Hi –

Made some changes I think you’ll like:

• Got Claude to rebuild my resource pages. It found a lot of stuff I didn’t have before and suggested I added New Zealand and Singapore (it suggested Japan and Switzerland, but their English coverage was not consistent, so…). And it made some design decisions as to level of detail – there might be a link or two I might passed on but, by and large, it looks like a first good stop for people looking for stuff. Feedback always welcome
• I changed the Practitioners Guide and Plain Language Guide to not just give names of things like FAQs, legislation and General Licenses, but to actually link to them. And the list of these guides is now accessible from the same Resources page.

And, of course, the 3rd edition of the newsletter….

Hi, all!

Just a few notes in case you haven’t noticed:

• I’ve been creating overall sanctions program guides – one more involved for practitioners who are not lawyers, and “plain language” guides for those newer to the biz. These can be found under the categories For Non-Lawyers and In Plain Language
• I’ve also had Claude make foreign language translations of the Venezuelan and Iran programs. Yes, I will undoubtedly do the same for Russia, Belarus and Cuba. They all have the category Foreign Language Translations… and Spanish and Farsi (for now).
• Still looking for input on Burnin’, Briefly, my occasional digest of Burning Question posts. Either reply to the poll in the latest issue, or comment somewhere here…
• And, in general, always looking for feedback as to how to make this more useful to everyone. I think the long weekend is going to include a review of the various resource pages… isn’t that what extra days off are for?

Enjoy the holiday, folks! Rainy for the next 2 days up here in New Jersey… hoping for clear skies for local holiday parades on Monday.

Mr. S

One thing Mr. Watchlist ran afoul of was keeping things updated. Claude is going to help me rectify this.

Firstly, I now have a way of keeping the events calendar more reliably up to date. Basically, Claude will produce an Excel for me of events in the industry with URLs, dates, locations, sponsoring organizations, etc. on demand. And, if I give it the previous Excel, it will produce a new workbook which also tells me if the listed event was not in the previous file, or for whom details have changed, making it easier for me to skip to the records which need actual maintenance. Unfortunately, Claude tells me it can’t update my actual Google Calendar – but even this eliminates an overwhelming majority of my prior effort.

In a similar vein, I am going to create an agent with Claude Cowork that will keep my resource pages updated. However, that is going to mean I’m going to need to restructure them. That will take a while, but it’ll be worth it… and might also allow me to provide more content under Resources.

So, keep an eye out for those changes… of course, I will post when I’ve made my changes.

I decided to give Claude a try, since my wife has been raving about it. And it did a charitable job putting together a sightseeing itinerary for my fall vacation (although it somehow thought I was looking at 2025 dates and didn’t think about whether or not the attractions it recommended were actually open on the days it proposed), and it put together a nice primer on fraud, which is an area I’ve had some interest in…

So, I decided to ask it to look at the site and make 3 recommendations to spiff it up.

Recommendation #1 was to edit the “About” and “The Mr. Sanctions Difference” pages to get to the point about who I am and what I intended the site to be. Done.

Recommendation #2 is to add more short commentary to posts – why a particular piece of news matters to us. I’m not sure I have the bandwidth to do this on every post – I may have a weekly roundup instead. After all, this is a labor of love that I fit in around a 10+ hour workday, the dog and my family life.

But something tells me I can tell my AI agents to do some research for me and put regulatory changes in context – not just when I notice something odd, like SECO’s late designation release or the change to the OFAC Russia-related General License that removed the prior expiration date rather than extending it. More on that later.

Recommendation #3 is the most interesting: Create a place for people new to the site to get acclimated to the cold water in the pool without having to jump in feet first. That will take some thought… but not a terrible idea.

Of course, this also reminded me I ought to update the Industry Events Calendar and review the other resource pages… no rest for the compliant, much less the wicked, right?

Hi –

Just wanted to let you about some updates I’ve made recently:

• Redid the About and The Mr. Sanctions Difference pages to make it clearer why I’m doing this and why (hopefully) you should care
• Updated the Industry Events Calendar with all events I can find through the end of the year, other than training classes and solutions provider events. I’ve got a prompt that will help me find events a lot easier, and make it easier to keep at least 6 months’ of events in it at all times.
• Updated all the Resources pages – probably the most manual work of all of this, especially with revamps over the last few years both in the US and UK

In addition to all this, I’ve started to be more proactive in going beyond the release to provide better context, analysis and commentary. These will likely be in Burning Question posts – and often I’ll be providing the prompt I used to get the response I got back. Because, you know, wouldn’t hurt us if we all learned how to be better at our “day jobs” as well as other research-inensive work (I recently asked Claude to make a sightseeing itinerary for my fall vacation)…

Mr. S