Japan's international aid program has reached a milestone. It's now 50 years since the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) sent its first group of aid workers overseas. Since then, about 40,000 volunteers have helped out, in fields ranging from farming to medicine.

NHK World's Miki Matsumoto spoke to some of them about what they achieved and how it changed them.

With cyber-attacks on the rise, officials in Japan and the United States are seeking ways to fight back. Japan's pension service was recently hacked resulting in one of the biggest thefts ever of personal data from a public institution. US officials, meanwhile, say hackers may have stolen the personal data of up to 4 million federal workers. Security experts on both sides of the Pacific are trying to figure out who breached these government computer systems and how.