Britain-EU relations: Europe's trust in Britain has gone. We're now a problem, not a partner - by Raphael Behr

The pandemic is landing well-aimed punches on the already bruised relationship between Britain and the European Union. A dispute over vaccine supplies threatens to bring blunt instruments of trade war down on delicate national feelings. Not in the darkest hours of Brexit negotiations did either side imagine that supply-chain management would so quickly become a matter of life and death.

At a summit later this week, European leaders will discuss a possible ban on exports to the UK from an AstraZeneca plant in the Netherlands. There is frustration in Brussels that millions of vaccine doses have gone overseas (mostly Pfizer ones) and none have come over in return. The UK responds that it cannot be blamed for moving earlier, signing better contracts and generally getting its immunising act together faster.

Tory MPs say Brussels is lashing out in jealousy. Vaccination is something Boris Johnson’s government is doing well, and the EU is floundering. That has less to do with Brexit than is claimed by triumphant ministers, but as propaganda the point is irresistible: there is nothing else to trumpet as a benefit of detachment from the continent, and winning the vaccination race resonates with voters grateful for jabs.

Read more at: Europe's trust in Britain has gone. We're now a problem, not a partner | Brexit | The Guardian

Europeans don’t trust the US or Trump, poll says - by Annabelle Timsit

Donald Trump has damaged America’s standing in the world in his three years as president, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Europe.

A new report (pdf), published by the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR),  found that Europeans “no longer believe that the US can serve as the guarantor of their security.” They also overwhelmingly favor neutrality rather than siding with the US on global issues. The survey covered more than  60,000 people across 14 European Union member states, including France, Slovakia, Poland, and Spain.

Read more at: Europeans don’t trust the US or Trump, poll says — Quartz

Electronics Smart Speakers: Can you trust your smart home speaker?

Read more at:

https://eu-digest.blogspot.com/2019/01/smart-speakers-can-you-trust-your-smart.html

Freedom of the Press: ​Americans, Europeans want non-MSM coverage of intl. news poll results show

Getting their international news only from mainstream media is not what the majority of Americans and Europeans want, an opinion poll shows. Some 60 percent desire alternative sources of news coverage.

The only country among the five polled by the British company ICM Research for Sputnik news radio, in which less than half of respondents said they would like to have an alternative source of information on world affairs, was France. Forty-nine percent of the people there said they would be ‘quite interested’ or ‘interested a lot’ in it.
 
Greeks were on the other side of the spectrum, with over 80 percent vying for such a source. The US and UK were level at 57 percent, while Germany ran at 55 percent, Sputnik reported.

The majority of Europeans - UK, French, German and Greek residents among them - distrust mainstream media coverage of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, a recent poll targeting over 4,000 people, reveals.

Greeks appear to have showed the least faith in their domestic media, with a total of 76 percent saying they were ‘fairly’ or ‘totally distrustful’ of mainstream reports on Ukraine. In Germany, the same opinion was shared by 57 percent of respondents.

Britons, on the other hand, have great trust in the mainstream media’s handling of the situation. As many as 55 percent of respondents stated they put a fair amount of trust in the coverage of events in eastern Ukraine by British media. Some 33 percent said it was biased, however.

In France, 47 percent of respondents said they don't trust the Ukraine conflict coverage.

EU-Digest