 Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. This program is designed for English learners, so we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English. On today's program, I report on an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos can be considered children. Gregory Stockle has a story on a man who lived years for free in a famous New York City hotel. Dan Friedel and Katie Weaver have a story on 200 years of dinosaur research. For the everyday grammar lesson, John Russell reviews listener responses to the question of what is popular in their country. But first, the Supreme Court of Alabama has ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law. The ruling immediately influenced the way fertility treatment services operates in the southeastern U.S. state. On Wednesday, the University of Alabama Birmingham Hospital said it paused all fertility treatments while it considers the ruling's significance. The court decision involved two wrongful death cases brought by three couples who had frozen embryos destroyed in an accident at a fertility center. In their decision, the justices noted recent and long-standing parts of the Alabama Constitution. The justices ruled that in 1872 state law permitting parents to bring legal action over the death of a minor child applies to all unborn children regardless of their location. Unborn children are children without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other characteristics Justice J. Mitchell wrote. The High Court released the ruling on February 16. Mitchell said the court had ruled earlier that fetuses killed while a woman is pregnant are covered under Alabama's wrongful death of a minor act. Nothing excludes extrauterine children from the act's coverage, he wrote. The ruling is likely to influence fertility treatments and the activity of freezing of embryos, which are fertilized eggs. A court opinion in Virginia last year said that frozen embryos can be considered property. Barbara Calura is chief of Resolve, the National Infertility Association, a nonprofit group based in Virginia. Calura told the Associated Press that the ruling raises questions for in vitro fertilization, or IVF, the method of fertilizing eggs in a laboratory. She said the ruling is stating that a fertilized egg, which is a clump of cells, is now a person. It really puts into question the practice of IVF. The group called the Alabama High Court's decision terrifying for people affected by infertility. She said the ruling also raises questions for providers of IVF services and for patients. It is unclear whether they can freeze embryos created during fertility treatment, or if patients could ever donate or destroy unused embryos. Sean Tipton is a spokesman with the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. He said at least one Alabama Fertility Center was told to stop IVF treatments by the hospital overseeing it since the decision. Dr. Paula Amato is president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Washington, D.C. She said no health care provider will be willing to provide treatments if those treatments may lead to civil or criminal charges. The couples in the Alabama case had undergone IVF treatments that led to the creation of several embryos. Some of the embryos were implanted and resulted in healthy births. The couples paid to keep the other embryos frozen in a storage center at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center. A patient in 2020 entered the area and removed several embryos, dropping them on the floor and killing them, the ruling said. The justices then ruled that couples' wrongful death legal case could go forward. The clinic and hospital that are defendants in the case should ask the court to reconsider its decision. One group that opposes abortion, the nonprofit's live action, supported the decision. Each person from the tiniest embryo to an elder nearing the end of his life deserves and is guaranteed legal protection, said President Lila Rose in a statement. Justice Greg Cook wrote the only full dissent to the majority opinion. He said the 1872 law did not define minor child and the meaning of the term was being extended to cover frozen embryos. He added the ruling almost certainly ends the creation of frozen embryos through in vitro fertilization IVF in Alabama. The Alabama Supreme Court decision partly depended on language added to the Alabama Constitution in 2018. It states it is the policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child. For five years, a New York City man lived for free in a famous central New York City hotel. He made use of a little-known housing rule to avoid paying. But government lawyers recently said Mickey Beretto went too far. He turned in paperwork claiming ownership of the whole New Yorker hotel building. And he also tried to have another person pay him for living there. Last week, Beretto was arrested and charged with turning in false property records, a criminal offense. The 48-year-old man says he was surprised when police showed up at his boyfriend's apartment with guns and protective gear. I said, oh, I thought you were doing something for Valentine's Day to spice up the relationship until I saw the female officers, Beretto recalled, telling his boyfriend, Valentine's Day is a holiday where people celebrate love. The charges against Beretto came after years of legal battles. They began when he and his boyfriend paid about $200 to stay in one of the more than 1,000 rooms in the hotel built in 1930. Beretto says he had just moved to New York from Los Angeles, California when his boyfriend told him about a little-known part of housing law that permits people who stay in single rooms and buildings built before 1969 to demand a six-month contract. Beretto claimed that because he had paid for a night in the hotel, he was counted as a tenant. He asked for a contract to stay and the hotel immediately had him leave. Beretto said he went to court the next day and the judge denied him. But he said, I appealed to the state Supreme Court and I won the appeal. But he added that at an important point in the case, lawyers for the building's owners did not show up, which permitted him to win by default. The judge ordered the hotel to give Beretto a key. He said he lived there until July 2023 without paying for his room because the building's owners did not want to work out a contract with him, but they could not ask him to leave. New York City prosecutors agree that the housing court gave Beretto possession of his room, but they say he did not stop there. In 2019, he put false paperwork on a city website claiming that the Holy Spirit Association for the unification of world Christianity had turned over the ownership of the entire building to him. The organization bought the property in 1976. The church was founded in South Korea by the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Beretto then tried to charge different groups as the owner of the building. The prosecutor's office said they include demanding payments from one of the hotel's tenants and demanding the hotel put its bank accounts in his name. The unification church took Beretto to court in 2019 over the building's ownership claim. The case is ongoing, but a judge ruled that Beretto cannot present himself as the owner in the meantime. A unification church spokesperson did not comment on his arrest as there is an ongoing civil case. In that case, Beretto argued that the judge who gave him possession of his room indirectly gave him the entire building because it had never been subdivided. I never intended to commit any fraud. I don't believe I ever committed any fraud, Beretto said. He said he never made any money out of this. Beretto said he aims to deny profits to the unification church. The church, known for holding large weddings, has been accused of misleading people to gain members and criticized by some over its friendly relationship with North Korea where Moon was born. Beretto said he has never paid for a lawyer and has always represented himself in civil cases. Last week, he secured criminal defense legal representation. I'm Gregory Stockle. On February 20, 1824, British scientist and Christian clergyman William Buckland spoke before the Geological Society of London. He described the find of a huge jaw and other bones at a rock mine in the village of Stonesfield near Oxford, England. Buckland recognized that these fossils belonged to a huge reptile of the long past. He gave it the scientific name megalosaurus, meaning great lizard. With that, the first dinosaur was officially recognized, although the word dinosaur did not come for several more years. Buckland's talk was the beginning of our fascination with dinosaurs, says University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Broussat. His announcement opened the floodgates, he said, and many people launched their own fossil hunts. People went out looking for other giant bones in England and beyond, Broussat said. In the almost 200 years since, dinosaur science has ballooned. Researchers have learned much about how these creatures looked, lived, and developed or evolved. Scientists also learned what caused the disappearance of the ancient animals. Dinosaurs lived from about 231 million years ago to 66 million years ago during the Mesozoic era. They are ancestors to birds of today. Science has identified over 2,000 species of dinosaur. Our understanding of dinosaurs has changed significantly since the 19th century, said paleontologist Emma Nichols of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. It is home to the megalosaurus fossils that Buckland studied. By the 1840s, other dinosaur researchers were learning that some dinosaurs walked on four legs and others walked on two legs. The megalosaurus belongs to a group known as theropods. The group also includes meat eaters, Tyrannosaurus and Spinosaurus, animals which scampered on their legs. Both species grew to about 9 meters tall and used their sharp claws and strong toothy jaws to overpower prey, Broussat said. Evidence of dinosaurs has been found all around the world. The first complete dinosaur skeletons were set up in the 1870s. In the 1960s, the discovery of a small dinosaur changed popular thinking about the animal group. Dynonicus was a fast-moving meat eater. Some smaller dinosaurs, like Archaeopteryx, were found to be very much like early birds in body structure. The new research confirmed how birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs. In the years that followed, scientists used new imaging tools to learn more about how dinosaurs grew and moved. Other tools permitted them to make good guesses about their colors because some dinosaur remains had small pieces of skin or feathers that contained pigment or color. Thomas Holtz is a paleontologist at the University of Maryland. He said, all of the research created a more dynamic and biological view of dinosaurs as living things. In recent years, fossils have been found in China, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and Mongolia. Hans Dieter Seuss is a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. He said the most important recent discovery is that the theropods were covered with feathers, although they could not fly. He said the feathers kept the dinosaurs warm and were used for show. One question that concerned scientists from the beginning was why the dinosaurs died. They came up with many theories. One scientist even said small mammals might have eaten all the dinosaur eggs. Scientists have since settled on an answer. They believe an asteroid that hit the Earth in what is now southern Mexico was to blame for the disappearance of dinosaurs. Experts believe the event destroyed about 75% of life on Earth, including all its dinosaurs. But what if there had been no asteroid? Would dinosaurs still rule the world today? Holtz of the University of Maryland says almost certainly yes. He notes that some mammals existed at the time of dinosaurs, but they were all small. He said dinosaurs would have needed to evolve as the Earth cooled and some forests dried out. In the last 200 years, scientists also have a better idea of the largest and smallest dinosaurs. One 2023 study said the largest dinosaur was Argentinosaurus, which measured about 35 meters long and weighed 76 tons. I'm Katie Weaver. And I'm Dan Friedel. In a recent lesson, we asked our readers and listeners to write to us about what is popular in their country. In today's lesson, we will explore some of what was written to us. Our audience will be the guides of our imaginative tour of cultures around the world. We will learn about English grammar on the way. Let's start with a message from a friend in Turkey. Greetings from Turkey. I am Forkan. I think Kivanç Tatlituk is a popular in Turkey because the whole country knows him. Forkan wrote a very clear message. Our main suggestion is to remove a couple of words and add a little more explanation. We can take out the words, I think. We can also remove the part about the whole country knows him. When we say someone is popular, we can assume that many or most people in a place know about the person. You could also explain a little more deeply why Kivanç Tatlituk is popular. For example, you might say he is handsome, talented, and so on. So you might update the message to something like this. Kivanç Tatlituk is popular in Turkey because he is handsome, talented, and wealthy. Now let's examine part of a message from Gorka in Venezuela. Gorka says this about baseball, a popular sport in the country. This sport is practiced by people of all ages and in all the states of the country. There are many baseball schools, some of them sponsored by American baseball organizations. Every year, more than 100 Venezuelan baseball players go to USA to play in the MLB or other related leagues. Not surprisingly, these players inspire younger baseball players to follow their steps. Gorka wrote an excellent description. Our main suggestion is to pay careful attention to short words. Instead of that, we can use then, as in more than 100 Venezuelan baseball players. And we want to add the in front of USA like this. Every year, more than 100 Venezuelan baseball players go to the USA to play in the MLB or other related leagues. A final word about the last sentence from Gorka. While it is correct to say follow their steps, in this situation we often say follow in their footsteps. We use follow in their footsteps when someone does something before us and we follow what they did. For example, if your father is a doctor and you become a doctor, you could say that you are following in your father's footsteps. Now let's turn to Japan. An unnamed reader sent us this note about a popular food. Most popular food in Japan is ramen. I think because ramen has huge kinds of taste. The message is clear and to the point. Once again, we need to pay special attention to short words and remove a few other words. We need to include the word the at the beginning of the message, as in the most popular food in Japan is ramen. While the meaning of huge kinds of taste is understandable, we might instead use different structures to express the same idea. For example, English speakers might say that the taste is complex, bold, or rich. We might update the entire message to something like this. The most popular food in Japan is ramen because it has a rich, complex taste. Finally, Raphael from Spain writes to us, he notes that he does not like the most popular sport, soccer. Raphael ends his message with the following. Since I don't like soccer, I feel a little weirdo. But not as much as you, John, who are in love with grammar. Thank you very much for your teaching, John. See you soon. Raphael wrote a very light-hearted, humorous message. The main correction needed is to add the word like after the verb feel and remove the word little. So the statement could become, since I don't like soccer, I feel like a weirdo. A quick note about the term weirdo. We often use it in a negative or disapproving way. So you should be careful about using it. If you choose to use the term, make sure that the person it is directed at understands that you are not being serious. Raphael's message, for example, clearly used the word in a joking manner. Still, his point is correct. I am a grammar weirdo. And that's Everyday Grammar. I'm John Russell. You just heard this week's Everyday Grammar. John Russell joins us now to talk a little bit more about the lesson. Welcome, John. Hi, Dan. Thanks for having me on the show. So if you had to summarize the most important feedback from the lesson, what would you say? The main suggestions are to pay attention to short words, prepositions, articles, etc., and to use clauses that begin with because to provide an explanation. We received many wonderful messages, but the messages often separated the explanation into a separate sentence. In some cases, that might be called for. Yes, absolutely. But if the goal is to provide a simple, clear explanation, then using a clause that starts with because is a great way to structure your sentence. For example, you might say this. Soccer is popular in many countries because it does not require a lot of costly equipment. Yes, that's right. Or you might say this. Yacht racing is not a very popular activity because it requires very costly equipment. A yacht. Another important lesson. Yacht racing is much more costly than soccer. Thanks for coming on the show, John. Thanks for having me. See you next time. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.