The blooming of cherry blossoms is an annual event many Japanese and tourists look forward to. This year some individuals decided to take home some cherry blossoms by stealing the branches they grew out of.

Residents near the Kanokita Park in Higashi, Osaka, Japan, discovered in late March that 18 branches and 3 trunks had gone missing from surrounding cherry blossom trees.

At first the residents assumed the missing tree parts were cut down as a form of maintenance to prevent rot or disease, as reported by The Mainichi via SoraNews24.

Image: Twitter/@Norikyuu

Judging by the cuts, authorities believe the thieves used power tools like chainsaws to cut away the missing pieces. Some of the tree parts stolen measured around three meters or nearly 10 feet in length.

Image: Twitter/@Norikyuu

Netizen and local resident Norikyuu (@Norikyuu) shared some photos of the crime scene in a tweet posted on April 1.

Image: Twitter/@Norikyuu

When the branches were cut still remains a mystery. Norikyuu suspects the thieves came in the middle of the night since the trees were in the middle of an industrial park and few people pass through the area at night. Norikyuu also thinks the branches may have been cut down in daytime as well where the thieves disguised themselves as park maintenance personnel.

The prestigious prize was awarded to the Times team led by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey and New Yorker contributor Ronan Farrow, for reports that disgraced the Hollywood mogul and sparked an avalanche of accusations against other powerful men.

Since the Times and New Yorker articles last October, more than 100 women have publicly accused the producer of misconduct ranging from sexual harassment to rape, sparking the #MeToo movement that has seen a string of influential men lose their jobs and reputation.

Weinstein’s marriage has ended, he has been under police investigation in London, Los Angeles and New York, hit by a litany of civil lawsuits and his former production company has been forced to file for bankruptcy.

Farrow, 30, is the son of actress Mia Farrow and film director Woody Allen, and something of a prodigy who has previously fronted his own television show, worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for late US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, and formerly advised then Hillary Clinton on global youth issues when she was secretary of state.

The former Rhodes scholar, who graduated from Yale Law School at just 21, has sided with his sister Dylan’s claims that Allen molested her when she was seven. Allen has repeatedly denied the allegations.

“So so so proud,” tweeted Mia Farrow minutes after her son’s award was announced. Ronan Farrow paid tribute to his co-winners and The New Yorker.

“This moment gets called a reckoning, but we just started telling the truth about old abuses of power. Thanks to all who keep doing so,” he wrote on Twitter to his nearly half a million followers.

The 102th edition of the Pulitzer Prizes were announced at Columbia University in New York by administrator Dana Canedy at a time when the US news media still under assault from the White House for peddling “fake news.”

Canedy praised the winners but also counselled the media to do more to improve trust with a skeptical public and to work harder to include more varied gender and racial perspectives.

‘Most trying of times’ 

The Washington Post won the Pulitzer in the investigative category for relentless reporting seen as having influenced the outcome of the 2017 Senate race in Alabama, revealing Republican candidate Roy Moore’s alleged past sexual harassment of teenage girls.

Moore’s opponent Doug Jones won the race last December, becoming Alabama’s first Democratic senator in 25 years and dealing a humiliating blow to President Donald Trump’s Republican administration.

The New York Times and The Washington Post shared the national reporting prize for furthering understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the connections between Russian actors and the Trump campaign, his transition team and administration, Canedy said.

“Winners uphold the highest purpose of a free and independent press even in the most trying of times,” she announced.

“These courageous, inspiring and committed journalists and their news organizations are undaunted in their mission in support of the fourth estate.

“It is a mandate that has been under a seemingly relentless assault of late but that remains central to a healthy democracy,” she added.

Reuters won the 2018 prize in international reporting for coverage of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. Reuters also won in the feature photography category for its coverage of the Rohingya crisis.

The prize for breaking news photography went to Ryan Kelly of The Daily Progress for a chilling image that captured the moment of impact by a car at a racially-charged protest in Charlottesville, Virginia that left one woman dead last August.

The Pulitzer for fiction went to Andrew Sean Greer for “Less” about growing older and love. The history prize was awarded to “The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea,” and the prize in drama for “Cost of Living” by playwright Martyna Majok.//AFP

Anastasia Vashukevich, known by her pen name Nastya Rybka, was arrested with nine other foreigners in February when Thai police raided their sex training course in the seaside city of Pattaya.

She and six others were initially charged with lacking a work permit but are now facing additional charges of soliciting prostitution and criminal association, according to Apichai Krobpetch, Pattaya’s police chief.

Vashukevich, who is embroiled in a political scandal in Russia, made international headlines after she offered to reveal secrets to American journalists in a video posted on Instagram shortly after her arrest in Pattaya.

“They are trying to put us behind bars… That is why I am ready to tell you about all those missing puzzle pieces that you lacked… regarding a link between our esteemed lawmakers and (Paul) Manafort, Trump and all this brouhaha, the US elections,” she said in the video.

The model, who has written a book about seducing oligarchs, has not substantiated her claims but does have links to Russia’s elite.

She is facing a lawsuit in Russia over footage she filmed purporting to show an influential deputy prime minister, Sergei Prikhodko, enjoying lavish hospitality on a yacht owned by billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

The video went viral after it was published by top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in February.

Deripaska, one of several Russian oligarchs sanctioned by the US this month, denied any wrongdoing and later sued Vashukevich and Alexander Kirillov, a “sex guru” who was also detained in Thailand, for invasion of privacy.

Deripaska, an aluminium tycoon, was once an associate of US President Donald Trump’s ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Manafort has been indicted on money laundering and tax-related charges as part of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

A participant in the sex training session who was not among those arrested told AFP that Vashukevich fears being deported back to Russia.

Three other participants have either been deported or are awaiting deportation, an immigration official told AFP.

The US Embassy in Bangkok has declined to comment on the case.//AFP

Choi Eun-hee was the South’s most famous actress for decades before being brazenly abducted by North Korean spies in Hong Kong in 1978 at the request of the North’s then leader-in-waiting Kim Jong Il, an avid film fan.

During her visit to Hong Kong to meet a potential investor in her arts school, she was reportedly lured onto a boat by her guide before being transferred against her will to a cargo ship destined for North Korea.

Her husband Shin Sang-ok, a top director, was taken to the North soon after, although circumstances over his alleged abduction remain unclear.

Choi remained trapped in the North for eight years, where the two made more than 10 films together under the instruction of Kim Jong Il.

In a 2011 interview, Choi said Kim “respected us as artists and fully supported us,” but that she could never forgive him for the “outrageous and unforgivable” kidnapping.

They were allowed to make “films with artistic values, instead of just propaganda films extolling the regime,” Choi said, but always longed for their freedom.

During their ordeal, the couple travelled overseas extensively for movie production missions and to attend film festivals — always under heavy surveillance by the North’s agents.

Choi even won the best actress award at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1985 for her role in “Salt” — a film about Korean guerrillas fighting against the 1910-45 Japanese colonial rule.

The couple — who had divorced in 1976, before their abductions — remarried during a trip to Hungary at Kim’s urging.

But they finally staged a daring escape to the US embassy in Vienna after attending the Berlinale film festival in 1986, and sought asylum in the US due to fear for their personal security.

The couple returned to the South in 1999 after spending more than a decade in the US. They remained married until Shin’s death in 2006.

Their dramatic life inspired several books and movies.

Choi, who made her cinematic debut in 1942, had risen to stardom in the wake of the 1950-53 Korean War that sealed the division between the communist North and the capitalist South.

She was called the “queen” of South Korean cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s while appearing in more than 100 movies — many made by Shin.

North Korea abducted hundreds of South Koreans under a state-sanctioned policy in the decades following the Korean War.

Choi’s funeral will be held in Seoul on Thursday.

The operation was “to support espionage, extract intellectual property, maintain persistent access to victim networks and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations,” Washington and London said in a joint statement.

“Russian state-sponsored actors are using compromised routers to conduct spoofing ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks to support espionage, extract intellectual property, maintain persistent access to victim networks and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations,” they said.

“Whoever controls the routing infrastructure of a network essentially controls the data flowing through the network.”

The US Department of Homeland Security said the hacking was part of a broad operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe, which DHS says comprises concerting cyberattacks by Moscow’s civilian and military intelligence agencies.

The router hacking operation has targeted both government and private sector groups, and the key providers of network infrastructure and internet services serving them.

The announcement came in an unprecedented joint alert that underscored closer cooperation between Western governments fighting what they say is an ongoing, multifaceted hacking and online disinformation campaign by Moscow.

The alert came from the Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, DHS and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In came after more than one year of separate warnings over the attempted hacking of key infrastructure like power and water utilities in Western countries.

The two sides did not give any examples of systems that had been broken into, but said those compromised risked losing data, identities, passwords and even control of their own systems.

Critical network components targeted

The hacking effort goes to the critical components of a computer network: the routers, switches and firewalls designed to safely and accurate deliver data from one computer to another.

Taking over a router virtually would give a hacker the ability to manipulate, divert or stop any data from going through it.

In an operation like an electric power plant, the hacker could shut down the service or physically damage a plant.

A hacker could also “potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations,” the joint alert said.

“The current state of US and UK network devices, coupled with a Russian government campaign to exploit these devices, threatens our respective safety, security, and economic well-being,” it said.

Both countries have accused Moscow of concerted efforts to use social media to interfere with public affairs, particularly with the British Brexit referendum and US presidential election in 2016.

During their two-day meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago vacation resort starting later Tuesday local time, Abe will seek cooperation to resolve the outstanding issue of Japanese nationals abducted by the North decades ago. He will ask Trump to take up the issue when the U.S. president meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to discuss denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

The first-ever U.S.-North Korean summit is expected to be held by early June, after Kim meets with South Korean President Moon Jae In on April 27.

Abe has said he will also request Trump to seek the elimination of not only North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the U.S. mainland, but its short- and medium-range missiles that could threaten Japan and South Korea.

On the economic front, the Japanese prime minister is planning to impress upon the U.S. president the significance of multilateral free trade as Trump has pushed for bilateral trade agreements.

Tokyo is preparing to propose setting up a new framework to discuss trade involving the two countries, in the hope of Washington rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, according to a government source.

Although Trump pulled the world’s largest economy out of the regional free trade pact upon taking office in January last year, he instructed officials last week to look into returning to it amid a simmering trade spat with China, a non-TPP member.

Following Washington’s withdrawal, the remaining 11 members, led by Japan, succeeded in signing a revised version in March.

Japan envisions TPP minister Toshimitsu Motegi and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer heading the new trade dialogue, separate from the existing economic dialogue helmed by Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, the source said.

During his sixth face-to-face talks with Trump, Abe is also expected to seek to win an exemption from steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports Washington recently invoked.

The two leaders are also likely to exchange views on the situation in the Indo-Pacific region, including China’s increasing maritime assertiveness in the South China Sea, as well as recent U.S.-led airstrikes on Syria, among other topics.

Abe and Trump played golf two times at previous summits in Florida and Japan last year, but it has not yet been decided whether they will do so this time.

The accident happened in Cirebon, about 220 kilometres (135 miles) east of Jakarta.

The wall of warehouse next door fell over and crushed the local art centre where the junior high school students were preparing for a show.

Seven were killed as the building caved in, including six boys between 13 and 15 years-old and the centre’s 48-year-old manager, police said.

Two 13-year-old girls were also injured, with one in a critical condition, they added.

Police are investigating the cause of the collapse, but they said initial suspicion has fallen on the age of the art centre which had been operating since around the 1940s.

“The building is very old, but we still need to ask experts to determine the cause of the collapse,” local police spokesman Trunoyudo Wisnu Andiko told AFP.

Lax construction standards have raised widespread concerns about building safety in Indonesia.

In January, at least 75 people were injured when a mezzanine floor at Indonesia’s stock exchange building in Jakarta collapsed into the lobby.

In February, the government temporarily halted all elevated transportation projects in Indonesia, after a dozen major accidents killed five and injured dozens more.

Kim Min-ho, 42, was found unconscious at the maximum security Lai Chi Kok detention centre Monday morning and was later declared dead at hospital, a police spokeswoman told AFP.

Police gave no detail on how Kim died but local Hong Kong media reported he had committed suicide.

Kim, who stated on his Facebook page that he was CEO in South Korea of the US-based Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory retail chain, was arrested in January and charged with double murder after the bloody discovery at the hotel room.

Police had rushed to the harbourfront hotel after receiving a report that a man and woman were fighting.

Kim’s wife and six-year-old son were found dead at the scene, his wife with multiple cuts to her neck and his six-year-old son with a throat wound.

Kim was believed to have consumed alcohol and appeared unconscious in the hotel suite with minor wounds to his hand and face, police assistant district commander Chan Tsz-Leung said at the time.

Police retrieved a five-inch-long knife from the room and Kim was arrested.

A source with knowledge of the investigation told AFP at the time that a friend of the suspect had warned authorities in South Korea he was potentially suicidal shortly before the incident.

The Ritz-Carlton is located on the top floors of Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper — the International Commerce Centre — and is famous for panoramic views of the city and its Victoria Harbour.

The South Korean consulate in Hong Kong did not immediately respond to Kim’s death.

Facebook’s CEO has left many Pakistanis wondering how the social media site could influence the country’s upcoming general elections — what kind of data could be accessed, exploited and by whom.

During his two-day congressional hearing on an information breach by data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which was affiliated with US President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Mark Zuckerberg said that fake accounts on Facebook could have an impact on Pakistan’s elections.

The 33-year-old Internet mogul said he feared bogus accounts “may disturb the transparency of the electoral process in the country”.

While talking to Dawn, a social media activist claimed that there was nothing new or shocking in the Facebook CEO’s statements.

“The US is years behind us. We have a much more sophisticated pattern. He’s whitewashed everything with big words — basically this is all about trolling,” he said.

“When the Facebook CEO talks about fake accounts and the data breach, he doesn’t mean someone is going to hack into your account and use your data — what this means is that fake accounts will be set up to sway the mind of the public and this has been going on in Pakistan for years.

“Look at Maryam Nawaz’s Twitter account, look at how party tweets go viral. People of all ages use social media — they are interested in what Mian sb did or where he’s buying clothes from, this helps develop their image of the man and thus his party and their candidate,” he explained.

Digital Rights Foundation’s Nighat Dad agreed with this point of view, saying: “Facebook, to a lot of people in Pakistan, is the internet and an only option to experience online spaces.

“So when they see something on Facebook without having the knowledge of an alternate narrative, they start believing what they see. So it’s important that Facebook builds strong mechanisms around countering false news on its platform.”

Controlling your data

Mr Zuckerberg claimed that right now the social media company’s top priority was to “protect the integrity of the upcoming elections in Brazil, India, Pakistan and other countries”.

Explaining how this would be done, Mr Zuckerberg said that Facebook, which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, would identify and remove fake accounts seeking to interfere in elections and spread misinformation.

He said the social network was deploying artificial intelligence tools to identify bogus accounts. He also revealed that Facebook, which had more than 30 million users in Pakistan in 2016, would be hiring over 20,000 new employees to ensure security and personal privacy.

Discussing why would it be easy to mine this kind of information in Pakistan, Sadaf Baig from Media Matters for Democracy, a not-for-profit working to defend freedom of expression, media, internet, and communications in the country, said that there were no data protection laws in the country.

“There is no provision for this in the cybercrime law either — your data is being used by telecommunication companies and companies like Facebook… the government is failing to protect our data,” she said, adding that this data can also include information available with the National Database and Registration Authority and can be sold without people’s knowledge.

What this means

“On the one hand you have people creating technology who don’t understand social and political implications and on the other, politicians who don’t understand technology… this disconnect is ideal ground for companies like Cambridge Analytica and individuals like Steve Bannon to come in and exploit,” said Rahma Mian who teaches politics of technology at Habib University.

Talking to Dawn, she said what is important here is what this case represents about politics and citizens’ rights today and where it is headed. Cambridge Analytica’s role in Brexit and US elections is really just the tip of the iceberg.

She said that compared to Pakistan, these countries have robust civil liberties frameworks and laws that protect privacy and data, yet despite that, something on this scale has not only happened but was pretty much not mainstream news for two years.

“In Pakistan, we may not have the exact same scenario unfold due to our particular history and electoral politics — in a bizarre twist our dysfunctional political system is actually helping us — but what can and is happening is that our data is being collected by the state and by these tech companies without any protection in place,” she said.

“This is definitely deeply frightening — but what is even scarier is how ill-prepared our politicians and bureaucrats are at handling not only our data which is basically equivalent to currency and freedom today but the rapidly changing technology policy landscape,” she added.

Unlike smartphone addicts who spend hours a day on social media, playing games or watching videos, residents of Basan village are using smartphones to save lives and local incomes.

The safety alerts about wild Asian elephants they spread help prevent injuries and economic losses that can be caused by the roaming rainforest giants.

The village, in the Xishuangbanna Dai autonomous prefecture of southwestern China’s Yunnan province, has witnessed frequent visits by wild Asian elephants in recent years as their numbers have grown. The giant animals, searching for food, sometimes pose a threat to safety.

“Nearly all families in the village had their crops damaged by wild elephants nearby,” said villager Huang Zhaowu. “Some were eaten while other crops were trampled. Nothing is left in the farmland, just like a hurricane has swept through it. To a local family, it means the loss of a whole season’s income.”

Even more annoying, the elephants sometimes break into villagers’ houses at night.

“Some people live in bamboo houses without a steel or wooden door that can be used as a defense,” Huang said. “It’s not funny if you are awoken by a wild elephant. They are capable of killing, very easily.”

The villagers’ options for dealing with the safety threat are limited because the wild Asian elephant is listed as one of China’s top-level protected wild animals due to its limited population－an estimated 300－all living in Yunnan.

Huang said some farmers used to broadcast loud music to drive the elephants away. “It worked in the beginning, but soon became nonthreatening to the elephants,” he said. “Then they stomped on all our sound equipment.”

An elephant alert alliance was later formed voluntarily in the village. Through text messages, phone calls and social media such as WeChat, a report system has been established. Anyone who notices a wild elephant nearby will spread the alert.

“Tourists are eager to see wild elephants, but we want them to stay in their territory and keep away from us,” Huang said.

Rarer than giant pandas

The area inhabited by wild Asian elephants in the province has expanded from seven counties in 2017 to eight this year, according to Chen Mingyong, a life sciences professor at Yunnan University who has been studying the animals for decades.

He said the wild Asian elephant population has grown by two to three animals a year in recent years.

Statistics from the provincial forestry department show the wild elephant population in the province－mostly in Xishuangbanna－has soared from 170 in the 1970s to about 300 now thanks to protection efforts.

That means they are still rarer than giant pandas, but the growing population has resulted in more conflicts between people and elephants.

In 2014, a villager in Basan died after being attacked by a wild elephant searching for food. In 2016, a sexually frustrated bull elephant smashed 19 cars in three days. Five months ago, a 67-year-old tourist from Sichuan suffered broken ribs and a broken right hip bone when he was attacked by a wild elephant in Xishuangbanna.

Statistics from the prefecture’s forestry bureau indicate that more than 85 per cent of the 153,000 confrontations between humans and wild animals in Xishuangbanna between 1991 and 2010 involved wild Asian elephants. A total of 33 people died and 165 were injured in such confrontations.

A lack of food is the root of the problem. Guo Xianming, deputy director of the research institute at Xishuangbanna Natural Reserve, said an adult Asian elephant usually weighs between 3 and 5 metric tons and consumes 150 to 200 kilograms of food a day. The growing population has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the herds’ demand for food.

The expansion of some invasive plants has made growing conditions more difficult for the elephants’ preferred food, and scientists say decades of rainforest protection efforts are another factor.

“Protection of rainforest resulted in rapid growth of plants, especially those big trees that used to be threatened by excessive tree felling,” said Wang Lifan, director of Xishuangbanna Natural Reserve’s Shangyong section. “The efforts are crucial to the better recovery of rainforest, but might also lead to problems with the wild elephants’ natural food supply.”

The section, covering 31,300 hectares, is the third largest in the natural reserve. Established in the 1980s, it is now home to 70 to 90 wild elephants.

“A number of the elephants’ favourite foods, such as bamboo, plume grass and plantain, are declining dramatically,” Wang said. “They are much shorter than trees and the protection of the rainforest allows trees to grow rapidly and become a shelter, stopping the sun’s rays those shorter plants need.”

‘Canteens’ for wildlife

To ease the tension, the provincial forestry department has built “canteens” in several natural reserves, reducing friction between villagers and wild elephants that had been eating their crops. In recent years, some of the canteens have been expanded.

In Xishuangbanna Natural Reserve’s Mengyang section, the canteen set up in 2008 has since doubled in size to 67 hectares, Guo said.

In the first two months of this year, 12 cameras shot more than 12,000 pictures and nearly 1,300 videos showing wild Asian elephants, sambar deer and boar feeding at the canteen.

“It shows the canteen is welcomed by the elephants,” Guo said. “After we provided the food source, the elephants paid many fewer visits to farmland, and their conflicts with farmers have been eased in recent years.”

However, with investigations conducted by scientists indicating local people sometimes also feed elephants with crops grown in villages, such as corn, Yunnan University professor Chen said he worries the canteens may teach the elephants to want more of it.

“And their affection for this sweet-tasting crop will encourage more elephants to step into humans’ territory,” he said.

Chen said the most practical way to maintain harmony between elephants and humans is to separate human territory from the elephants’ habitat.

With investment of more than 1 million yuan ($159,000), the country’s first protective fence to separate people and wild elephants was built last year in Xiangyanqing village, Xishuangbanna.

The green, steel fence, 2.2 metres high and 800 metres in length, surrounds the village, which used to be visited by elephants about 40 times a year. It has proved to be effective and another fence, 550 metres long, is now under construction in another village in the prefecture.

Funding needed

But Chen is still trying to figure out other methods that could encourage elephants to stay within a certain region, far from the villages.

Through years of observation, he discovered an elephant secret－they usually spend several months a year near a source of salt, which could be a rock or a small pool with a high salt content.

“We could build some artificial salt source far from the village,” he said. “It won’t hurt either villagers or elephants and will encourage the elephants to stay in the deep forest.”

Drones that used to monitor forest fires have also been introduced to the wild elephant alert system since 2016, according to Chang Zongbo, a media officer from Xishuangbanna’s forestry public security office. He said drones are sometimes used around the clock for real-time monitoring of all 18 elephants in Menghai county, using infrared cameras at night, and that sections of road will be cordoned off if elephants are found there.

“The biggest obstacle in solving conflicts between humans and wild elephants is the lack of scientific research funding,” Chen said. Compared with some overseas research projects on big, wild animals that cost millions of dollars, he said scientific research on wild elephants in Yunnan had only received about 2 million yuan in government funding in the past decade.

“Government funds are mainly used as compensation for the losses of farmers during elephant encounters,” he said. “But that can’t solve the problem fundamentally.

“If more funding can be given to research programmes, things will be different. Scientists would figure out effective and natural methods to ease tension by knowing more about this wild, giant species.”