Three news to start your week: January 8
Singapore fines Credit Suisse for bankers' misconduct
(The Wall Street Journal)
Singapore fined Credit Suisse 3.9 million Singapore dollars (US$3.0 million) for its inability to stop or identify relationship managers' wrongdoing.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore said that spreads above bilaterally agreed rates were charged to clients for 39 over-the-counter bond transactions because Credit Suisse bankers in Singapore had given them false or incomplete post-trade disclosures.
According to the Monetary Authority of Switzerland (MAS), Credit Suisse failed to implement sufficient controls to stop or identify the bankers' misconduct while examining pricing and disclosure practices in the private banking sector.
Boom in AI Prompts a Test of Copyright Law
(The New York Times)
Over the past year, authors and a top photo agency have filed lawsuits, claiming that their intellectual property was unlawfully used to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can generate human-like prose and power chatbots.
The news industry has now joined them in the spotlight. The New York Times is the first major American news organization to challenge Microsoft and OpenAI over using artificial intelligence through a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Claiming that Microsoft's Bing Chat and OpenAI's ChatGPT can generate content almost exactly like Times articles, the lawsuit says that these two platforms can "free-ride on The Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment."
Japan prosecutors make first arrest in financial scandal engulfing ruling party
(The Guardian)
In a financial scandal that has rocked Japan's ruling party and raised questions about the future of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, prosecutors have made their first arrest.
Yoshitaka Ikeda, a former vice-education minister, is suspected of failing to report money he received from fundraising events arranged through his faction in Kishida's Liberal Democratic Party [LDP]. The Tokyo district public prosecutor's office announced that it had detained Ikeda.
But the scandal goes far beyond Ikeda. Kishida, already facing low approval ratings, saw a further decline in popularity last month when LDP politicians were allegedly accused of routinely withholding approximately ¥600 million (US$4.2 million) in funding, potentially violating campaign and election laws.
