• Tokyo police arrested a yakuza boss, accusing him of stealing Pokémon cards.
• The yakuza once had a fearsome, violent reputation. This arrest marks a shift to petty crimes.
• Anti-gang laws and lower profits have made yakuza membership less appealing to younger Japanese.

Tokyo Metropolitan Police last week arrested an executive of the Takinogawa gang, a faction of Japan's second-most powerful organized crime syndicate — the Sumiyoshi-kai.

His alleged crime? Police accuse him of stealing Pokémon cards.

Yakuza are members of organized crime syndicates, the Japanese equivalents of gangsters or mafiosos. Membership peaked in the 1960s when numbers swelled to more than 180,000.

In media, the yakuza are often depicted as terrifying figures, known for full-body tattoos and involvement in loansharking, extortion, and violence.

The recent arrest challenges that stereotype.

SoraNews24 reported that Keita Saito, a 39-year-old kanbu, or leader, was arrested in late April over a petty theft related to a December 2022 office break-in.

According to the news outlet, items worth 252,000 yen, or $1,621, were stolen, which included 25 Pokémon trading cards.

SoraNews24 noted an increase in trading card thefts in Japan due to their lightweight, easy conversion into cash, and difficult traceability.

According to France's Le Monde, it's surprising to see a gang member, let alone a leader, arrested for petty theft in Japan, especially given the yakuza's historical association with more serious crimes.

Gangs have, in recent years, largely moved from violence toward white-collar crimes.

According to DW, as well as becoming less brutal, gang membership has steadily declined over the past few decades.

Stringent anti-gang laws, targeting businesses associating with gangs and restricting members' access to financial services like credit cards and pensions have lessened the economic incentive to join, DW reported.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this, the outlet said, noting that decreased demand for illegal activities like gambling, sex work, and drug trafficking impacted the yakuza's financial resources.

Becoming a yakuza has become a less attractive career path for young Japanese, according to Tomohiko Suzuki, an expert on the yakuza, speaking to The Guardian back in 2020.

He told the newspaper: "They have to sacrifice a lot to lead the life of a gangster, but for increasingly diminishing returns."

The Guardian reported that the average age of a yakuza is now over 50, with a growing number in their 70s.

• Rachel Maeng Brown is a former NCAA rower who now works with student-athletes at her firm Gen Agency.
• The agency has provided NIL education and consulting to college athletes, collectives, and schools.
• Brown shared a presentation with five strategies to help athletes price and negotiate brand deals.

Knowing your worth is a struggle many college athletes face now that they can make money from their name, image, and likeness, known as NIL.

To help athletes understand their value, influencer-marketing-and-production company Gen Agency has been educating and consulting college athletes on NIL.

"Our big focus is creating a sustainable NIL marketplace at each university," Rachel Maeng Brown, the founder and CEO of Gen agency, told Business Insider.

Brown, a former NCAA rower, said the NIL side of Gen Agency educates universities to help them build curriculums. The agency also offers athletes on-site and virtual workshops about NIL marketing.

In April, Gen Agency hosted its first NIL-educational summit for University of Michigan influencers in partnership with Reach, a student-driven organization helping content creators grow their platforms and connect with brands. The presentation, which was shared with BI, covered how athletes can understand their audience, price sponsored content, post properly on social media, and protect themselves with a contract.

The summit also featured a panel of guest speakers, including former NFL player Isaiah Johnson. Johnson told BI that social-media followers and engagement are more important to brands who work with athletes than on-field performance.

"Followers, everyone wants to know how many people are following you and then two, just how genuine you are," he said. "If you are genuinely using a product, this could be a wonderful fit."

Johnson said athletes with the best media presence are natural and real with their followers. He said sports fans love behind-the-scenes footage they can not get from somewhere else, like athletes' day-in-the-life videos.

Here are five key slides from Gen Agency's NIL presentation on how athletes can brand themselves and negotiate fair pay:

Learn about your audience

Brown said knowing your target audience is key to working with brands. It helps companies understand who they can reach by recruiting you. 

During the summit, Brown showed athletes where to find key stats on their Instagram audiences, including follower count and growth, location, age, and gender.

A formula athletes can use to estimate the price of a brand deal

The presentation offered a formula student-athletes can use to calculate how much to charge brands for a sponsored post. It's based on a $10 CPM, which refers to the cost per every 1,000 impressions, though CPMs can vary.

To calculate what to charge per post, take the average number of views over the last 30 days and divide it by 1,000. Then take that figure and multiply it by the CPM.

Using that math, an athlete with 600,000 average views over the last days would charge $6,000 per post, based on a $10 CPM, per the presentation's example.

Know your copyright rules

Athletes, like other influencers, need to comply with brand, platform, and regulatory guidelines for social-media posts and ads, such as copyright rules and what kind of content is permitted on a platform.

Student-athletes also need to abide by NCAA rules because posting inappropriate content can result in losing scholarships, eligibility, and future career opportunities, according to the NCAA.

Brown said college athletes should also exercise caution and not include other brands or anything illegal in a sponsored post. She advised double-checking the spelling before posting, too.

Dos and don'ts for sponsored posts

The agency also emphasized the importance of double-checking disclosures for paid ads, partnerships, and more so athletes do not have to delete or redo sponsored videos.

"This is really important to student-athletes as well as smaller influencers because a lot of brands will try to bully them," said Brown, "to say, 'You don't need to put hashtag. You don't need to disclose that we're sponsored.' But it's actually illegal across social media."

She said failing to disclose a sponsored post could result in an athlete's account being banned or messing up their average views and algorithm.

Things to know about payment

Brown also talked about contracts and W-9s, which are tax forms for independent contractors. The presentation emphasized in capital letters that athletes need a contract to make sure they get paid for their work.

They should also be mindful of terms such as "usage" and "ownership" because it could mean their videos could be posted on any social-media channel or site.

Brown said brands are not going to protect the athletes, so they need to look out for themselves.

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren led a group of Democrats in pushing for increased Federal Student Aid funding.
• They said that key student-debt relief programs, like SAVE, are at risk without more resources.
• Congress has failed to boost funding for the agency over the past couple of years.

A group of Democratic lawmakers is pointing to one key thing that will help student-loan borrowers and families navigate financial aid: more funding.

On Wednesday, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren led 24 of her Democratic colleagues in calling on Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Shelley Moore Capito — chair and ranking member of the Senate education committee, respectively — to grant President Joe Biden's $2.7 billion budget request for the Office of Federal Student Aid in fiscal year 2025.

Over the past couple of years, Biden has requested that Congress provide increased funding to FSA to help it facilitate the return to student-loan repayment, the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form, and a host of new repayment and debt relief programs.

However, Republicans have opted to flat-fund the agency, and this year, they proposed funding cuts. The Democrats wrote in their letter, first viewed by Business Insider, that the lack of funding is "severely undermining FSA's ability to implement critical programs."

"FSA's responsibilities have increased to protect students and borrowers, but its federal funding has remained stagnant," they wrote. "The lack of adequate resources creates more barriers for students to start and continue their education."

Since federal student-loan payments resumed in October, many borrowers have faced a list of challenges, including hours-long hold times with their servicer, payment inaccuracies, and delayed or missing billing statements.

On top of that, the Education Department has been working to carry out a series of reforms to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, it implemented the new SAVE income-driven repayment plan, and it's in the process of overhauling the student-loan servicing system.

Each of those efforts requires more resources to implement effectively — something servicers themselves have previously acknowledged when explaining their own challenges in assisting borrowers.

When it comes to the FAFSA, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been highly critical of the way the Education Department has facilitated the rollout. While the department intended to create a simplified form for families and students, technical glitches delayed the form by months, and aid calculation errors followed, forcing many schools to push back their commitment deadlines.

Just one day before the Democrats' letter, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona requesting that the department ensure the FAFSA form is ready, without errors, for students to access as they apply for aid for the next school year. The Democrats wrote in their Wednesday letter that FSA needs more funding to live up to that commitment.

Cardona also expressed the need for Congress to boost the Education Department's funding in written testimony for a Tuesday hearing before the House. He wrote that Biden's $2.7 billion request for FSA will allow the agency to "support students and student loan borrowers as they navigate these modernized financial aid application and student loan repayment processes."

The Education Department is also in the process of crafting its broader student-debt relief plan, which is currently in the public comment period. The department plans to begin implementation of the new debt relief this fall, but the presidential election — and likely legal challenges — present uncertainty to that timeline.

• Footage shared by a Ukrainian battalion appears to show exploding drones striking Russian 'cope cages.'
• Both Russia and Ukraine have used the cages as makeshift missile defenses on vehicles.
• However, experts have told BI that the primary benefit of the cages is psychological.

Video released by a Ukrainian battalion appears to show drones getting through increasingly complex "cope cages" installed on Russian armored fighting vehicles, to devastating effect.

In a video posted on Monday by the 8th Separate Mountain Assault Battalion — part of the famed "Edelweiss" brigade — heavily protected Russian vehicles are seen to be targeted and, it appears, destroyed by Ukrainian drones.

In the video, a drone approaches a Russian armored fighting vehicle topped with a tangled cage-like structure.

The drone hovers for a beat, before backing up to make what appears to be its suicidal — and devastating — last approach.

A similar scene plays out for a second time in the video, on a different vehicle, before a zoomed-out view reveals three smoking wrecks.

The battalion did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for more information, but the vehicles were stationary, suggesting they may have already been hit.

Russia and Ukraine have both been documented using what are somewhat sarcastically known as "cope cages" — makeshift frames or screens aimed at limiting the impact of missiles.

Versions of the defensive apparatus have also shown up in Israel's military following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks, Popular Mechanics reported.

As well as the complex, heavy structures seen in the latest video posted by Ukraine's military, other 'cope cages' have taken the form of box-like screen cages, seemingly aimed at stopping drones.

However, early versions were largely useless against the Javelins and NLAW anti-tank missiles that proved so decisive early in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, experts told BI's Alia Shoaib.

RAND historian and former tank commander Gian Gentile told BI's Jake Epstein last year that cages might offer more protection against some loitering munitions, like drones.

But as the recent video appears to demonstrate, this is by no means a given.

And any protection they offer is largely psychological, Gentile said. "It is a psychological thing that soldiers do in combat when they want to live," he said.

Meanwhile, having to operate a fighting vehicle with a cage is likely a "huge inconvenience," Gentile said, noting that they impede mobility and visibility.