Tokyo Metropolis Prefecture
Dog rescued from Ben Nevis suspected to have eaten discarded cannabis
A dog has been rescued from Ben Nevis after it is suspected to have fallen ill from eating discarded cannabis. Christina Bluhme, a dog trainer from Esher in Surrey, was halfway up the UK's highest mountain when her black Labrador Tokyo collapsed on the trail. Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team came to their aid and stretchered Tokyo down from the 4,413ft (1,345m) peak to a local vet. Bluhme said Tokyo had made a full recovery after the incident during a trip to Scotland last weekend. She said vets believe she ingested cannabis left on the trail.
18-year-old man arrested over 2025 cyberattack on internet cafe operator
An 18-year-old man has been arrested for his suspected involvement in a cyberattack on an internet cafe operator. An 18-year-old man has been arrested for his suspected involvement in a cyberattack on the operator of the Kaikatsu Club internet cafe chain, according to investigative sources. On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Police Department's cybercrime countermeasure division arrested the company employee from Tokyo's Katsushika Ward, who was in the second year of high school at the time of the incident, on suspicion of fraudulent obstruction of business and violation of the law against unauthorized computer access. He has denied parts of the allegations, the sources said. In the cyberattack on the internet cafe chain operator Kaikatsu Frontier, a computer program that a high school boy from the city of Osaka developed using ChatGPT was used.
Japan's Terra Drone to mass-produce defense drones domestically
Japan's Terra Drone plans to set up a system enabling domestic production of up to tens of thousands of interceptor drones a year, the company's head, Toru Tokushige, said in a recent interview. As well as domestic development for such defense drones, the Tokyo-based company aims to speed up work to establish supply chains that do not rely on imports by promoting the development and production of drone components at home. In March, Terra Drone announced its full-scale entry into the defense drone market, in addition to civilian-use drones. As part of the move, the company has acquired two Ukrainian firms that develop interceptor drones. In Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Middle East conflict, cheap drones are said to have changed the concept of war by shooting down expensive missiles and attacking important enemy bases.
Japan and Singapore ink pact to boost cooperation on peaceful use of space
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi meets her Singaporean counterpart Lawrence Wong at a bilateral meeting in Tokyo in March. Singapore - Japan and Singapore have signed a memorandum on cooperation to promote the peaceful use of space. The move came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and her Singaporean counterpart, Lawrence Wong, agreed at a meeting in Tokyo in March to upgrade the two countries' relations to a strategic partnership, and identified the space sector as a pillar of the partnership. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the National Space Agency of Singapore signed the memorandum Monday on the sidelines of the Spacetide 2026 international space business conference in Tokyo. The pact is the first bilateral agreement for NSAS.
Japan to launch council to overhaul legal frameworks governing AI use
Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara (third from left) speaks at a meeting of the digital administrative and fiscal reform council, held at the Prime Minister's Office in Tokyo on Tuesday. The government decided Tuesday to establish a new council to drastically overhaul legal frameworks governing the development and use of artificial intelligence. The plan was included in the government's 2026 basic policy guidelines adopted at a meeting of the digital administrative and fiscal reform council, held at the Prime Minister's Office in Tokyo. This council, launched under the administration of former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, will be reorganized into the new body. The guidelines stressed the urgency of advancing what is described as AI transformation, or a fundamental review of work using AI, to cope with population decline.
Kioxia ships samples of new flash memory for AI data centers
Hiroo Ota (center left), CEO of Kioxia Holdings, and others unveil Kioxia's new 3D flash memory chip at its Kitakami plant in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, on Friday. Kioxia Holdings has started shipping samples of its next-generation flash memory chips to artificial-intelligence data center operators, seeking to gain ground in the lucrative business against rivals. The Tokyo-based chipmaker's latest high-density 3D flash memory chips aim to better meet AI data center needs with better efficiency and transmission speeds. The 332-layer 10th-generation chips pack more data into silicon and can store 59% more data compared with its previous flagship 8th-generation chip, the company said Friday. Production will take place at the company's second manufacturing facility at its Kitakami plant in Iwate Prefecture, which began operating in September last year.
U.S. defense firm Anduril in talks for Nissan plant to build drones in Japan, sources say
U.S. defense firm Anduril in talks for Nissan plant to build drones in Japan, sources say U.S. defense firm Anduril Industries is in talks to acquire the plant to build military drones in Japan, sources say. U.S. defense firm Anduril Industries is in talks to acquire Nissan Motor's Oppama assembly plant near Tokyo as the maker of autonomous weapons looks to build military drones in Japan, according to three sources familiar with the matter. While they say no decision has been made, any deal could transform one of Japan's first large-scale postwar car factories, long a symbol of its industrial revival, into an arms-making hub. The talks over Oppama, which are being reported for the first time, come as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's government seeks to expand defense manufacturing amid growing concern that a Taiwan Strait crisis could draw in Japan and run down weapons stocks. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.
Provably Efficient RL under Episode-Wise Safety in Constrained MDPs with Linear Function Approximation
We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total utility value in every episode. While this problem is well understood in the tabular setting, theoretical results for function approximation remain scarce. This paper closes the gap by proposing an RL algorithm for linear CMDPs that achieves eO( K) regret with an episode-wise zero-violation guarantee. Furthermore, our method is computationally efficient, scaling polynomially with problem-dependent parameters while remaining independent of the state space size. Our results significantly improve upon recent linear CMDP algorithms, which either violate the constraint or incur exponential computational costs.