MADRID: Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Monday he had decided to continue in office, days after abruptly announcing he was considering his future following the launch of a corruption investigation against his wife.
The center-left prime minister, 52, had surprised foes and allies alike when he said on Wednesday he was taking time from public duty to consider quitting. He described the court investigation of his wife Begona Gomez for influence peddling and business corruption as orchestrated by his opponents.
Sanchez met King Felipe VI on Monday — a step that would have been necessary should he have decided to resign — but announced in a televised address that he had informed the monarch of his decision to stay on. He had been encouraged to stay by widespread expressions of support over the weekend, Sanchez said.
“I have decided to go on, if possible even stronger as prime minister. This is not business as usual, things are going to be different,” he said in a national broadcast.
His announcement that he might quit had caused further turmoil in Spanish politics, where a fractious parliament has struggled to form coalition governments after close elections. Should a new election have been required, it would have been the fourth in five years.
The opposition will try to exploit the sign of indecision from Sanchez, but the impact may be limited because Spain’s political landscape is already so polarized, said Ignacio Jurado, political science professor at Madrid’s Carlos III University.
“His credibility is already hotly contested and voters have already given it to him or taken it away,” he said. “As a leader he has shown a weakness and it’s something that the opposition will exploit a lot.”

RIYADH: The global shortage of teachers will not be remedied solely through the use of artificial intelligence, according to education experts and decision-makers at the World Economic Forum’s Special Meeting in Riyadh.

“Teachers is the biggest problem at the moment for the education sector in low- and middle-income countries,” Laura Frigenti, chief of the Global Partnership for Education platform, told the panel on Sunday.

Gaspard Twagirayezu, Rwanda’s education minister, said that AI can revolutionize education and provide solutions for the global shortage of teachers.

“Of course, AI and technology are not going to replace teachers,” he added. “We can make sure that teachers are properly educated.”

“Here, we are trying to talk about how AI can help in producing education materials for the teachers so that we do not have all these expensive training sessions that we all have to go through.”

Stressing that AI can support teachers in the classroom, Twagirayezu explained that “teachers can be enabled to learn on their own using AI.”

Frigenti said that when it comes to harnessing the power of artificial intelligence in education, “there is not a kind of a one-size-fits-all technology that you can just import into one particular country.”

“You have to start from the conditions of that country and think in terms of a solution,” she continued. If there are no tailored solutions, this would “create a much bigger gap between a part of the world that can invest $8,000 per child per year in education and a part of the world that barely manages to invest $80.”

She added: “And that is going to create all sorts of socio-economic disparities, inequalities within society, (and) inequalities between the Global North and Global South.”

Frigenti added: “We integrate the improvements that technology and AI can add to the way in which the sector performs or is managed to a bigger way of thinking about the sector’s needs to transform, which includes a lot — changing the curricula (and) thinking about what you have to do for the (teachers) problem.”

The panel discussion, titled “Is Education Ready for AI,” featured speakers including Rudayna Abdo, founder and CEO of Thaki; Jack Azagury, group CEO of Accenture; and Deemah Al-Yahya, secretary-general of the Digital Cooperation Organization.