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    Why a Biden presidency might not mean a return to pre-Trump foreign relations

    European leaders, desperate for an end to the Trump presidency, are being warned that four years of Joe Biden may present them with new challenges and not a simple restoration of the benign status quo in transatlantic relations prior to 2016.An evolving Biden doctrine about ending “forever wars” and protecting American workers from Chinese competition would require collective military and economic commitments from the EU that it is still ill-equipped to meet, foreign policy specialists have suggested.The overall tenor of the platform, emphasising post-Covid multilateralism and cooperation with fellow liberal democracies, is already welcome in Europe. Biden’s promised end to the institutionalised mayhem, animus towards allies and pandering to authoritarians will be a relief. Competence, reliability and dialogue may not be a high bar to set a presidency, but simple normality would amount to a revival of the idea of the west, such has been the chaos of the past four years.Forsaken multilateral institutions, such as the World Health Organization, would be rejoined, ending the US practice, in the words of Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser Tony Blinken, of simply going awol. “Ninety per cent of life is about showing up,” Blinken told Chatham House, adapting Woody Allen.Biden may seem to personify an old-school nostalgic Atlanticism of the foreign policy establishment. But the Democrat’s draft policy platform released last month reflects the influence of the progressive left, and an effort to absorb the lessons from the shock 2016 defeat.Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy adviser, speaking to the European Council on Foreign Relations podcast, agreed that Biden had moved to the left, saying he had faced mobilisation on foreign policy from progressives in a way that Barack Obama never experienced. As a result, foreign policy is no longer a backwater in democratic politics, and new links between foreign and economic policy are being drawn.Many of the Obama-era foreign policy advisers now clustered around Biden, dismissed as a horror show by some on the left, also deny that they crave simple restoration, saying everything has changed since 2016.Stung by Hillary Clinton’s defeat, they recognise the populists’ claim to have better constructed a foreign policy to help Americans’ daily lives at home. William Burns, a former state department official under Obama and one of Biden’s many advisers, recently wrote: “The wellbeing of the American middle class ought to be the engine that drives our foreign policy. We’re long overdue for a historic course correction at home.”Jeremy Shapiro, a senior researcher with the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR), also says there has been a pressure on Democrats to make their foreign policy more relevant to daily American lives. “There was this sense that in the Obama administration foreign policy was a plaything of the elites divorced from Americans’ daily existence. The change from Obama to Biden is there will be more focus on America.”Without threatening tariff wars, the Biden platform hints at a new scepticism about globalism and free trade. In broader policy terms, Europe will welcome Biden’s commitment to the Paris climate change treaty, and to Nato, “the single most significant military alliance in the history of the world,” as Biden described the organisation to the Munich security conference in 2019. To the relief of Berlin, the withdrawal of US troops from Germany would stop. A more consistent approach to Turkey would be sought. More

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    Coronavirus live news: Italy to get €210bn from new EU Covid-19 recovery fund

    €750bn EU Covid-19 recovery plan agreed in early morning talks; Trump to resume daily briefings; two Brazil ministers test positive
    EU leaders agree spending and €750bn Covid-19 recovery plans
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    WHO's Covid-19 inquiry is a shrewd move in a sea of disinformation

    In the world of epidemiology it’s sometimes said that pandemics are lived forwards and understood backwards.We encounter them head-on, chaotically, trying to fathom the disease in real time even while trying to mitigate its impact. Lessons generally come later as the evidence accumulates.What’s also true is public health, especially on a global scale, is rarely separable from politics. One of the complicating factors of the recently ended outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the country’s long history of conflict and the toxic relationship between central government in Kinshasa and the affected population in the country’s east, which led to deep and sometimes violent distrust.One of the most depressing subtexts of the coronavirus pandemic is how these kinds of conflicts are now being writ large as a range of actors, including western ones, have used the crisis to spread disinformation.The past months have been marked by dodgy dossiers leaked to the media and conspiracy theories, pushed by US officials engaged in a struggle for global influence with Beijing, suggesting that the virus was deliberately cooked up in a Chinese lab. More

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    Global report: WHO says 'evidence emerging' of airborne coronavirus spread

    WHO bows to pressure from scientists about risk from aerosol transmission; Brazil’s Bolsonaro tests positive; Israel health chief resigns Coronavirus latest updatesUS still ‘knee-deep’ in pandemic says FauciBrazilian president Jair Bolsonaro tests positive for Covid-19 Play Video 1:11 ‘Evidence emerging’ of airborne Covid-19 spread, says WHO – video The World Health Organization has acknowledged new […] More

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    The EU Should Collect Health Data Centrally

    When the COVID-19 disease began to spread in Europe, France and Germany prohibited the export of medical equipment, while Italy asked in vain for supplies of protective equipment under the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. Neither the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) nor the member states of the EU themselves were aware of […] More

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    President calls negative hydroxychloroquine study 'a Trump enemy statement' – live

    Trump falsely claims hydroxychloroquine ‘doesn’t harm you’ Vice-president says he is not taking anti-malaria drug Trump says he’s taking hydroxychloroquine despite FDA warnings Strikes erupt as US essential workers demand protection amid pandemic Coronavirus – latest global updates Get a fresh perspective on America – sign up to our First Thing newsletter LIVE Updated Play […] More

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    Trump is making America an obstacle in the global fight against Covid-19 | Michael H Fuchs

    Trump is making America an obstacle in the global fight against Covid-19 Michael H Fuchs The president’s deadly mishandling of the pandemic threatens to make the world’s most powerful country a pariah ‘Donald Trump does not seem to recognize that the only effective solution to the pandemic is to counter it everywhere.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP […] More