Per Rusijos atakas Kyjive žuvo mažiausiai du žmonės, ketvirtadienį pranešė prezidentas Volodymyras Zelenskis.

Jungtinėse Valstijose viešintis prezidentas Gitanas Nausėda ketvirtadienį pradeda dviejų dienų darbo vizitą Majamyje.

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Europe faces major challenges to its competitiveness, including low productivity growth, labour shortages, demographic decline and technological gaps. While these issues dominate economic discussions, a significant opportunity often remains overlooked: accessibility. Around 90 million people in the European Union live with disabilities, and this number is expected to increase as the population ages. Yet employment rates among people with disabilities remain far below the EU average, leaving a substantial pool of talent, skills and purchasing power underutilized. Accessibility is not only a social or legal issue; it is also an economic strategy. By making products, services, buildings and digital platforms accessible, businesses can reach a wider audience, including people with disabilities, older adults, individuals with temporary limitations and consumers who simply benefit from better design. Rather than serving a niche market, accessibility expands markets and improves experiences for everyone. For many organizations, accessibility is still perceived as a compliance requirement or an additional cost. In reality, it should be viewed as an investment in quality, innovation and growth. Barriers that exclude people with disabilities often create difficulties for all users. Removing those barriers improves usability, customer satisfaction, brand reputation and commercial performance. Accessibility therefore contributes directly to competitiveness and business success. The European Accessibility Act, which entered into application in June 2025, reflects this changing perspective. It establishes common accessibility requirements for products and services such as e-commerce, banking, smartphones, computers, ticketing systems, self-service terminals and e-books. By harmonising standards across the single market, the legislation reduces fragmentation, lowers compliance costs and enables companies to scale accessible solutions more efficiently across Europe. Accessibility is not simply a matter of rights or compliance — it is a proven tool for driving innovation and strengthening Europe’s long-term competitiveness. Accessibility should also be understood as a quality standard. Many features originally developed for people with disabilities have become mainstream benefits. Captions, for example, were introduced to support deaf and hard-of-hearing users but are now widely used by all audiences. Likewise, clear navigation, readable content, intuitive interfaces, effective color contrast and logical information structures are not special accommodations. They are characteristics of products and services that simply work better. Research consistently shows that accessible digital design can increase web traffic, improve conversion rates, reduce cart abandonment and generate strong returns on investment. Conversely, poor accessibility often reflects wider usability failures. Many websites still contain basic barriers such as inadequate color contrast, missing labels or inaccessible forms, creating friction for all users and limiting overall performance. Accessibility is also economically efficient. When incorporated from the beginning of a project, costs remain relatively low. Retrofitting products, websites or services after launch is often far more expensive and less effective. For this reason, accessibility should be built into design and development processes from the outset rather than treated as an afterthought. Accessibility also reduces the environmental and economic cost of artificial intelligence. For decades, digital accessibility has been defended on three main grounds: it is a fundamental right, it is a legal obligation, and it opens access to a large and often underserved market. All three arguments remain valid. However, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) introduces a fourth dimension that is increasingly relevant for Europe’s competitiveness: efficiency. Accessibility is fundamentally about making information understandable. Accessible websites and documents clearly identify headings, buttons, form fields, images, languages and relationships between pieces of content through structured, semantic coding. These features were originally designed to support people using assistive technologies, but they provide an additional and increasingly important benefit: they help AI systems understand content more efficiently. AI relies on context and structure to interpret information. When digital content is properly labeled and organized, AI systems can process it directly. When that information is missing, the system must infer meaning, perform additional processing and consume more computational resources. In practice, inaccessible content requires more machine work, increasing electricity consumption, water usage in data centers, processing costs and response times. Recent research modeling the interaction between AI systems and digital content found that accessible versions of the same webpages, documents, and online transactions can reduce AI processing work by between 70 percent and 99 percent, depending on the use case. The same reductions apply to electricity consumption, water usage, and associated carbon emissions because these factors are directly linked to computational effort. The implications are significant. At scale, organizations receiving millions of AI-powered queries each year could reduce operational costs while simultaneously lowering energy consumption and environmental impact. Accessibility therefore becomes not only a tool for inclusion and usability, but also a practical mechanism for improving the efficiency and sustainability of AI systems. This emerging reality is particularly relevant in Europe. For the first time, European legislation is advancing along two complementary paths: requiring digital products and services to be accessible while also increasing transparency and accountability regarding the energy and water consumption of data centers. Accessibility contributes to both objectives through the same technical measures. When incorporated from the beginning of a project, accessibility costs remain relatively low. Retrofitting later is far more expensive. Demographic trends further reinforce its importance. Europe’s growing silver economy, driven by consumers aged 50 and over, represents one of the continent’s largest and fastest-growing markets. These consumers increasingly demand products and services that are simple, safe and intuitive to use. Tourism provides another example, as accessible destinations attract more visitors, encourage longer stays, foster customer loyalty and generate greater spending while improving experiences for all travelers. Accessibility is also becoming increasingly relevant in the age of AI. The same features that make digital content accessible to people, such as structured information, semantic coding, alternative text and properly tagged documents, also make it easier for AI systems to process information accurately. Accessible content improves data quality, reduces inefficiencies and helps AI systems perform more reliably, making accessibility an enabler of innovation rather than a constraint. Achieving these benefits, however, requires more than legislation. Organizations need knowledge, skills and implementation capacity. This is the role of AccessibleEU, the European Accessibility Resource Centre. Through training, technical guidance, knowledge-sharing and collaboration, AccessibleEU helps businesses, public administrations and professionals translate accessibility requirements into practical solutions and build expertize across Europe. By creating a common knowledge base and sharing best practices, it helps ensure that accessibility is implemented consistently across sectors and countries. Spain’s ONCE Social Group provides a compelling example of accessibility as an economic asset. Through ONCE, Fundación ONCE and ILUNION, the organization has demonstrated that inclusion and business success can reinforce one another. Today, it is the fourth-largest employer in Spain and the world’s largest employer of people with disabilities, showing how accessibility can unlock talent, improve productivity, stimulate innovation, and expand markets while generating social and economic value. The conclusion is clear: Europe should treat accessibility as both competitiveness infrastructure and a quality standard. Alongside digital transformation, skills development, energy policy and the single market, accessibility should become a central element of economic strategy. Properly understood, it is not simply a matter of rights or compliance but a proven tool for improving products, driving innovation, expanding markets, increasing employment and strengthening Europe’s long-term competitiveness. Accessibility is no longer the social dimension of economic policy; it is increasingly one of Europe’s most powerful and underappreciated engines for growth, resilience and prosperity. Barriers that exclude people with disabilities often create difficulties for all users. Removing them improves usability for everyone. Jesús Hernández GalánDirector of accessibility and innovation, Fundación ONCE Disclaimer POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT The sponsor is Fundación ONCE The advertisement relates to EU accessibility and competitiveness policy and advocates for accessibility to become a central element of Europe’s economic, digital and innovation strategy. More information here.

PARIS — French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon says he wants to set France’s debt “on fire.” Now his allies are scrambling to spell out what he means. The leftist leader’s controversial plan to write off billions of euros worth of French debt, which has caused uproar among his political opponents and central bankers alike, is also prompting his economic advisors to try to soften his rhetoric. “Mélenchon’s comments sparked a reaction and fueled debate; in that sense, they were successful,” said Eric Berr, an economist with Institut La Boétie, a think tank affiliated with Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party, in an interview. But Berr and other left-leaning economists have tried to reframe the debate around what they see as the grip of financial markets over sovereign debt. However, Mélenchon isn’t tamping down his language. With polls suggesting he could qualify for the first time in a second-round face-off against far-right leader Marine Le Pen, and as rivals from more moderate parties are struggling to emerge from a jam-packed field, the 75-year-old appears keen to set France’s fiscal debate on his own terms. Playing hot and cold In a press conference with online media and influencers last June, the presidential candidate outlined his idea of “freezing the public debt held by the Bank of France at a zero interest rate,” echoing a proposal from his previous presidential campaign to convert these debts into perpetual zero-interest debt — in other words, loans with no repayment date and no interest payable. The French central bank holds less than one-sixth of French debt, totaling some €488 billion. Mélenchon’s proposal would be like “putting the debt in the fridge,” he first said — before going on to talk about “throwing it to the fire.” The latter metaphor sparked a Europe-wide controversy later in the summer, fueled by a viral post on X reposting the clip in August. Political opponents have predicted a “financial crisis,” “ruin” or “bankruptcy” should the state fail to follow through on its financial commitments. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, alongside the Governor of Germany’s Bundesbank, Joachim Nagel, and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Moulin, said that such a measure would be “illegal.” In an opinion piece published in August, Berr and other economists aligned with Mélenchon tried to cool the controversy by emphasizing the “freeze” rather than the “fire.” “Mélenchon’s idea of ‘putting the securities in the fridge’ means to remove part of the stock of French sovereign debt from the market [by placing it in the central bank’s vaults], in order to shield it from speculative attacks,” the opinion piece reads. In other words, unlike private investors, who can sell the government debt securities they hold if they no longer consider France’s economic policy to be credible — thereby driving up interest rates — the ECB, for its part, holds on to securities it has acquired until they mature: it freezes them, so to speak. “The central issue is not cancellation as such, but how we break free from our dependence on the financial markets,” Berr said. The opinion piece then suggests that the central bank should maintain its holdings of public debt — what they refer to as “the freeze” — or even increase them. These tools already exist, as the ECB introduced them during the sovereign debt crises of the 2010s and the Covid pandemic in 2020. But they are being phased out, and since central banks are independent from governments, only they can decide to use them again. Frozen for eternity The freezing metaphor, however, still allows for some ambiguity. While Berr and his coauthors seek to freeze debt from financial markets until maturity, many in France Unbowed argue for converting the debt held by the central bank into perpetual debt — something closer to sovereign debt cryogenics. While the central bank has already purchased government debt securities on the financial markets — what the opinion piece is suggesting — it has never canceled them or converted them into perpetual debt — what Mélenchon wants. But Mélenchon continues to use the terms “freezing” and “canceling” interchangeably. “We have proposed […] that these debt securities held by the European Central Bank should either be frozen or written off,” he reiterated in a Sept. 12 speech. His policy team said in comments that this aimed “to emphasize that there [were] several techniques for neutralizing the debt held by the European Central Bank.” Mélenchon’s proposal sets him apart from his rivals, particularly those on the right and in the center, for whom fiscal discipline — particularly when it comes to pensions — is a top priority. Yet it appears to resonate with French voters, and the presidential candidate was quick to publicize a Sept. 5 poll showing 43% of the public supported canceling parts of the debt, while only 31% opposed it. Critics of the candidate, notably central bankers, argue that this would be illegal, as it would amount to direct financing of member states by the ECB, which is prohibited by the treaties that laid the foundation for the euro and the ECB. The treaties would therefore need to be amended, which would take time and require unanimous approval. Although he disputes that the measure is unlawful, Mélenchon emphasized that, should he win in 2027, he would seek allies at the European level to push the measure through. The ice is melting But beyond any potential political and legal hurdle, Mélenchon’s proposal faces, above all, an existential threat as the amount of French debt the Bank of France holds is shrinking. Mélenchon wants to “freeze or cancel” only the portion of the debt held by the French central bank, which he put at 18% in June. His estimate, however, is out of date. By the end of 2025, this proportion had already fallen to just 15%, according to the specialist website Fipeco. And it is expected to further decline. In early 2025, the ECB discontinued the debt-purchasing policy it implemented in response to the economic crises of 2010 and 2020. As a result, the Bank of France — which conducts operations in France on behalf of the ECB — is gradually being depleted of these securities as they are redeemed. France Unbowed MP Eric Coquerel said he had received a letter from Moulin, the Bank of France governor, informing him that the bank’s stock of securities would fall by €80.6 billion this year, dropping to €465.3 billion by the year-end. The share could therefore fall somewhere between 11% and 12%, Coquerel said. “That’s what worries me most,” added Coquerel, who favors canceling the debt. It is also for this reason that maintaining the stock has become the priority for France Unbowed. If the central bank no longer holds any debt securities, “there will be nothing left to write off” or to convert into perpetual debt, Coquerel said.

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