25/08/2025

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BRUSSELS: An influx of foreign workers has given the eurozone’s economy a boost in recent years, helping offset shorter working hours and lower real wages, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on Saturday. Migration into the European Union pushed its population to a record last year despite declining births but governments are placing curbs on new arrivals in response to domestic discontent. Lagarde listed a rise in the number of workers from outside the 20 countries that share the euro as a factor that supported the bloc’s economy despite a growing preference for fewer working hours and a fall in living standards in some sectors. “Although they represented only around 9% of the total labour force in 2022, foreign workers have accounted for half of its growth over the past three years,” Lagarde said. “Without this contribution, labour market conditions could be tighter and output lower.” She said gross domestic output in Germany LONDON: Outside supermarkets or in festival crowds, millions are now having their features scanned by real-time facial-recognition systems in the UK – the only European country to deploy the technology on a large scale. At London’s Notting Hill Carnival, where two million people are expected to celebrate Afro-Caribbean culture today, facial recognition cameras are being deployed near entrances and exits. The police said their objective was to identify and intercept wanted individuals by scanning faces in large crowds and comparing them with thousands of suspects already in the police database. The technology is “an effective policing tool which has already been successfully used to locate offenders at crime hotspots resulting in well over 1,000 arrests since the start of 2024”, said Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley. The technology was first tested in 2016 and its use has increased considerably over the past three years in the United Kingdom. Some 4.7 million faces were scanned in 2024 alone, according to the NGO Liberty. UK police have deployed the live facial-recognition system around 100 times since late January, compared to only 10 between 2016 and 2019. Examples include before two Six Nations rugby games and outside two Oasis concerts in Cardiff in July. When a person on a police “watchlist” passes near the cameras, the AI-powered system, often set up in a police van, triggers an alert. The suspect can then be immediately detained once police checks confirm their identity. But such mass data capture on the streets of London, also seen during the coronation of King Charles III in 2023, “treats us like a nation of suspects”, said the Big Brother Watch organisation. “There is no legislative basis, so we have no safeguards to protect our rights, and the police is left to write its own rules,” Rebecca Vincent, its interim director, told AFP. Its private use by supermarkets and clothing stores to combat the sharp rise in shoplifting has also raised concerns, with “very little information” available about how the data is being used, she added. Most use Facewatch, a service provider that compiles a list of suspected offenders in the stores it monitors and raises an alert if one of them enters the premises. “It transforms what it is to live in a city, because it removes the possibility of living anonymously,” said Daragh Murray, a lecturer in human rights law at Queen Mary University of London. “That can have really big implications for protests but also participation in political and cultural life,” he added. Often, those using such stores do not know that they are being profiled. “They should make people aware of it,” Abigail Bevon, a 26-year-old forensic scientist,

UK’s mass facial-recognition rollout alarms rights groups

safeguards”, such as disabling the cameras when officers are not present and deleting the biometric data of those who are not suspects. However, the UK’s human rights regulator said the Metropolitan Police’s policy on using the technology was “unlawful” because it was “incompatible” with rights regulations. Eleven organisations, including Human Rights Watch, wrote a letter to the Metropolitan Police chief, urging him not to use it during Notting Hill Carnival, accusing him of “unfairly targeting” the Afro-Caribbean community while highlighting the racial biases of AI. Shaun Thompson, a 39-year-old black man . said he was arrested after being wrongly identified as a criminal by one of these cameras. – AFP

exceptions such as counterterrorism. Apart from a few cases in the United States, “we do not see anything even close in European countries or other democracies”, stressed Vincent. “The use of such invasive tech is more akin to what we see in authoritarian states such as China.” Interior Minister Yvette Cooper recently promised that a “legal framework” governing its use would be drafted, focusing on “the most serious crimes”. But her ministry this month authorised police forces to use the technology in seven new regions. Usually placed in vans, permanent cameras are also scheduled to be installed for the first time in Croydon, south London, next month. Police assure that they have “robust

o Some 4.7 million faces were scanned in 2024 alone told AFP by the entrance of a London store using Facewatch. She said she was “very surprised” to find out how the technology was being used. While acknowledging that it could be useful for the police, she complained that its deployment by retailers was “invasive”. Since February, EU legislation governing artificial intelligence has prohibited the use of real-time facial recognition technologies, with

A van being used by the metropolitan police as part of their Facial Recognition operation is pictured close to the route of the ‘King’s Procession’, a 2km stretch from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey in London. – AFPPIC

Foreign workers have boosted eurozone economy: Lagarde

H&M launches first store in Brazil with local manufacturing ambitions

The company did not disclose its total investment in Brazil. The first Brazilian store, in an upscale shopping mall in Sao Paulo, focuses on women’s fashion. The second, set to open soon, will offer a wider assortment of products including women’s, men’s and children’s clothing, accessories and shoes. “We want to have pricing that is inclusive,” said Magnus Olsson, H&M’s regional manager for the Southern Hemisphere. The firm plans to increase local production while maintaining global standards, said Olsson. For now, H&M is producing shoes, beachwear and jeans in Brazil and importing the other products from different markets, including India, Bangladesh and Portugal. The executives said H&M will eventually open stores in other Brazilian states, without elaborating. The chain also has a distribution centre in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais that can be expanded. – Reuters

SAO PAULO: Swedish fast-fashion retailer H&M opened its first physical store in Brazil on Saturday and launched online operations in the country, where it is already producing some items locally, including footwear and beachwear, an executive said. The short-term goal is to open four stores in Sao Paulo state over the coming months, H&M Brazil’s country manager Joaquim Pereira said in an interview. “This courtship with Brazil has been going on for a long time,” he added, noting that the move took years of planning. H&M aims to compete locally, but not necessarily against Chinese brands such as Shein, which often have below-average prices, the executives said. “In Brazil there are many national brands that are very good, really very good. “In terms of price, in terms of quality,” said Pereira. “I think it’s a very, very competitive market, regardless of whether it’s a Chinese company or a local company.”

would be around 6% lower than in 2019 without foreign workers and added Spain’s strong economic performance since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic also owed much to the contribution of foreign labour. The EU’s population rose to a record 450.4 million people last year as net immigration offset a natural population decline for the fourth straight year. But this has come at a cost of political backlash from local voters, who have increasingly turned to far right parties. Germany’s new government, for example, has suspended family reunification and resettlement programmes as it seeks to regain support from voters drawn to the Alternative for Germany. In the United States, President Donald Trump has stepped up arrests of immigrants in the US illegally, cracked down on unlawful border crossings and stripped legal status from hundreds of thousands of migrants since his inauguration. – Reuters