Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Canada's anti-money laundering body to leverage AI bets to crack down on bad actors

Summary: Canada’s Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre, or FINTRAC, has recently increased its use of artificial intelligence tools to identify suspicious transactions a top official from the agency said earlier this week, and this has already resulted in the detection of violations that led to substantial fines for the country’s two largest banks.

Context: FINTRAC received authority to levy fines for financial violations in 2008, but has only collected about $23 million Canada dollars-worth during that period; these two recent fines added up to around $9 million Canadian dollars all by themselves, so this increased used of AI tools looks like it could help the agency detect more of the estimated $100-130 billion Canadian dollars-worth of money laundering that takes place in the country each year, which could help staunch that laundering, while also empowering the agency to increase its scrutiny of other illegal practices that have, until now, mostly gone undetected and unaddressed.

—Reuters

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India summons Maldives envoy over ministers' remarks

Summary: The high commission of Maldives has been summoned by India following a series of social media posts by three Maldives officials in which they called Indian Prime Minister Modi a clown, a terrorist, and a puppet of Israel.

Context: This is notable in large part because these posts have led to calls for a boycott on traveling to the Maldives on Indian social networks (and the Maldives are typically a popular destination for Indian tourists), and because there’s already been tension between the two countries following a request by the Maldives’ new president that Indian troops leave the country after his election last year; the Maldives have long existed within India’s regional sphere of influence, and this change in governance has suggested a turn toward stronger ties with China, which India’s government is not happy about; the three Maldives officials who shared the offending posts have been suspended, but as of Wednesday at least, they haven’t been fired as was demanded by Indian officials.

—BBC News

More delays for NASA’s astronaut moonshots, with crew landing off until 2026

Summary: On Tuesday, NASA officials announced new delays to their Artemis program schedule, pushing back their next planned flights to the Moon until 2025 and 2026.

Context: The original plan was to send four astronauts to loop around the Moon in late-2024, but safety concerns related to its own and private spacecraft involved in the Artemis missions forced the agency to delay that ambition until September of 2025, and the subsequent landing of astronauts on the Moon until 2026 at the earliest; this announcement was made less than hour after a private space company’s Moon lander was found to have a fuel leak after it was launched into space, ending its mission to achieve the first soft-landing on the Moon by a US-based entity in decades, and adding to existing concerns that the timeline NASA was operating under might have been too ambitious, considering the number of moving parts and unanticipated slowdowns in getting some aspects of the program safely underway.

—The Associated Press

Predictions about global GDP prospects in 2024 are not great, but many of the few bright spots (in the sense of seeing growth rather than stagnancy of decline) are located in Sub-Saharan Africa.

—Bloomberg

5.26 million

Estimated number of Chinese-made vehicles sold overseas in 2023, according to the China Passenger Car Association.

That’s expected to surpass Japan’s number of exports by about a million vehicles, and the increase in exports from China is partially the result of sustained gas-powered vehicle demand in markets like Mexico and Russia.

—The Wall Street Journal

Trust Click

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