今年最後の英語！See you next year!で終了。英語の勉強というか娯楽と感じているから続けられていると思う。来年も土曜の朝のお楽しみにします！
1) What better way to spend Christmas than eating fried chicken and strawberry shortcake? While it may not be exactly traditional from a Westerner’s point of view, that’s the way they do it in Japan, especially if the chicken is from good ol’ American fast food restaurant, Kentucky Fried Chicken. With it being tradition to eat KFC on Christmas, it’s no wonder that KFC Japan’s sales between December 23 and 25 are calculated to be over 6 billion yen.
2) The New Year holiday exodus from Tokyo and other cities began on Friday, with vacationers crowding train stations, airports and expressways.
Travel agents and airlines said about 880,000 people are estimated to depart and return to Japan by plane between Friday and Jan 3. Travel agents said the most popular destinations this year are Hawaii, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Cebu in the Philippines.
3) Yamato Transport Co, Japan’s largest package delivery company, plans to open a new distribution facility with labor-saving technology near Tokyo early next year, its chief executive says.
The move comes amid widening labor shortage and a surge in parcel volumes because of the country’s growing use of e-commerce retailers such as Amazon.com Inc.
The Bank of Japan’s quarterly survey on Friday showed Japanese companies were faced with the most severe staff shortages since 1992.
“It’s especially difficult to find workers in big cities. The labor shortage got more severe in December,” Yamato Transport CEO Yutaka Nagao said in an interview.
4) Authorities are trying to crack down on “shirotaku” taxis, the relatively cheap but illegal and potentially dangerous services that have grown in popularity among tourists from overseas.
Many of these unlicensed taxis are found in and around tourist destinations and airports across Japan.
Tourists can easily book shirotaku through apps on their smartphones in Chinese and other languages..
5) U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday made light of climate change science as an Arctic chill settled on much of the central and northeastern United States and Canada, forcing people indoors, stranding motorists with dead car batteries and complicating firefighting duties.
“In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record,” Trump tweeted from his Mar a Lago resort in Florida, where he is on holiday vacation.
“Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”
6) Japanese authorities on Thursday indicted the North Korean captain of a boat that drifted to its coast on charges of stealing a generator, appliances and other equipment from an uninhabited island, officials and media reports said.
The captain and his nine crewmembers on the dilapidated boat were rescued near a tiny island off of Hokkaido, northern Japan, in late November. Japanese police said they arrested the captain and two crewmembers earlier this month on suspicion they stole a generator and appliances from a barn on the island.
7) A report by a British research firm predicts a growing dominance of Asian nations in the global economy in 15 years, with China becoming the world’s largest economy.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research on Tuesday released a report on the global economic outlook for the next 15 years.
The report says that by 2032, China is likely to overtake the United States in the size of gross domestic product. At present, the US is the largest economy while China is ranked second.
8) Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has said she plans to start mass production of surveillance drones as Chinese military jets become more active in the region.
Tsai unveiled the plan in a year-end news conference at a military facility on Friday.
Tsai pointed to the recent surge in Chinese jets flying around the island. She said China’s ambition to expand militarily in East Asia is becoming more apparent.
9) The South Korean Navy started a 2-day maritime drill around the Takeshima Islands in the Sea of Japan on Thursday.
Japan lodged a strong protest, as it claims territorial sovereignty over the islands.
10) A decision by Japan to deploy a U.S. missile defense system will damage Moscow’s relations with Tokyo and is a breach by Washington of a landmark arms control treaty, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.
Japan formally decided this month it would expand its ballistic missile defense system with U.S.-made ground-based Aegis radar stations and interceptors in response to a growing threat from North Korean rockets.
Dec 29th, 2017