[CNN10で英語学習！] 米国と日本の防衛関連強化 他 [10分動画]

What's up friends, I'm Coy here in Arizona where Yukon was crowned NCAA champions in men's basketball. So congratulations to the Huskies and we have to give a huge shout out to South Carolina who rocked it out in the women's tournament. Rise up! Today is Hash Your Word Wednesday, so listen to see if your VOC word made it into the show.

First up, we start in our nation's capital Washington DC where President Joe Biden is prepping for an important meeting with the leader of Japan, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. The main issue on the agenda is strengthening the military alliance between the US and Japan. Japan is widely considered the most important ally for the US in Asia. The US has military bases all over Japan and coming out of this summit, the US and Japan will change some rules that Biden and Kishida say will help the two countries work together better. Japan and the US are also discussing how to better design and possibly produce military and defense hardware together.

Why do the countries want to strengthen their bond? Well, they face many of the same threats, chief amongst them China. The US and Japan say they're concerned about China and Russia recently strengthening their relationship and that China has expanded its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region which could potentially endanger Taiwan. You may remember last week we talked about how China says it owns Taiwan but Taiwan sees itself as independent. That has caused tension in the region and Taiwan is only 62 miles from Japan's southern coast. North Korea's nuclear arsenal, the war in Ukraine, and the war in Gaza are also major concerns for both countries.

The world is at a historic turning point, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida tells me ahead of his summit with US President Joe Biden this week. The longtime partners will upgrade their defense relationship to the next level in the backdrop of mounting international security challenges. In our neighborhood, there are countries that are developing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons and others that are building up their defense capabilities in an opaque way. Also, there is a unilateral attempt to change the status quo by force in both the East China Sea and South China Sea. Kishida says soaring geopolitical tensions force Japan, long a pacifist country, to change its defense posture—moves not seen since World War II. Under his leadership, Japan plans to boost its defense spending to 2% of its GDP by 2026 and purchase weapons including US-made Tomahawk cruise missiles, acquiring counterstrike capabilities for the first time in decades.

So if Japan has a security pact with the United States, why does it need counterstrike capabilities? Missile-related technology is evolving year by year. As missiles become more sophisticated, Japan must constantly consider what kind of technology is needed to protect the lives and livelihood of its citizens. Following the US-Japan summit, the two nations will convene with the Philippines for the first trilateral meeting of its kind to address rising security threats from North Korea weapons testing and aggression in the South China Sea. The US and Japan, an enduring bond, confronts its pivotal moment as a volatile world seeks to unravel their global sway.

Hano Mger, CNN Tokyo.

10-second trivia: Which one of these categories is considered a worst-case scenario when it comes to hurricanes? Category 3, category 1, category 5, or category 4? Correct answer is category 5. Meteorologists use a scale called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to classify hurricanes into categories 1 through 5. Categories 3 to 5 are considered major hurricanes, but a category 5 is catastrophic.

Next up, this coming hurricane season may be less than ideal. That's according to Colorado State University. The school has been putting out yearly forecasts since 1995 and they say this year they're predicting more hurricanes and major storms than ever coming out of the Atlantic Ocean. The university says that from June through November, there could be 23 big storms including 11 hurricanes and five Category 3 or major hurricanes. These storms are likely to hit the eastern part of the US and the Caribbean. In the typical season, there are 14 big storms including seven hurricanes. A big reason for more hurricanes this year is a weather phenomenon known as La Niña which basically means that the temperature of the surface water is cooler than normal in a particular area and certain wind patterns are stronger in that same area. Unfortunately, that combination creates the ideal conditions for some major storms.

Well indeed, our water temperatures here in the Atlantic are 3 to 5 degrees warmer than they should be at this time of year, indicative of really late April, not early April. And so our hurricane season will likely start earlier than usual, a more active season. Changing to La Niña, and I'll tell you what that means in a second. And obviously the warm ocean temperatures from the record-breaking year of 2023 globally. So Colorado State predicts 23 storms with names, 11 hurricanes, and 5 major hurricanes. Last year, they predicted 13 storms, 6 hurricanes, and 2 major hurricanes, but it turned out to be 20 storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes. So they're not overestimating in April, just in case. What they see is what they get here in the warm temperatures with an early start, maybe a late end. That's how we get to these numbers. Landfall anywhere across the US is never a certainty and even this year, with all of those storms in the water, we're still only about 63% on average right now compared to what we should be in the 40s for any landfall hurricane for any given season. Of course, across the Gulf Coast here too, a 42% chance of something in the Gulf getting to major category. That doesn't mean that storms aren't going to landfall, that just means some major storms making landfall there.

So what does La Niña do? Well, kind of the opposite of what El Niño did last year. El Niño made a lot of disturbances here, a lot of what we call shear in the atmosphere. Well now, the jet stream's going to be farther to the north and that means that there's going to be less shear. Less shear down here means the storms aren't going to be torn apart. If you have storms that aren't torn apart, you're going to get more storms to continue and so therefore more storms forming and more storms moving up toward the west.

For our next story, we're talking cameras. They're everywhere—they're on our phones, on our tablets, in our cars, on street corners. It's like there's some Machiavellian plan out there to capture our every single move. And now we have the camera the size of a car. That's right, the biggest digital camera ever. It's called the LSST camera. It has 3 billion pixels, a 5-foot wide optical lens, and it took scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab nearly two decades to build it. The camera will be installed at an observatory in Chile where it will take a series of photos of the southern skies. Each photo will take 15 seconds to snap. That may sound like a long time to take one photo, but it's the best way to make sure the camera is capturing as much detailed information in the deep dark solar system as possible. Then every three days, scientists will take all those photos and stitch them together to make a huge detailed image. Over the course of 10 years, the camera will generate over 1,000 of these large detailed photos of the sky. Scientists will then analyze and compare these images to understand how our galaxy was formed, how the universe is expanding, and what exactly is dark matter, which is a substance that scientists believe exists in outer space but don't know for sure.

Today’s story getting a 10 out of 10. We go from photos of the sky to the animals that occupy it—birds. Well, in this case, parrots. Researchers have been studying how parrots interact with touchscreens. The reason? They may want to develop apps to entertain them. You see, parrots are very smart creatures and the concern is that if you keep them cooped up as pets, they could get bored. So what do people like to do if they get bored? Games. Apps. This is all coming from a recent paper written by researchers at Northeastern University's Interact Animal Lab and the University of Glasgow's Animal Computer Interaction Lab. So if you get a Snapchat from Polly who wants a cracker, you'll know why.

Alright Superstars, congrats to Mr. Ross Val's class at Weston Middle in Weston, Connecticut for submitting our vocab word of the day, "Machiavellian," an adjective meaning to be cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous. Great job explorers and thanks for watching our show every day. For today's shout out, we are showing some love to Forest Park Middle School in Franklin, Wisconsin. Wildcats rise up! And how about a shout out to Ida B. Wells Middle School in Washington DC. We see you wolves. Have an awesome day everyone and I'll see you right back here tomorrow on the [Music] 10.