show their power and influence. However, they were very expensive to look after, and could be a burden on their owners. In modern usage, a “white elephant” usually r…

This month we will look at some common English idioms that use color to express an idea or feeling.Some people say that lying is always wrong. However, there are “white lies,” which may be harmless or intended to protect someone’s feelings. The phrase is thought to come from Christian culture, which links white to purity. Imagine your grandmother s…