EU, New Zealand sign free trade agreement

July 10, 2023 News Editor

The European Union and New Zealand signed a free trade agreement on Sunday which, according to Brussels, should lead to a 30% increase in bilateral trade within a decade.

Referring to the agreement, which will be concluded in June 2022 after four years of tough negotiations, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed the text as ‘ambitious’ and ‘very balanced’.

“New Zealand is a key partner for us in the Indo-Pacific region, and this free trade agreement will bring us even closer together,” she added in a statement from Brussels.

For his part, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins praised a text that represents “enormous benefits” for both partners.

The EU is New Zealand’s third-largest trading partner, exporting in particular wine, fruit and meat to Europe.

Bilateral trade in goods between the two zones was worth just over €9 billion in 2022.

According to Brussels, EU exports to the Pacific archipelago could increase by up to €4.5 billion a year. EU investment in New Zealand could also increase by up to 80%.

The text also contains a chapter dedicated to ‘sustainable development’, which is unprecedented in a European trade agreement.

“With unprecedented social and climate commitments, (this agreement) promotes fair and green growth while strengthening Europe’s economic security”, said Ursula Von Der Leyen.

To come into force, the agreement will still need to be approved by the European Parliament and ratified by New Zealand.

Greece votes in parliamentary polls for second time in five weeks

June 25, 2023 News Editor

Greeks are voting for a second time in little more than a month to elect a new parliament, with voters expected to give former Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative party a second term in office.

Polling stations across the country opened at 7am (04:00 GMT) on Sunday and will close 12 hours later, with results expected by about 17:00 GMT.

The vote is overshadowed by a boat wreck off the coast of western Greece about a week ago in which hundreds of refugees and migrants either died or went missing.

But the disaster is unlikely to significantly affect the overall outcome as Greeks are expected to focus on domestic economic issues.

Mitsotakis, 55, is eyeing a second four-year term as prime minister after his New Democracy party won by a huge margin in May but fell short of gaining enough parliamentary seats to form a government.

With a new electoral law now favouring the winning party with bonus seats, he is hoping to win enough seats to form a strong majority in the 300-member parliament.

The new electoral system grants a bonus of between 25 and 50 seats to the winning party, depending on its performance, which makes it easier for a party to win more than the required 151 seats in the parliament to form a government.

His main rival is Alexis Tsipras, the 48-year-old head of the left-wing Syriza party who served as prime minister from 2015 to 2019, during some of the most turbulent years of Greece’s nearly decade-long financial crisis.

Tsipras fared dismally in the May elections, coming a distant second, 20 percentage points behind the New Democracy. He has been trying to rally his voter base, a task complicated by splinter parties formed by some of his former associates.

Sunday’s election comes after hundreds of refugees and migrants died or went missing in southern Greece when an overcrowded fishing trawler heading from Libya to Italy capsized and sank, drawing criticism over how Greek authorities handled the rescue.

But the disaster, one of the worst in the Mediterranean in recent years, has done little to dent Mitsotakis’s 20-point lead in opinion polls over Tsipras, with the economy at the forefront of most voters’ concerns.

As Greece gradually recovers from its brutal, financial crisis, voters appear happy to return to power a prime minister who delivered economic growth and lowered unemployment.

Mitsotakis, a Harvard graduate, comes from one of Greece’s most prominent political families: his late father Constantine Mitsotakis served as prime minister in the 1990s, his sister served as foreign minister and his nephew is the mayor of Athens. He has promised to rebrand Greece as a pro-business and fiscally responsible Eurozone member.

The strategy, so far, has worked: New Democracy routed left-wing opponents in May, crucially winning Socialist strongholds on the island of Crete and lower-income areas surrounding Athens, some for the first time.

Trailing in opinion polls and on the back of his particularly poor showing in the May vote, Tsipras finds himself fighting for his political survival. His political campaign in the run-up to the previous elections was deemed by many as being too negative, focusing heavily on scandals that hit the Mitsotakis government late in its term.

Despite the scandals, which included revelations of wiretapping targeting senior politicians and journalists, and a deadly February 28 train crash that exposed poor safety measures, Tsipras failed to make any significant gains against Mitsotakis.

Whether the conservative leader will manage to form a government, and how strong it will be, could depend on how many parties make it past the 3 percent threshold to enter parliament.

As many as nine parties have a realistic chance, ranging from ultra-religious groups to two left-wing splinter parties founded by top former members of the Syriza government.

In the May elections, held under a proportional representation system, Mitsotakis’s party fell five seats short, and he decided not to try to form a coalition government, preferring instead to take his chances with a second election.

Culled from AlJazeera

New European Prize for Women Innovators launched by EIC, EIT

June 17, 2023 News Editor

THE European Innovation Council (EIC) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) have taken their partnership to the next level and launched today a revamped European Prize for Women Innovators.

This joint competition will reward an even wider community of women innovators, celebrating their achievements and giving them more opportunities. The awards will be given to the most inspiring women entrepreneurs whose innovation is creating a positive impact for people and planet.

According to Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age, this new award will be given to inspire Europe and women innovators. Launched by the European Innovation Council and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, the award aims at removing barriers to women in business and tech. I look forward to seeing many contributors.

Margaritis Schinas, Vice-President for Promoting our European Way of Life, said: “This new award is a great way for Europe to show its shared commitment to innovation and gender equality. It’s a cause that will bring the EIC and EIT closer together – natural allies in breaking down barriers to women in business and tech. My hope is for a large field of competing women innovators and entrepreneurs so we can show the diversity in European tech!”

Three winners will be announced at the European Innovation Council Summit in March 2024 in each of the following categories:

Women Innovators: This category is open to all women founders and co-founders from across the EU and Associated Countries. The winner is awarded EUR 100 000, and two runners-up are awarded EUR 70 000 and EUR 50 000 respectively.

Rising Innovators: This category is open to promising young innovators under the age of 35. The winner is awarded EUR 50 000, and two runners-up are awarded EUR 30 000 and EUR 20 000 respectively.

EIT Women Leadership: This category is open to those with a direct link to the EIT Community or one of the existing Knowledge and Innovation Communities. The winner is awarded EUR 50 000, and two runners-up are awarded EUR 30 000 and EUR 20 000 respectively.

An award designed to celebrate women and inspire Europe

These awards will be given to the most inspiring women entrepreneurs whose groundbreaking innovation is creating a positive impact for people and planet. By spotlighting their ingenuity, the European Prize for Women Innovators will show the central role women can (and should) play in creating a new more sustainable Europe, and inspire people of all ages to join the new vision the EIC and EIT are building of women as tech and climate leaders.

Removing barriers to women in business and tech

The EIC and EIT said it knows that systemic barriers still pose obstacles to women’s advancement in the realms of technological innovation and business. That’s why they’ve made women’s empowerment in those sectors core to their mission.

Women are an important source of talent that too often are discouraged or turned away from the world of tech. The EIT’s own study in association with Dealroom revealed that inclusivity unlocks Europe’s potential for innovation. In fact, it found that women-founded tech scale-ups grew 1.2x faster than their competitors over the past five years showing the degree of potential Europe can tap if it makes tech more inclusive to women.

By contrast, excluding women is a huge risk the tech world cannot afford to make. Studies already show that without women’s perspectives and inclusion in the creation of cutting-edge tech, sectors like AI could actually fail to meet people’s real needs and instead reproduce the inequities and harms already present in our status quo.

The European Prize for Women Innovators is now the latest in a series of steps the EIC and EIT are taking to make sure Europe can make the most of inclusive innovation. It won’t just decide winners and who gets prizes – it will connect women innovators, give them a chance to network and build out a community, and help boost the future number of women in leadership roles by normalising the idea of women in charge.

EU Takes Major Step Toward Regulating A.I.

June 15, 2023 News Editor

The European Union took an important step on Wednesday toward passing what would be one of the first major laws to regulate artificial intelligence, a potential model for policymakers around the world as they grapple with how to put guardrails on the rapidly developing technology.

The European Parliament, a main legislative branch of the European Union, passed a draft law known as the A.I. Act, which would put new restrictions on what are seen as the technology’s riskiest uses. It would severely curtail uses of facial recognition software, while requiring makers of A.I. systems like the ChatGPT chatbot to disclose more about the data used to create their programs.

The vote is one step in a longer process. A final version of the law is not expected to be passed until later this year.

The European Union is further along than the United States and other large Western governments in regulating A.I. The 27-nation bloc has debated the topic for more than two years, and the issue took on new urgency after last year’s release of ChatGPT, which intensified concerns about the technology’s potential effects on employment and society.

Policymakers everywhere from Washington to Beijing are now racing to control an evolving technology that is alarming even some of its earliest creators. In the United States, the White House has released policy ideas that include rules for testing A.I. systems before they are publicly available and protecting privacy rights. In China, draft rules unveiled in April would require makers of chatbots to adhere to the country’s strict censorship rules. Beijing is also taking more control over the ways makers of A.I. systems use data.

How effective any regulation of A.I. can be is unclear. In a sign that the technology’s new abilities are emerging seemingly faster than lawmakers are able to address them, earlier versions of the E.U. law did not give much attention to so-called generative A.I. systems like ChatGPT, which can produce text, images and video in response to prompts.

Under the latest version of Europe’s bill passed on Wednesday, generative A.I. would face new transparency requirements. That includes publishing summaries of copyrighted material used for training the system, a proposal supported by the publishing industry but opposed by tech developers as technically infeasible. Makers of generative A.I. systems would also have to put safeguards in place to prevent them from generating illegal content.

Francine Bennett, acting director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, an organization in London that has pushed for new A.I. laws, said the E.U. proposal was an “important landmark.”

“Fast-moving and rapidly repurposable technology is of course hard to regulate, when not even the companies building the technology are completely clear on how things will play out,” Ms. Bennett said. “But it would definitely be worse for us all to continue operating with no adequate regulation at all.”

The European bill takes a “risk-based” approach to regulating A.I., focusing on applications with the greatest potential for human harm. This would include where A.I. systems were used to operate critical infrastructure like water or energy, in the legal system, and when determining access to public services and government benefits. Makers of the technology would have to conduct risk assessments before putting the tech into everyday use, akin to the drug approval process.

A tech industry group, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said the European Union should avoid overly broad regulations that inhibit innovation.

“The E.U. is set to become a leader in regulating artificial intelligence, but whether it will lead on A.I. innovation still remains to be seen,” said Boniface de Champris, the group’s Europe policy manager. “Europe’s new A.I. rules need to effectively address clearly defined risks, while leaving enough flexibility for developers to deliver useful A.I. applications to the benefit of all Europeans.”

One major area of debate is the use of facial recognition. The European Parliament voted to ban uses of live facial recognition, but questions remain about whether exemptions should be allowed for national security and other law enforcement purposes.

Another provision would ban companies from scraping biometric data from social media to build out databases, a practice that drew scrutiny after the facial-recognition company Clearview AI used it.

Tech leaders have been trying influence the debate. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has in recent months visited with at least 100 American lawmakers and other global policymakers in South America, Europe, Africa and Asia, including Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. Mr. Altman has called for regulation of A.I., but has also said the European Union’s proposal may be prohibitively difficult to comply with.

After the vote on Wednesday, a final version of the law will be negotiated by representatives of the three branches of the European Union — the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union. Officials said they hoped to reach a final agreement by the end of the year.

Culled from The New York Times