A stubborn government

It is unfortunate that the government chose to plough ahead with its plans to strike out the right of ordinary citizens to directly petition the courts with a request for a magisterial inquiry into suspected wrongdoing.

There is nothing genuine about this stubborn approach. The only reason government is doing this is because it wants to protect its ministers and top public officials from judicial scrutiny. The argument that the government wants to defend people from persecution is just a smokescreen.

We would have thought the value of magisterial inquiries has more than been established after the conclusion of the Vitals and 17 Black inquiries that led to prosecutions. These inquiries were initiated on the behest of ordinary individuals. Had they not done so, nothing would have been probed because the police had shown no commitment to do so.

This is why, the government’s urgency to reform the manner by which inquests are carried out is suspicious. And coming on the back of five requests for inquiries made by Jason Azzopardi over the Christmas holidays – all have been rejected by inquiring magistrates and no one has been probed injustly – the timing is just diabolical.

Prime Minister Robert Abela opened the debate yesterday on the proposed reform, ignoring the criticism made by several entities, not least the Chamber of Advocates. It seems, the government has decided on its course of action and will simply ignore all concerns raised.

Quoting the words of former Labour MP Jose Herrera from his parliamentary intervention in 2006 when the Nationalist administration at the time wanted to stifle magisterial inquiries: ‘We’re going back to the times of Mussolini.’

How times change!

EU fund for AI a positive development

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the AI Action Summit in Paris the EU executive plans to create a €20 billion fund to invest in artificial intelligence.

The fund, partly financed from existing EU funding programmes, aims to leverage up to €200 billion, which could come from EU governments, private sources and the European Investment Bank.

Von der Leyen said the fund will help finance the creation of AI gigafactories in the EU to provide the computing power to train the largest and most complex AI models. These factories will provide the computing capacity that AI start-up companies may lack.

This is the bloc’s biggest response so far to the massive US investment plans announced last month by President Donald Trump.

“Our goal is that every company, not only the big players, have access to the computing power they need,” Von der Leyen said, calling it “the largest public investment for AI in the world, which will unlock over 10 times more private investment.”

The EU cannot allow itself to fall behind in the global race to harness the power of AI and this initiative is a good first step. Europe needs to foster a start-up culture and support home-grown innovation in a fast-paced world where rival blocs are sparing no punches in their quest to dominate the AI race.

But as Von der Leyen outlined, the EU must do it the European way, based on openness and cooperation. The fund will help supercharge the process.

What the Commission has to ensure now is that financing does not get bogged down in excessive red tape.

Another aspect that cannot be ignored is the impact of this new frontier on energy demand. Supercomputers and data centres guzzle a lot of electricity and unless the higher demand is going to be met through green sources, they could become major contributors to the EU’s carbon footprint.

Within this context, the EU cannot relent on its efforts to support investment in renewable energy sources across the bloc. It would do well to also support the production of green hydrogen for commercial use and nuclear power. In this way, any negative impact from the AI drive will be mitigated because electricity is being produced by cleaner sources.