第2页：LRC同步字幕
[by:www.tingvoa.com - VOA英语网]
[00:00.00]如果你喜欢voa英语网(www.tingvoa.com)，请介绍给更多的同学哦
[00:10.08]Hey, thanks for watching this Wednesday.
[00:13.14]I'm Carl Azuz for CNN STUDENT NEWS.
[00:15.06]Yesterday, we told you about the sudden of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
[00:21.32]and said there was a political battle brewing over his replacement.
[00:23.54]Today, we're explaining why.
[00:25.21]First, the Constitution.
[00:26.98]It says the president nominates justices to the Supreme Court with the advice and consent of the Senate.
[00:33.10]What that means is that the Senate has the power to confirm or reject whoever the president nominates.
[00:39.46]Now, the plot thickens.
[00:40.99]The president is a Democrat.
[00:42.68]The Senate is controlled by Republicans.
[00:45.01]And while the president and congressional Democrats want Scalia successor nominated and confirmed this year,
[00:51.45]Republicans want to wait until after a new president is sworn in to move forward with Supreme Court nominees.
[00:57.86]Why this tension? There's a political split in the Supreme Court.
[01:01.87]Until Justice Scalia's death, five of the high court's members were nominated by Republican presidents,
[01:08.21]four were nominated by Democratic presidents.
[01:10.76]Now, though, the court is split four to four.
[01:14.04]So, the new justice could dramatically impact the cases that divide the court.
[01:18.87](BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
[01:19.47]JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, serve for life.
[01:26.07]That's why presidents regard these judicial appointments as such an important way to extend their own legacies.
[01:35.75]The Constitution does not set out a resume that a Supreme Court has to have.
[01:42.04]There's no requirement in the Constitution that a Supreme Court justice even be a lawyer.
[01:46.46]But traditionally, presidents have nominated impeccably qualified sitting judges.
[01:52.47]Both presidents and senators like to say that the confirmation process is all about qualifications.
[01:59.90]But it's really also about politics.
[02:02.06]Virtually, every important issue in American politics and even American life
[02:10.37]winds up in front of the Supreme Court, and they have the last word.
[02:14.15]Both the president and the senators trying to figure out how the nominee's stance
[02:20.76] on the hot-button issues that the Supreme Court
[02:22.19]deals with and that's why the senators will vote yes or not.
[02:26.04]There is no law that says a president can't nominate someone to the Supreme Court in his last year in office.
[02:34.41]The Senate on the other hand can run out the clock when they don't want a president to fill that seat.
[02:40.12]The Supreme Court is designed to operate with nine justices.
[02:43.60]What makes Justice Scalia's death so unusual in Supreme Court history
[02:48.36] is that most justices announce that they plan to retire and then a president nominates their successor.
[02:55.66]So, there is no vacancy at any point in the Supreme Court.
[03:00.19]With eight justices,
[03:01.70]there are possibilities for tie votes, which can create a significant amount of confusion in the law.
[03:07.56](END VIDEOTAPE)
[03:08.06](BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
[03:08.61]SUBTITLE: What is OPEC?
[03:12.20]NINA DOS SANTOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Whenever you hear about oil, the word OPEC isn't far behind.
[03:14.31]OPEC stands for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
[03:18.53]It's a group of 12 nations that have a lot of (INAUDIBLE) in the energy market
[03:22.41]because they produce about one third of the world's total oil and export it around the globe.
[03:28.44]That's about 30 million of barrels of oil every single day.
[03:30.46]It was formed in 1960.
[03:30.98]The goal: to coordinate oil production to insure that members are pumping enough supply to meet demand.
[03:38.29]If all 12 countries play by the rules, it can help to regulate and stabilize global oil prices.
[03:44.47]But there were also plenty of major oil-producing nations that are not part of the OPEC club,
[03:48.95] including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Russia.
[03:52.87]And they don't attend OPEC meetings, and as such, they're not bound by the decisions.
[03:56.68]And as these nations have increased their production over the past few years,
[04:00.50] OPEC's influence in the market has plunged.
[04:02.81]There's now an excess of oil supply, which has pushed down prices significantly.
[04:07.50]The price drop has caused political problems in some OPEC countries
[04:10.78]that rely on oil sales heavily to fund their governments.
[04:13.91](END VIDEOTAPE)
[04:14.29]AZUZ: OPEC does not want to lose that influence.
[04:17.34]That's partly why it continues producing oil at a record rate even as global oil prices stay very low.
[04:24.14]Yesterday, there was a meeting between OPEC member Saudi Arabia and non-member Russia.
[04:30.12]They were looking at ways to work together to help reduce the world's oversupply of crude oil and raise the price of it.
[04:36.15]The agreement they reached was to freeze their oil production levels where they are, not increase them, not decrease them.
[04:43.61]And because that's not expected to have much impact on the world's oil supply, international prices dropped again yesterday.
[04:50.68](MUSIC)
[04:51.73]AZUZ: The one and only place our producers look for your "Roll Call" requests,
[04:57.93] each day's transcript page at CNNStudentNews.com.
[05:01.12]On yesterday's transcript, we heard from the Tigers.
[05:03.71]The Mitchell Junior/Senior High School Tigers, they're in Mitchell, Nebraska.
[05:09.29]And the Bobcats are here, too.
[05:10.45]Sahuarita Intermediate School is watching.
[05:12.88]You find it in Sahuarita, Arizona.
[05:15.40]And from Germany, we welcome our friends at Netzaberg Middle School.
[05:19.76]That's in the community of Netzaberg.
[05:21.22]The British Airline Pilots Association says laser pointers should be classified as offensive weapons.
[05:27.85]Why?
[05:28.96]On a flight from London to New York earlier this week,
[05:32.31]a laser pointer was aimed a Virgin Atlantic passenger plane.
[05:35.37]A pilot said he wasn't feeling well afterward and the plane returned to the U.K.
[05:39.42]No serious injuries were reported.
[05:41.73]But a British Airways pilot did have his eyesight damage last year
[05:46.16] when a military strength laser shined into the cockpit of his plane.
[05:50.54]It's a problem that's increasing in the U.S.
