the taliban in afghanistan have declared a ceasefire for the three days of the muslim festival of eid. the militant group had stepped up its attacks in recent weeks but now says they will restrict themselves to defensive operations. the afghan president has ordered the army to respect the truce. funerals have been taking place in pakistan for some of the victims of friday's plane crash in karachi, in which 97 people died. the government has launched an official inquiry, but the pakistan pilots‘ association says it has no faith in the official investigation. now on bbc news — dateline london.

hello and welcome to dateline london. i'm carrie gracie. this week: for many countries, the emergency phase of the covid pandemic is coming to a close. is this a moment for governments which failed the test of that first phase to redeem themselves? who has a smart plan for the long hard recovery that begins now? my guests — on socially distanced screens — stephanie baker of bloomberg news and iain martin of the times. welcome to both of you. and here in the studio, observing the two—metre rule, jo coburn, presenter of the bbc‘s politics live programme. let's start with the uk. iain, i am going to throw the first question to you. we have lots going on. lots of rows over all kinds of things.

we have four governments to assess individually. how are they doing? the picture is very mixed and it is fair to say that number 10 and boris johnson, who had a very difficult start to the crisis, and already people are getting in their excuses early for the public inquiry which is bound to come. what they are trying to do i suppose is a betterjob of coordinating things on the way out of the crisis. it's complex because, as you said, you have the devolved administrations in cardiff, belfast and scotland, and the disease in the uk is moving at a different speed in different parts of the country, obviously. scotland in particular seems to be a couple of weeks behind where london is and there is huge pressure in the south of england for relaxation but nervousness in other parts of the country

where the disease is still more prevalent, for things to be done more carefully and more slowly. so it is really difficult for the uk—wide treasury, for example — which wants to get the economy moving again to coordinate all of that and it is fair to say it has been quite fractious in public. behind—the—scenes, the impression is of better coordination than was the case a couple of months ago. what do you think? you are looking at this inside the westminster petri dish. at the beginning, borisjohnson‘s critics said the government was veering between complacency and panic. this past week we saw a very swift u—turn on foreign health workers having to pay for nhs care. is that the sign of a new or fleeter footwork or an opposition leader

making a running? i think you can overstate the opposition's role in terms of actually triggering that u—turn. it was within 24 hours. keir starmer did very much focus his mind around what he would say was a moral issue. how could it be right that some of the very people who were protecting the nhs, possibly helping borisjohnson himself when he was ill — care workers from outside the economic area — were going to have to be charged to use the very service that they were working in and protecting? borisjohnson held his fire in response to keir starmer and stuck to his guns in response — i think what changed for the government, and for him personally, because he said he had thought about it a lot, which was revealing, was that a number of conservative mps said straight off they were not going to support it. and all of a sudden you are presented with this image of what is the right thing to do? it's a hackneyed phrase, and the common—sense of keir starmer allowing some of those tory mps to be able to say we are not going to back it despite a thumping majority that borisjohnson has,

they changed their minds. and as a final point it will be interesting to see what happens to the status of care workers, particularly in a post—brexit immigration system — will they be elevated out of this low skilled area of work, which would change where they would come on a points system. it has been a difficult week of tough headlines for the treasury. we have record borrowing, terrible retail figures. do you get a sense at this point that the treasury has a plan for this new post—pandemic world? i think it has a good short—term plan. i'm not convinced it has a good long—term plan or if it does it has not shared it with us. the bank of england has said that the three—month lockdown could lead to a 14% drop in gdp, which would be the deepest recession since the 18th century. i think there had been hopes

of recovery, that the economy in this medically—induced coma would bounce back, but that is looking unlikely because consumer demand is expected to remain depressed for months if not longer. people are scared to go out, scared to spend on things like travel, and i think the service sector will take a hit for quite a while. rishi sunak, the chancellor, was very wise in pushing ahead and creating this job—retention scheme and that has helped quite a bit, but for many companies they furloughed workers using the scheme and they have used it as kind of a life support. you know, the design and aim of it was to keep and retain jobs but i think once that programme starts to get unwound and companies are asked to contribute, i think what we are going to see is the real scale of the job losses.

longer term, i think we have to look at whether or not they try to use this as an opportunity to rebalance the economy away from the service sector perhaps supporting manufacturing, particularly in areas where we are seeing the supply chain in the uk exposed/ things like drugs and chemicals and medical supplies, but that's unlikely to make up for the loss ofjobs that are likely to happen in hospitality and tourism. on top of that, the very real prospect of a no—deal brexit or a minimal trade agreement that could have a further hit to the economy, and i don't see a real strategy in place to deal with all of that. brexit, it is hurtling down the track at us by year end. do you see it going ahead on schedule at this point? i do, actually. of course we should point

out the key decision, the crunch, is coming not in december when britain at the end of december leaves, the transition by which it continues following european rules, the crunch comes injune, where both sides, the eu and the uk, have to decide whether sufficient progress has been made to do a deal or whether itjust breaks down and you end up with something like a no—deal brexit. the calculation they make is perfectly reasonable which is that the economy has taken such a spectacular hit, as we just heard, the worst since the 18th century, but you are looking at a recession so deep that the uk government's calculation is would you really notice the increased effects of a no—deal brexit and are you going to get a better deal by waiting six months or a year? is it better to just crack on with it and try

to remodel the economy? that is the calculation they are making. it's possible, anything is possible, if there is a second wave for example, boris johnson might change his mind, but those around him seem particularly determined not to extend the transition. if borisjohnson tried to extend the transition, the politics would become impossible for him in terms of the house of commons, where i do not think the conservative party or his own mps would tolerate an extension. it would involve him, the person who delivered brexit and was elected to get it done, having to go back to the country and say, i don't think this can be done, we have to go and ask the european union if we can sign a cheque to carry on following eu rules. politically it is not plausible, so people need to adjust to the reality that an extension to the transition on either side is not going to happen. jo, is that how you read it?

i don't see there being a delay at this particular point. we will find out in a few weeks but they have stuck to their line that there will be no transition. what's interesting is if you thought about it the other way, we just had priti patel setting out and confirming the quarantine rules for people, travellers, coming into the uk. i think there's quite a lot of disquiet in business, tourism, hospitality, industries who will say, ok, you are going to stick to your brexit deadline, you want to open up the economy, of course we have still got a pandemic going, but how do you square that circle? because if we are not going to even think about having flights or people travelling from countries with low infection rates, this air—bridges, that is going

to kill off the recovery for now in those sectors and those particular areas and they are big areas for the uk. that is on the one hand. picking up on what stephanie said, i agree, rising unemployment, a loss of consumer demand, these are going to make it very difficult to have this recovery. there are a couple of things we know because ministers have said then. rishi sunak the chancellor implied early on when he was setting up his support schemes that the self—employed would have to pay tax levels similar to paye. borisjohnson has said there will not be a return to austerity, although we are not sure what that means when you think this is a conservative government that has allowed the biggest intervention, rightly people would say, by the state into our lives and into the economy. how will they change that? how will that look when we get a vaccine hopefully in the next year or 18 months? also all of the ministers have said we need to value our nurses, doctors, public sector workers.

are they going to pay them more if the economy is still very depressed? these are all questions that apply to other countries too. in the united states, scripts for the electoral race ripped up over the past few weeks. i remember a couple of months, the last time we spoke to you on this programme, you were predicting the pandemic would spell the end for president trump's hopes of re—election. that was before a lot of things happened. what do you think now? as you say, a lot has changed in a couple of months, and it is pretty rash to make predictions, but it is difficult to see how a sitting president can get re—elected with the scale of what is happening to the economy, the unemployment numbers and the us about to go into something equivalent to the great depression, but hopefully their recovery will be quicker.

recent polling, remember there is a long way to go in this cycle, it is still very early in the election year, things could look very different by october or november, but the most recent polling in the last couple of days suggests that he has serious problems particularly with older voters. he is tanking compared tojoe biden the democrat nominee. on some measures he was 17 points behind on seniors voters over the age of 65. if it is anything like that then he seems to be toast. that could all change, no doubt. he will pitch himself as the person who can deliver the economic recovery. he is still marginally on the polling across all voters up

about three points on fox polling, just ahead on the economy, as in who do you agree is best to handle the situation economically going forward, so that is a very narrow lead. joe biden is a weak candidate in many respects and has made plenty of gaffes, so it is not over, but trump has plenty of problems. older voters who made him president last time not impressed. how do you read it? particularlyjoe biden. it is a rather odd campaign so far. he is hunkered down. working from home in delaware. how is he getting on pushing out a message from there? if you look at the polls, the sort of bunker fireside chat mode of campaigning has benefited him. he has gained in the polls during lockdown. i think people are scared to go to events and are searching

for a candidate that is empathetic and stable and experienced, and he offers all of that. i would agree that the advantage with older voters who voted for trump in 2016 is huge. the national polling does not really mean much. you need to look at how he is faring in the swing states and in many of those swing states joe biden remains ahead, in some places not by big margins, but it is looking good. and joe biden had two main problems of building the economy over trump and a split democratic party and those have gone away. he has had a huge amount of support among women. the two caveats i would add is that it is rare for a president to lose. he has the resources, he has the free media airtime that comes with being president and trump

has a very passionate base. the other caveat is thatjoe biden does have a tendency to make mistakes and put his foot in his mouth like he did yesterday with a comment about african americans who voted for trump saying they are not black. those sorts of things could derail his candidacy. assuming the pandemic is still going on and the economy does not bounce back, i think he stands a good chance of winning. i want to range a bit wider. i want to address the question of whether china is going to allow an investigation. we had the world health assembly and rather surprisingly it wasn't quite as fractious as some had predicted and china said it

would cooperate with some kind of investigation but it sounded like there was plenty of wriggle room in that. what is your assessment? there was. on the back of that, china did impose tariffs on australia, who have been particularly robust in demanding an independent inquiry, and the approach from australia is it makes perfect sense, which is that we are going to, after the shock of the pandemic, have a regime of testing and international inquiry, there is going to have to be something akin to a nuclear inspector style regime, and that is something the chinese government certainly is not open to. the bigger question is how the west deals with china. i think that is what underpins things at the moment, that democracy is trying to work out how to respond. there is a great danger in this us election year, where both candidates

will compete to outdo the other on being anti—chinese communist party, in that if it gets out of control you end up with all sorts of alarmist talk about a new cold war. i think democracy is figuring out how to effectively disengage with china. one of the most interesting pieces published this week which i recommend was in a magazine called american interest by a historian which essentially said you have to realise you are not dealing with the liberalising china of 20 years ago, you are dealing with a totalitarian state and you have to find ways, where you can, of delicately disengaging your economy, which is incredibly difficult considering how much we rely on chinese imports, but steadily you have to do that and accept that china has chosen this path under its current leadership and that involves extreme surveillance, being expansionist,

and you have to try to hold it off until china changes or it doesn't. that is a question for the europeans, and something they will be thinking of, but i wanted to tackle something slightly different, which is the big 500 billion euros plan that angela merkel and emmanuel macron pulled out of a hat on monday. were you surprised? i was. there had been resistance and disagreements and 500 billion was also much more than people were expecting. i think the other surprise here was that this will be distributed to countries in the form of grants rather than loans. historically germany has been very reluctant to allow fiscal transfers between wealthier countries and the poorer ones.

i would stress that this is not necessarily a done deal. all 27 member states need to agree on the terms, the end package might look quite different, and i think you will see a split emerge between the harder—hit mediterranean countries, that have really suffered, and the northern european countries, the so—called frugal four, denmark, sweden, austria and the netherlands, who may balk at this plan, so i think it is a pivotal moment for the eu that they have agreed on this and i think there was a sense and concern by angela merkel that this could threaten the whole eu project and single market and that they could not rely on the european central bank to do all the heavy lifting this time around like in 2008, they really had to step up. i think, looking at angela merkel's popularity and the fact she is widely admired for having handled the crisis in germany quite well, ithink she had political headroom to push ahead with this and the question is does she have the leverage to make sure all member states back it in the end?

can i get a uk perspective on both of those very interesting discussions? the uk is in an interestingly different position. we talk about the west disengaging from china but the uk doesn't have the protection of being in a large block to do that delicate operation. and this 500 billion euros package, the uk is no longer in at that table. no. picking up on the relationship going forward with china, we spoke before about a hardening of opinion, which is evident and actually seems to be growing to some extent, certainly on the conservative backbenches. it is partly driven by the involvement of huawei in the 5g network and partly driven

by the pandemic and whether the uk should be engaging as fully as they had been, and remember it was the conservatives but generally across the board who wanted to embrace china. there is a word of warning about whether the uk can afford to in some ways sort of step back from engaging fully with china because of the investment that they will be looking at. when it comes to what's going on in terms of bailouts in the eu, there will be a feeling that post—brexit relationships with europe and the eu countries are going to be paramount, but there will also be a sense of we will not be part of some of the bailouts that are going to be needed to rebuild. so, we will have to put our hand in our pocket? that is what they may

well be thinking. at the moment the uk is trying to get some sort of trade deal although it is looking extremely difficult and all the noises certainly coming out of brussels and london at the moment is london saying we are not getting what we want because of this level playing field that london always talks about and the eu saying we are giving you what would be expected in any trade deal, so it is a little bit of deja vu in terms of the deadlock that is persisting. it sounds deja vu. before i let you go, we are getting short of time, the other stories that have been neglected due to a focus on the virus? what is the story we would have been talking about a lot of it was not

for the virus? i'm not sure. i was asked this question earlier and it made me just reflect that i have not thought at all really about other news than coronavirus for weeks. it is partly related which is that, related to what we were talking about, which is the city of london, which this weekjust got going again on its deal with china, and talking to people in the city in despair about realising that the world has to start going again and that money matters and the markets have to function, but beyond that i'm afraid i hadn't thought about anything. that is a perfectly adequate answer. what i think should be getting more attention, it got a bit of attention this week, is the whole issue of election infrastructure in the us as we go into the november presidential election, one of the most

consequential elections with ramifications for the world. is us election infrastructure adequate given we could be in the middle of a second wave of the pandemic? yes or no, one word? at the moment, no. it will be a huge political fight between trump and the democrats as he tries to claim back absentee ballots. can i mention the parallel epidemic? it is to do with coronavirus and we are starting to talk about it, but about all the undiagnosed potentially, i know it is not terribly uplifting, but undiagnosed cancer patients, people with diabetes, they must come back to hospitals, operations are going to start moving again, because i think that cost could be incalculable and may take many months and years to unravel.

thank you all. it is really fascinating to have you on as always and i would add on that point about unvaccinated children and the indirect costs of the virus around the world. 0ne story from me i think we would be talking about a lot this week if not the virus is the new national security legislation that beijing has said it intends to impose on hong kong. right now, i have to say goodbye. that is it for this week. thank you to our guests. we are back next week. thank you for watching. goodbye.

hello there. we saw gale force winds across the north and the west of the uk today. lots of showers rattling through across england and wales, though. much of england and wales did stay dry, with plenty of sunshine. most of the rain was in western scotland — it was extremely wet, with over three inches falling on saturday. sunday, less windy, a lot of cloud around in the morning thanks to this weather front bringing outbreaks of rain to the north—west of the country. but high pressure will continue to build in across the south, so that will turn things dry as we head through sunday afternoon. we start the day off, though, with temperatures in double figures for most. that's because we'll start with quite a bit of cloud cover around, and still a fair old breeze out there. it will be quite wet, western scotland in towards north—west england initially, and it looks like the cloud will tend to break up with increasing amounts of sunshine,

especially across england and wales, and into the afternoon across northern ireland. these are the mean wind speeds, so you can see quite fresh out there but nothing as strong as what we had on saturday. with slightly lighter winds, more sunshine again in the south, temperatures will creep up to around 22, maybe 23 degrees in the south. high teens further north. on sunday night, the winds turn lighter still. as high pressure builds in, it'll turn drier with lengthy clear skies, a bit of cloud in the far north of scotland. under those clear skies with very light winds, temperatures could drop into single figures for many northern and western areas. one or two spots in the east seeing 10/11 degrees. 0n into monday, then, a bank holiday monday — high pressure with much of england and wales. we've got these weather fronts just flirting with the north—west corner of the country. that will tend to bring in thicker cloud. there will be a stronger breeze for western parts of northern ireland, western scotland and outbreaks of rain. much of scotland, though, england and wales will be dry, plenty of sunshine. light winds. it's going to feel much warmer for all, especially in the south—east, where we could make 25 or even 26 degrees into the afternoon. as we move out of monday into tuesday, we start to these weather fronts move a little bit further south—eastwards. a very weak feature, but it could introduce more

cloud, i think, to parts of england and wales as we go through the day. sunshine making a return to the north and west of the country, but there will still be some glimmers of brightness further south too, and that'll help push temperatures up to around the mid—twenties celsius again, as it is a warmer air mass. highs of around 16 or 17 in the north. we will see a bit more cloud at times and the odd spot of rain as we continye to move through the week for scotland and northern ireland. for england and wales, though, with the high pressure dominating, it's going to be warm and sunny.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. the chief adviser to the british prime minister, comes under pressure, as he's accused of breaching lockdown rules, twice — but cabinet ministers defend his actions. mr cummings is, you know, in the public eye. but the reality of the matter is that a four—year—old child's welfare, ithink, is the important thing. after weeks of increasing attacks — taliban and afghan government forces agree a three—day ceasefire, to mark the eid holiday. spain continues to ease its lockdown. tourists can travel to the country again from july — and top—flight football will resume next month. and a huge fire engulfs parts of fisherman's wharf in san francisco.