outside state television buildings in belarus as unrest continues to spread across the country. the country's president, alexander lu kashenko, says he's agreed with president putin that russia would provide what he called comprehensive assistance in the event of an external military threat. president trump has warned that despite the coronavirus pandemic, the country is not ready for a postal ballot in the november elections. speaking at a press briefing, mr trump said that universal mail—in voting would be catastrophic and make the nation a laughing stock around the world. south africa is lifting a ban on the sale of alcohol and tobacco products, imposed as part of its coronavirus lockdown. president cyril ramaphosa said all indications were that the country had reached the peak of infections. he removed restrictions, allowing restaurants and pubs to return to normal.

now on bbc news, it's dateline london. hello and welcome to dateline. this week... breakthrough or betrayal in the middle east? recession hits boris johnson's promise of a decade of prosperity. and "that little girl was me" — the "bussed to school" daughter ofjamaican and indian immigrants becomes only the fourth woman ever on a us presidential ticket. my guests on socially distanced screens are mina al oraibi, editor of the national, a news service for the middle east. and michael goldfarb of the podcast frdh, or first rough draft of history. and here in the studio

the bbc‘s business editor simonjack. welcome to you all. now, president trump called it a historic peace agreement between two great friends of the united states. palestinians said their friends had sold them out. iran has called it a huge mistake. the deal between israel and the united arab emirates will make the uae only the third arab state to have full diplomatic ties with israel. in return, israel has agreed to suspend annexation of parts of the occupied west bank. mina, this is one to start you off with. is this a case of the uae recognising the reality that was already there? in some ways, yes. there are realities on the ground but also a very important moment after the fear of annexation only a few weeks ago.

we say today that annexation is pa rt we say today that annexation is part of a larger problem. we say today that annexation is part of a larger problem. ...larger occupation of palestine but the realities on the ground and in 2020 are different from 1967 and the palestinians have slowly been losing land and the israelis have been trying to create the realities on the ground and have been made for all intents and purposes a point wanting to annex a new palestinian territories in july. the uae put out both a private and also a very public stance calling on israelis not to do so. the israeli ambassador to the us. first time you had a gulf official speak directly to the israeli people and said to them there are two routes you can go. we can have a route of relationship, we can build towards police, or we can have annexation and further disruption in the region and that will complicate matters beyond the possibility of ever having a palestinian state and it seems that the israelis

heeded that word. —— moving towards peace. so from then we saw the exhilaration coming to this point which was the announcement and the trilateral call between us president donald trump, crown prince mohammed bin zayed, and the israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu. so in some ways the uae itself has had some behind—the—scenes discussion with the israelis and important collaboration on certain issues including covid—i9 that sees the whole world needs to come together and try to come to solutions to deal with the pandemic but it is also an important point that the annexation was a very serious threat and while it is a suspension, this is a process just like the process towards establishment of the bilateral relations between the uae and israel is going to be a process. so as a matter of suspending annexation, so it is important to see it in that context. michael, i want to ask you whether you agree that israel has heated the uae‘s views on

annexation. obviously the israeli prime minister has had something to say about annexation. are they clear or is it clear what they amount to? i'm not sure about that. i think there are two more parts that we will come unto but the first is of course the trump administration in washington and washington is always a major player and intercessor between israel and its neighbours. the other player is iran and we will get to that. what happened was, to a certain degree, this comes after israeli domestic politics. people who pay attention will know that they have already had three elections in i think under 12 months. bibi netanyahu has had so many escapes and has been predicted to lose and he doesn't and he always ends up being the person that cobbles together the coalition that governs and it is very interesting that even now he is in a coalition and it is agreed that leads the other large party and the coalition will succeed

him as prime minister yet he didn't bother to tell... a thing about these negotiations. the annexation was a promise to the right wing of israeli politics. netanyahu made a promise to the prime minister which is important because he is being investigated for i guess fraud and might face charges when he left office. this met with total disapproval from the trump administration and they worked very hard to find a way to walk israel back from this and at this point, the united arab emirates ambassador to washington played a key role meeting with, the search results web results jared kushner president's son—in—law who was the chief adviser on middle east matters and we end up where we are today, with his unexpected announcement that there

would be this diplomatic relations for the first time between the uae and israel but now we come to iran quickly, which is the relationship between the uae and israel was quietly going on. they are part of the anti—iranian alliance. an "entente cordiale" is being built quietly between certain arab states because they fear iranian influence in libya and in lebanon. that's actually a critical part of this as well. we will come back to that in a second. while we are dealing with these three players in the negotiation, we talked about the politics and the economics of it but what about the economics of it, what are the players stand to gain? there is almost always an economic angle, that some would say is what gets these deals to get done. looking at the economic interest, the uae wants to be

a major player economically in the region and what this does is it gives its access to the israeli technology base, the universities of israel. 15% of students at israeli universities are arab, they have got some of the best technology out there and an opportunity for them to and diversify the economy and for israel, you have a less interruptible supply of oil because a lot of their oil comes via back in via turkey, and also you have got a big new defence customer for the us. one of the biggest trades, one of the biggest businesses in this conflict and area is of course arms and they have already got a $0.5 billion order for some anti—mine vehicles and there is a prospect that they could sell f35, which is the most expensive defence project in world history, and they want to sell as many f35s as they can, which they can't really sell to the uae

because they have got this gentleman's agreement with israel that they will only sell then the top—notch stuff and not their neighbours. but this possibly gives them the opportunity to increase that trade. what more can they do to push back to prevent other arab states following the uae‘s example? the palestinians are in a difficult position and not just because of the uae. the situation on the ground in palestine is difficult, the difficulties politically, economically and so forth. the palestinian leadership at this point should be looking at ways to take advantage of this time that has been created to halt the annexation, and try to find ways to manoeuvre, to gain some momentum, and that is what emirates have said that they want to get out of this. trying to push back doesn't really win the palestinians anything down the line and one of the things they should be building on is the status

of eastjerusalem. they uae, like the rest of the arab league, continues to hold onto the status of a palestinian state to protect the status of eastjerusalem. these are important moves, more diplomacy rather than cutting off tides or coming back. that won't help the palestinian cause which i think it is important. also michael spoke about the sort of alliance that is in—built in the region when it comes to iran. it is really not just about iran. the region is going through so much turmoil and in some ways, however palestinians trying to say we want to find a way to get out from the difficult corner that the occupation has put them in? it is notjust about iran, it is about the different voices in the region that try to use the palestinian cause of their own benefit. we have seen the turks say that they want to pull their ambassador from the uae even though turkey have had ties with israel since 1949 and is the largest muslim—majority country trading with israel.

so instead of helping their palestinians, they are trying to just put up rhetoric without, in reality, cutting off their title with israel. the one that this is a serious mistake, is there any way that they can make that a self—fulfilling prophecy. you're sitting there in the uae yourself, is that something that the emirates are concerned about? the iranians are constantly threatening and they have their prospects to put their realities of what the region should be. i don't think this is actually a threat that should be of concern, but what is concern is that you do have malicious proxies that are waging civil strife in iraq and syria, have created all sorts of havoc in lebanon and don't serve the palestinian cause in any way but actually have hurt other arab countries along the way. mike, just a quick outlook for me on the electoral advantage or otherwise for donald trump. he promised when he came

into office that he would get deals in north korea, deals with iran. this is a deal from the man that claims to be a proponent of the art of the deal. how much will it matter to him in november? it won't make any difference, in novemberand i am reminded of something that mina told me in 2017 when he took over. he will get on really well with the saudi rulers and etc because he deals through family which is the way the monarchies in arabia like to deal. mina is right, he deals with family and it is working for him. thank you for being concise on that point, because we now on to economics. at the start of the year, borisjohnson predicted an exhilarating decade of growth, prosperity and opportunity. but within six months, the pandemic has pushed the uk into its deepest recession on record. the chancellor now admits hard times are here but promises to leave no—one without hope. why is the uk at the back

of the european pack? it looks on paper that we have the worst worst possible worlds. the highest death in europe and the second economic hit in the second quarter of any country in the developed world. one reason is the fact that the uk economy is incredibly focused on services, and services, that face—to—face stuff whether it is hairdressing, restaurant, hospitality, leisure, other stuff that makes up the uk economy, that has been very hard—hit. the pandemic has not allowed that part of the economy to operate at anywhere near its full capacity. services 80%, manufacturing 10% of the economy but in germany manufacturing makes up 30% of theirgdp. others say that the lockdown came a bit late in the uk even though they had knowledge for it. what happened now is that the chancellor is playing, i don't know if you remember the game kerplunk —

do you remember that? when you have all the marbles there at the top and all the subtle struts here. what he is trying to do now with a very generous, very big programmer of government spending and protection forjobs, he has now got to try to carefully remove the supports without all the marbles crashing down. for some people, his plan is not nearly delicate enough. he plans to remove the furlough scheme which has supported 9.5 million jobs uniformly across the economy by the end of october, and there are some businesses and some industries which are not going to be anywhere near operating at full capacity by then, and some people are saying that isjust too blunt. i mentioned that the chancellor said he is going to leave no one without hope or opportunity because this is a government that came in at the end of last year promising to level up social mobility. is thatjust bravado, is there a way that he can this game? look, he is writing some very big checks.

uk borrowed 300 billion and perhaps even £400 billion this year and a lot of that priority will be spent on areas where they won votes in traditionally labour seats, but i think what is going to happen is you have got a situation where what is going to emerge from this is a kind of state—sponsored capitalism of the kind that you would not have... borisjohnson would not have been dreaming of when he first got the keys to number ten. i think you will see that reflected across the rest of the global economy. whereas capitalism usually let it do itsjob, let all these companies go bust and see what goes in its place, i think you will see much more state intervention. michael, let us take it to the us because state—sponsored capitalism is also in the air there, the economy has fallen by less than the uk, but of course donald trump wanted to go into november with a roaring economy. how good are his chances of an economic recovery by november? i would say they are pretty small. it is interesting that gdp has fallen by about half

of what is to has fallen in the uk and there are reasons for this and simon will have better details than i do but it is a more diverse economy but more importantly, we never shut down nationally. i mean, there have been tighter restrictions in one part of the country or another, but the economy takes over more, people got on and flew to business meetings, you know, without protection, and the downside of that of that is that the us never flattened the curve on covid. so we are still having outbreaks all over and eventually that will have an impact on the economy, and it will be still going on in november, when people go to the polls, but the whole idea of using gdp of the measure at this moment strikes me is probably not being helpful, because going back to 2008, when we had the crash, gdp recovered across the developed world much faster than employment.

people were onlyjust getting back to earning the same amount of money on average in america that they were earning in 2008 just before covid hit. now we have the situation in the us where the unemployment rate is in double digits, and unlike the uk, there was no furlough scheme. there was a little extra top up from the federal government to states in unemployment checks, but that stopped this week, and an attempt to find more emergency funding for that met with the typical congressional response, they went on summer holiday. so a lot of people are going to see their unemployment checks reduced by several hundred dollars a week. all of this adds up to gdp going down but more importantly, and the reason why we should look at employment before anything, but clearly that it was the shattering of employment norms in 2008 which led to the political

response in the united states that culminated in donald trump, and in this country, in brexit, where a lot of people you knowjust so dissatisfied with the status of their lives they are willing to go for a populist line in their political activities. and i think that is what we have to look for over gdp because gdp will recover. it will recover long before the vast majority's economic prospects will recover in the us and the uk. mina, we have looked at the us and the uk. the gulf is a good place from which to observe the globe on trade and economic integration. how does it look from there? well, this year has had the double whammy of the slump in oil prices at the beginning of the year and a very erratic oil market and then of course we had to covid—19. the gulf countries are the oil producing countries and the situation is different from those that

are not oil—producing. in the gulf, particularly the two largest economies, saudi arabia and uae there was an early lockdown in march and april and may and they are now slowly emerging from those lockdowns and in the uae you have some cautious optimism for the rest of the year and what it will look like. the problem, and i completely agree with michael here, is the issue of unemployment in other parts of the arab world and particularly for those who rely on daily wages and lost those day wages with covid—19 lockdowns but also with the concerns that there will be second and third waves. that is where the concern is. but in the gulf the opec plus deal has helped maintain oil prices and saying they are steady and you also see able to continue being strong and pumping in money into the economy. but the concern is for other countries in the arab world

is already fragile and this has been a real blow to them. mina's points is really true to many countries, strict mina's pointsis really true to many countries, strict mina's point is really true to many countries, strict lockdowns are unsustainable, containment is the name of the game but it has real economic applications. a lot of people have been disagreeing about what the recovery would be. one of the senior economics of the bank of england expected a v—shape recovery, others say that when you go this far down you are bound to go back pretty quick, 9% increase from may to june. so you have gone back up already, it is this next bit, and what we don't know is of the 8 million people that are now on furlough, there were 9.6 and they are coming down because of those people counted twice, how many of those people are unemployed but just don't know it yet? so that will be the thing and mina and michael talking about jobs, it will be about jobs but economically it will be about how much demand is going to be lost from the economy as people find

themselves without a job. that is the unknown here. no confetti, balloons or big hats. this next bit is political. the democrats will hold their 2020 national convention virtually, but the line up this week includes many of the party's big names and barack obama has already waded into the election campaign by accusing president trump of attempting to kneecap the us postal service. joe biden talks of an assault on democracy. michael, we're going to have to keep this fairly concise all three of you because we have only got a few minutes left on the programme but tell us how serious this row on the postal service is in the run—up to november. well, actually, it is very, very serious. postal voting was going to be an issue anyway. donald trump politicised it before covid hit. now you have got this pandemic it might actually be an unhealthy thing to go into a crowded polling centre in your local neighbourhood and vote.

people would like to vote by mail, and clearly the government is making it more difficult. overnight there were reports of postboxes being removed from the street in montana as a way of preventing people from voting. i applied for my postal ballots this week and, you know, i got an e—mail back saying they had accepted it and you will get your full ballot in september, late september, early october, and then then this morning, you know, you read that, well you need to get your ballots in perhaps a month beforehand. well, that is a month before election day and i am mailing from the uk so it is a very nervous—making thing, and on top of that states usually don't know how to count postal ballots anyway. imean, i mean, pennsylvania and wisconsin, to important swing states in 2018 midterms. pennsylvania state had

about 4% of ballots sent in by post, wisconsin was about 6% by post. what is going to happen if they get 30 or 40% by post? this will be a huge, huge problem on the federal government. i'm just going to intervene because we're so short of time, but we definitely got the message from you — it really matters and we need to watch it. secondly, kamala harris, i mentioned her at the top, the little girl bussed to school, the child of immigrants, fourth ever woman on the us presidential ballot. trump is calling her "phony kamala". what is less about in bullets to? ifjoe biden pick the man he would be calling the manner a name as well. he just calls people names and it is part of his brand. kamala harris is the best pick, in my opinion, thatjoe biden could have made — she is a strong, influential senator and people have made their decisions by large and what she does is shore up one constituency, african americans, who drifted away from the party in 2016 but who came out

in numbers for obama and less so for hillary clinton. and more importantly women, who will all remember how she questioned brett kavanaugh, who was one of the turning points of the trump administration. so it is a strong pick and whatever donald trump chooses to call her, she shores up the democratic vote and that is the most important things most important thing she can possibly do. mina, how does it look, the presidential campaign? obviously it is huge amounts at stake for everybody in the world in a us presidential election. how is it seen from the uae? there is interest of causing what these elections will bring about and i will speak here as an iraqi actually because biden is remembered at by iraqis as somebody who as senator propose the biden plan, which was to carve up iraq based on very crude sectarian divides, and many iraqis have not forgotten that. so there is a concern in iraq and other parts of the that

that sort of foreign policy that looks very crudely on sectarian and ethnic divisions coming with a possible biden administration. but the flip side, donald trump has been very unpredictable, so for many people it is almost equal what happens because we deal with the ramifications of what american voters decide. mina, michael and simon thank you all so much. simon you are going to have to get your say on the us presidential election next time. whoever wins, the biggest issue they are going to have to face as the economic cold war between the us and china. is the economic cold war between the us and china. policy on that is something that will sum up the difference between the two. thanks to something that up so briefly. goodbye for now.

hello there. we still have a lot of humid air across the uk, the same air mass that brought us the hot and sunny weather. the big difference now is that the extensive low cloud. because of the humidity, still mist and fog and also bits of drizzle dotted around. you see a pretty extensive cloud but that is continuing to work its way northwestward, and we also saw saturday some heavy thunderstorms worked into parts of essex. and in writtle brought a0 mm of rain in the space ofjust an hour and through the 2a hours we have 57 mm and that is over a month, so the majority of that brought flooding around the writtle area, including around the chelmsford area. looking at the weather picture, we see that excessive cloud and it is marching its way northward. murky around the coast and hills with fog and quite an extensive drizzle and occasional heavier

rain mixed in. a humid, warm feel to the air. temperatures starting off sunday morning around 18 degrees in the south. sunday, a cloudy start for many of us and heavy downpours on the way. i think we will see the skies brighten up but the best of any sunshine will be across northwest scotland. through the day, we will quickly see thunderstorms working in the southwest england but another batch of storms is likely to affect southeast england, east anglia and the midlands and maybe wales. thunderstorms capable of bringing torrential downpour, so i think we could see some further localised flooding, particularly sunday afternoon. for monday, we see an area low pressure drifting northwards, so again, we are looking at heavy thundery downpours at times and notice the rain is turning to move northwards. and after a dry few days across parts of northern england, northern ireland and scotland, it will be a greater chance of seeing some rain working in here and it will continue to feel humid, but again those downpours will be very heavy, so there is an ongoing threat

of localised flooding. we have humid air with us at the moment, but it looks like by thursday we will start to get coolerfresher air following in across the uk behind that cold front. but it will stay pretty cloudy in the week ahead and there will be further bursts of rain at times. it is only really later in the week that it starts to turn a bit brighter and a little bit fresher as well. that's your latest weather. goodbye for now.

welcome to bbc news. i'm aaron safir. our top stories: protests on the streets of belarus for a seventh day as pressure continues to grow on president lukashenko. president trump claims plans for universal mail—in voting — proposed for november's election — will be catastrophic. a prominent women's rights advocate in afghanistan has been wounded in a gun attack. the taliban denies responsibility. south africa announces a major easing of lockdown restrictions, people will be able to buy alcohol and tobacco.