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The expansion of Mexico’s avocado market since it signed a free trade agreement with the US and Canada in the 1990s has gone hand in hand with rising levels of violence and criminal networks, security analysts at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime said in a report this year.

“International demand and organised crime groups have shaped a multibillion-dollar industry in which politico-criminal relations continue to play a crucial role,” the report said.

From: Mexican avocado and mango exports hit after US agents assaulted.

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Working in VR is also becoming more common in certain sectors such as healthcare and engineering where training applications can be useful, particularly in dangerous or high-stakes environments such as surgery or operating heavy machinery.

From: Meetings in the metaverse: new tech draws workers to virtual offices.

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Christoph Fleischmann, founder and chief executive of Arthur Technologies, a virtual office space start-up with 40 Fortune 500 clients, says that “AI is the ultimate eye candy”. As a theoretical example of future use, he points to a finance team that might meet in VR and have an “incredibly smart AI interacting directly with . . . data sources”, and be able to project that data visually in a tangible way for participants.

From: Meetings in the metaverse: new tech draws workers to virtual offices.

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While some business owners might think the 3% fee for processing credit cards is a significant cost, research over the last decade has shown that cash handling costs US retailers a great deal more —between 4.7% and 15.3%.

From: The World is going cashless…but how quickly?.

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RedyRef said it more than doubled its shipments of reverse ATMs in the first five months of the year compared with the same period in 2023.

From: Want to Pay Cash? That’ll Cost You Extra – WSJ.

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When Noa Khamallah recently tried to pay cash for popcorn and soda at Yankee Stadium, his almighty dollars struck out.

The stadium’s concession stands no longer take cash. An employee directed him to a kiosk that could convert his greenbacks into plastic. Khamallah, 41 years old, fed $200 into the reverse ATM, which subtracted a $3.50 fee and spat out a debit card with a balance of $196.50.

From: Want to Pay Cash? That’ll Cost You Extra – WSJ.

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More interestingly, future politicians will largely be AI-driven. I don’t mean that AI will replace humans as politicians. Absent a major cultural shift—and some serious changes in the law—that won’t happen. But as AI starts to look and feel more human, our human politicians will start to look and feel more like AI. I think we will be OK with it, because it’s a path we’ve been walking down for a long time. Any major politician today is just the public face of a complex socio-technical system. When the president makes a speech, we all know that they didn’t write it. When a legislator sends out a campaign email, we know that they didn’t write that either—even if they signed it. And when we get a holiday card from any of these people, we know that it was signed by an autopen. Those things are so much a part of politics today that we don’t even think about it. In the future, we’ll accept that almost all communications from our leaders will be written by AI. We’ll accept that they use AI tools for making political and policy decisions. And for planning their campaigns. And for everything else they do. None of this is necessarily bad. But it does change the nature of politics and politicians—just like television and the internet did.

From: How AI Will Change Democracy – Schneier on Security.

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HARARE, May 10 (Reuters) – Zimbabwe will fine businesses using inflated exchange rates as the government battles to maintain the value of its newly introduced gold-backed currency, the Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG).
Any business using an exchange rate higher than the official rate of 13.5 ZiG per U.S. dollar will be liable for a fine of 200,000 ZiG ($14,815), according to a government notice seen by Reuters.

From: Zimbabwe to fine businesses not using official new exchange rate | Reuters.

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The BRICS group of emerging nations has been agitating for a move away from US dollar dominance.

Last year, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called for a BRICS common currency. The economist who first gave the bloc its name said that idea was almost “embarrassing.”

While the setup of a common currency is practically challenging, the bloc — which comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, which make up its acronym, along with Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates, its new members — has called for more trade and lending in local currencies as a way to break up with the dollar.

Christopher Granville, the managing director of global political research at GlobalData TS Lombard, wrote in a Friday report that there might be more traction in ditching the dollar this year when the BRICS bloc meets in the Russian city of Kazan from October 22 to October 24.

From: De-Dollarization: BRICS Could Start Knocking Down USD Payments Pillar – Business Insider.

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Still, not everyone is so optimistic. “You can certainly understand why Starling needs another story, but I’m not sure how credible it is really,” one fintech executive said, noting the difficulty and risks of propping up small banks in so many different markets.
In any case, Engine faces a competitive scene. Cloud banking fintech Thought Machine, valued at $2.7bn (£2.1bn) in 2022, has landed deals with big players like Lloyds, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.
Other rivals include Mambu and 10x Banking. The latter’s head, Antony Jenkins, who was CEO of Barclays from 2012 to 2015, said the next decade of banking was “all about how you can harness technology to meet your customers’ needs, particularly in areas like artificial intelligence”.

From: Inside UK banks’ arms race against fintech start-ups.

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