cool and dry with just afternoon. cool and dry withjust some showers there in scotland and northern ireland. he was a forecast for tonight. that weather front is really stubborn. if anything, the rain may return and be heavierfor a time, at least across this portion of the uk. the south—east, dry and mild. scotland and northern ireland will be colder overnight, frost on the way for places like belfast. in belfast on monday it will be sunny but wet and windy for belfast on tuesday. hello this is bbc news with me, ben brown. the headlines: borisjohnson is due to hold a final meeting with senior ministers and scientific advisers about how to ease england's lockdown ahead of tomorrow's announcement of a roadmap out of restrictions. there's a new pledge that every adult in the uk will be offered their first dose of coronavirus vaccine by the end ofjuly —

a month ahead of schedule. thousands of protesters have returned to the streets in myanmar, a day after security forces fired at a crowd, killing two people in the city of mandalay. a passengerjet engine has burst into flames above the us state of colorado. debris fell onto homes below, but the plane landed safely. now on bbc news, dateline london. hello, i'm shaun ley. this is the programme that brings together leading commentators, bbc specialists and the foreign correspondents who film and report for the folks back home,

with the dateline, london. this week, how patient will people be as the number of covid patients decline. peaceful but persistent in myanmar but what will make the generals listen? and the not so splendid isolation of north korea. the dateline panel this week, we're hoping to bejoined shortly by the italian journalist and documentary filmmaker annalisa piras. jef mcallister is already with us. he's former white house diplomatic correspondent and ex london bureau chief for time magazine. he is also a lawyer so i will be minding my ps and os. and with me in the studio, celia hatton, the bbc�*s asia—pacific editor. great to have you with us. let's begin with the practical questions of the world not being able to vaccinate itself out of the covid pandemic. although the uk's progress inoculating its citizens has been widely praised, the statement expected on monday from borisjohnson on exiting lockdown is likely to be heavy with caveats. jef, saturday's newspapers

were full of good news. some speculation but a concrete commitment that the government has confirmed that people in care homes will now be able to meet a relative indoors and hold hands for the first time, for some of them, in nearly a year. do you suspect that this may be an attempt to sweeten the pill? from the other indications, of course we do not know until borisjohnson says what the plans are, there is talk of a wholesale return to school in a few weeks as well. i think it is more than sweetening the pill. it looks like the trend lines of hospitalisations and of deaths and of the r rate, those indicators are positive and quite steeply so. this appears to be not so much a consequence of vaccination, although that has been a success, but of social distancing measures.

the vaccinations are also starting to make a difference and that will be a geometric progression as well, i think. so i think the government is in a sweet place here as long as the trendlines are good. i think they will get a lot of running room from the public. i think the public does not like stop, start, reverse. but as long as things seem to get better i think people are quite tolerant of the mess. the labour party focus groups, as keir starmer was trying to work out how to get some purchase on boris johnson, said, we don't like you to attack the government we want you to work together but we don't think you guys would do any better anyway. i think there is a large baseline of ease, as long as the numbers keep going in the right direction i think the public will be ok. in this country, in the us and elsewhere. other countries where things are not as advanced it may be different.

annalisa, thank you for being with us. vaccination has been a problem in much of continental europe. we've got at least one governor in italy saying that he is looking to purchase vaccines of his own, he is so frustrated by the slower pace and italy had a hellish start to the pandemic last spring. a new government has just taken office. the man they used to call super mario, mario draghi. they called him that a decade ago during the financial crisis. how difficult a balancing act do he and other european leaders face in easing lockdown? it is a gigantic challenge of course because we are all in the same situation, basically trying to understand when is the right moment to ease restrictions, when it is safe and at the same time we have this race against time to vaccinate most of the population, especially the most vulnerable.

of course, the answer cannot be everyone on their own. so the governor is now backtracking. he tried to buy vaccines on his own and it looks like it was possibly fraud, a con. we did not know where the vaccines were coming from. so the entire episode highlighted how, in the end, it was the right decision to try and do it at an eu level, to avoid exactly this kind of situation in which people, understandably, they are dealing with methods of life and death so they want the vaccines. the answers cannot be to go and get them wherever you can because they may not be safe. in fact it looks like the government was ready to pay five times the price.

you understand that having a black market for vaccines, everybody on their own, would be a recipe for disaster and it would be unsafe for the people. so the eu took the right choice in trying to centralise and keep a tab on this, avoiding a vaccine war across the regions and countries in europe. the only problem is, as everybody knows, the eu is not a country and it does not have a national health service so it has to provide vaccines to 27 countries, to more than 400 million people. it cannot be done overnight so there are logistical problems. as you say, the arrival of super mario at the head of the italian government, that does bring with itself consequences that go far beyond italy because he is seen as

an extremely capable manager. he managed, after all, the european central bank with 19 central banks involved. he has solid experience. and he is also managing as many political parties as he tries to cohere together the coalition. let me bring in celia. now, annalisa spoke about the risk of a vaccine war. in a sense we are starting to see worrying signs of that globally, aren't we, in terms of the stresses that this causes? emmanuel macron on friday was saying that if the british and the americans and the europeans don't give vaccines now to help health workers in africa, the african countries will look to china and russia and they will get vaccines that way and any confidence or faith they have in the western way, if there is such a thing, will be

evaporated. and that is already happening. we have heard for weeks now about vaccine dealsl that china is striking with, first starting with regional| players near china but of- course china has been giving vaccine, offering big vaccine deals for several weeks- now ever since they were able l to announce that they had three workable vaccines. there are some - challenges with those vaccines and there have been questions about the release i of data from phase three trials from those chinese—made - vaccines but of course - vaccine diplomacy is alive and well in beijing. what is interesting are some. of the countries that have said look, we're not going. to bother with vaccines. we know we won't get them for quite some time. - vietnam was one of those i countries that has done quite a good job at keeping the virus at a low level and maintaining i lockdown. they threw up their hands early and said we're not even- going to try to contend for any of these - expensive vaccines. theyjust announced this week

that they are getting - 30 million doses through - the covax scheme, the who run scheme to give vaccines| to the world's 20% most vulnerable. the message coming from vietnam is that you can sit tight _ and wait and you will get vaccines eventually, - you do not have to _ go through the beijing route. jef, that raises an interesting question. whether one of the consequences of this pandemic is that parts of the world will emerge sooner than others and that a different sort of global competition, both political and economic, will come from that uneven emergence from the restrictions of the pandemic. i think you are right and i think it is inevitable. like any gigantic event, both health and economic, this is going to have an effect and things will be different in the end. the idea... i think it is almost old—fashioned geopolitics that is getting

the western leaders now to make a bigger noise about getting vaccines out to developing countries, but china and russia are already quite far advanced in this and i think we have to get used to the fact that china, in particular, has a lot of cards to play and it will be playing them in a sophisticated fashion and if it is putting vaccines into people's arms, who is going to complain? let's move on and talk about a country that has had its share of the headlines over the last three weeks, peaceful protest inside myanmar. diplomatic pressure and sanctions against military leaders from the outside. and on friday, the first recorded death, a woman in the capital, naypidaw, shot in the head as police dispersed a crowd there. can any of this restore civilian authority? it was never really control, extinguished by the army those three weeks ago. one forgets how quickly events move, jef, but it was only 12 days

afterjoe biden took office as us president, the first significant foreign policy challenge he has faced. how realistic is it, the aspiration expressed not least by his secretary of state antony blinken, that myanmar should return to civilian control? i think the statement of secretary blinken was a statement like those made by president biden about nato. the old us is back. we will put human rights in our foreign policy, we will not just say nothing when bad things happen to democracy as would have happened in previous times. but in practical terms, there really is not a lot that the us has leverage to accomplish here. trade with myanmar is small, the trade between

myanmar and china, the 1200 mile border, is much larger. china has different interests in consorting with the generals than the us does. there are some old sanctions but there have already been sanctions. so i think this is symbolic more than anything else. i think the interest... you see the young people using the internet and using social media and other kinds of social protest to signal that this is not your parents kind of demonstrations but, still, the government has so many tools of repression and after all, aung san suu kyi was under house arrest for 15 years. i think we must expect a very long and messy attempt to try and put pressure on them to accommodate their own complex domestic political forces. annalisa, jef mentions aung san suu kyi there and she is a political prisoner again, perhaps seen differently than she was the first time around, much criticism of her willingness to defend the military

over its suppression of the muslim minority rohingya people, many of whom are now in neighbouring bangladesh. do you think that affects, at all, the calculation made in european capitals about how to treat what has happened in myanmar? i hope not. of course there has been serious damage done to the reputation of aung san suu kyi and it is very sad because she was a symbol well beyond myanmar. but i would not expect world diplomacy to take that into consideration. after all, what matters today more than ever is the respect of democracy and she has had a resounding mandate from the electorate to lead the country. and this must be defended and upheld, regardless

of what are, probably, serious flaws in her leadership at times. celia, china referred to the coup. the myanmar military said it was not a coup, they said it was a corrective for a defective election that they say was fraudulent. the chinese called it a major cabinet reshuffle. that's a bit like calling the english war of the roses a small family dispute. is it possible that this is actually a coup that was approved in china? that china may have seen this as something that was beneficial from its perspective? there have been questions raised about that, but i don't get that feeling, because the chinese ambassador to myanmar came out yesterday and said, look, we had fairly good relationships with both sides, with aung san suu kyi's party and also with the military. frankly china has always had a very complicated relationship with myanmar.

in this case, i don't think china is really happy about this and the ambassador said very clearly, he said the situation is absolutely not what we wanted to see. china is myanmar's largest trading partner, of course they're very important, but myanmar also needs to think about its biggest investors, and in the region its biggest investors are japan, thailand, singapore. those are some of the countries it will have to start paying attention to, and those military generals. this is not the myanmar of decades past, this is a myanmar much more integrated into the global economy. and so if the generals really want to ignore the calls of many of their own people, three quarters of civil servants are on strike at the moment in myanmar, if they want to push on with this and try to impose their own ruling they will have to think about the region in general, notjust china. that's a powerful point, isn't it? you have made much of your reputation as a documentary filmmaker.

this time we are seeing something we never saw during years of military oppression in myanmar, we're seeing images and pictures, extraordinarily powerful ones, those flotillas of small boats, for example, marshaled in protest, the buildings covered in the colours of aung san suu kyi's party. how much difference can that make in maintaining international interest in myanmar? i think it was during the first world war that virginia woolf saw the photographs coming out of the war and said, we will never have war ever again because now that people can see that, we willjust stop it, because we can see it. unfortunately it didn't work that way and it doesn't work that way now, but images and footage still have extraordinary importance. the problem is that with the different interpretation

of the media system, with social media, with the internet, with facebook, we are seeing enormous controversy now between facebook and australia, images and news are not any more kind of delivered to the people with authority and credibility. so there's a risk that even with those images that have an extraordinary potential to wake people up to the reality of what's happening, when they get dispersed into the noise and the confusion, now, with technology, we also know that with deepfakes you can fake them. so there's growing distrust in what you see. so i think that your question points to a very fundamental problem of our times, which is information and how you can transmit those really meaningful images of the horrors of the things that are happening to wake people up from their slumber.

jeff, that raises a really interesting point in relation to what you said at the start of the section about human rights. lots of people saw images as part of the case for suggesting that war crimes were committed in the suppression of the muslim minority in myanmar. i spoke to a former head of the british army who said he wondered if that had been a partial motive for the coup, that the military were worried that maybe the civilian government, when it had full power, would be willing to hand them over to international justice. is there an appetite in america now underjoe biden for internationaljustice to take its course? i think as always, there is more of an appetite i forjustice for one's - enemies than one's friends. the failure of the - united states to be part of the international criminall court, which i think would be very difficult for even - a democratic administration with human rights interests like joe biden's to try- to return to, that means that

i think it probably will be not| unserious attempts to try to link human rights backi into foreign policy more. but with the usual caveats - and hypocrisies that are always involved in this. i think it's probably likely- to be better than not doing it, but it's never going to bel purely or the sole or even the major influence _ on what the united states does. jeff, thank you. let's stay in the region. for almost 50 years myanmar was isolated internationally. the borders with china and russia have been shut for more than a year now. covid—i9, say the propagandists in pyongyang, have been kept out. it has still applied for a share of shots to poorer countries. south korea even claims it neighbour has tried to steal the intellectual property behind that. in a sense, some countries

might feel a bit of sympathy if you did try that, because they're so frustrated they can't produce the vaccines at home. but parking that thought, do we have any sense at the moment ofjust how fragile north korea is? i think north korea is a country on its knees at the moment. it has often been said north korea's a perfect storm at the moment. this is a country which even before covid—i9 hit the world, 40% of the population was going hungry, 7 out of io babies were not getting the minimum amount of calories needed. that's according to the united nations. so north korea was one of the first countries to lock down its borders with china. it did so in late january. and it has maintained that lockdown — against its own interests, really. its major trading partner is of course china, just over the border. but we have seen trade with china dropping down 75%. presumably that is the official trade? there have always been, bluntly, sanctions as well, haven't there? absolutely. and this is a country

which normally has a very porous border between china and north korea. that border, by all accounts, has been locked down. so we have sanctions, years and years of sanctions imposed by the united nations and regionally, we have the imposition of a quite strict covid lockdown, and we have some natural disasters that have been battering north korea, drought coupled with typhoons. so kim jong—un appears to be in a difficult position, he has been in powerfor nine years now but seems to be shuffling senior leaders more rapidly than ever. he appointed a new person to be in charge of the economy and then just last week he took that person out of power and said, you haven't been doing enough. some targets are too high, some targets are too low. he seems to be floundering, he has apologised repeatedly to his own people for the economic missteps, where do we go from here? i think he will try to do whatever he can to get a vaccine but also to get some

of those sanctions lifted. donald trump saw potential to do something fresh with north korea. do you thinkjoe biden sees any kind of potential in north korea? i think the potential for a lot of trouble. | i don't see what the grounds are for a big deal. _ the us holy grail for decadesl was denuclearisation in return for some kind of lifting of sanctions in terms l of the world economy. i think the nuclear programme is too far advanced, _ and the dependence of. the regime on the nuclear programme for its survival, that's just way too intense i to think that might be possible. - i think it's a concern - that there might be sabre rattling, as there has been before, in order to get- attention from the west. and try to break sanctions. it's interesting that one - of the good ways north korea is now making money is computer fraud, which doesn't require - the infrastructure of-

old—fashioned sanctions busting, they're quitei effective at it, they're stealing from central banks, . atm networks, currency trading networks, they have to spend the money, but the nuclear. programme appears to be robust and even though it does seem i to be a perfect storm, i there doesn't seem to be any graceful landing. is there a spring, no. is there going to be some kind of effort to make the best - of something using| nuclear diplomacy? that seems more likely. this isn't the most stable part of the world at the best of times, and there are those among china's neighbours who think it's doing its best to stir things up, with its actions around the south china sea, with its rhetoric towards taiwan. do you see much changing in the region in the nearfuture? before christmas you were talking about the possibility of an invasion of taiwan, well, china wouldn't see it as an invasion, it says it's part of china anyway,

but quite a lot the world disagrees. i think this is a region that really has all its eyes on washington at the moment. because we haven't quite seen howjoe biden's strategy for the region might play out. he has a lot of people who were in office in obama's time, he has brought many of those same people on the team to come and work with him. the idea that, as he has said, he will try to unite with his allies, unite with other world leaders, other democracies and like—minded countries, in order to put pressure on china, that could really change the region, but how will beijing react to that idea? i think a lot of players in the region, taiwan included, are really looking to see how much of the trump administration's policies will be carried over through the biden years, and how much of the tone will really change with joe biden in office. however much the world changes, for now at least the world

still waits to see what washington will do. we will wait to see ourselves. let me ask one final thought. we are almost up to one year since the first lockdowns began. a tip from each of you, briefly, the one thing that has kept you going during the pandemic, during those lockdowns, lisa first? tiramisu! italian cake, which can be very easily done at home, it takes a little time and it makes everybody happy. so you can do it in a kind of kid—friendly version, you can do for the grown—ups with a bit more rum on the bottom. highly recommended. it has cheered us up. i think we know what you're saying. jeff? gin and soda has been my. new reform, rather than gin and tonic, less calories -

and therefore more survival. i always noticed that people would have a full gin and ask for a low—fat tonic, but it's often the gin that's the real problem. some great regional gins around the world, by the people are improvising distilleries of their own in lockdown. celia? i've been planning a series of trips. i don't know when i'm going to take them, but i want to go back to india to see friends, i want to go on a big backpacking trip, i like planning trips so that's what i have been doing in lockdown, tojust remind myself that one day this will be over. one day it will. and we're over now, dateline london for this week. dojoin gita and her guests at the same time next weekend. for now, have a good week.

there is definitely sunshine in the forecast but it is pretty soggy in wales at the moment. we have had an awful lot of rainfall in the last 2a hours. over 100 millimetres of rain in one or two spots in the south of wales and flood warnings in force from the environment agency as river levels are high. it is not raining as heavy today but still somewhat persistent in the south—west, wales, may be northern england later. dry and mild in the southeast this afternoon. cool and dry with just some showers there in scotland and northern ireland. here is the forecast for tonight. that weather front is really stubborn. if anything, the rain may return and be heavierfor a time, at least across this portion of the uk. the south—east, dry and mild. scotland and northern ireland will be colder overnight, frost on the way for places like belfast.

in belfast on monday it will be sunny but wet and windy for belfast on tuesday.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. borisjohnson meets ministers and scientific advisers to put the final touches to plans to bring england out of lockdown. a new promise that every adult in the uk will be offered their first dose of coronavirus vaccine by the end ofjuly — a month ahead of schedule. its because of the success of the vaccine roll out that we are able to do that and that will have an impact on how quickly we will all be able to return to normal, which is obviously what everyone wants to see. meanwhile israel eases its lockdown after almost half the population is vaccinated, but you'll need a special pass to take advantage of all the new freedoms. a funeral has taken place in myanmar for a young woman who's

become a national symbol of resistance to miltary rule,