| Just in: The U.S. Senate voted 51-50, after Vice President Kamala Harris broke her first tie, to adopt a budget blueprint for Biden's $1.9 trillion virus relief package.
Russia reset | European Union foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell met Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov today in Moscow as the 27-nation bloc seeks to reboot relations with Russia after years of confrontation. The first visit by a top EU official since 2017 came as President Vladimir Putin conducts a crackdown on protesters over the jailing of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, whose case Borrell called "a low point in our relationship." Shifting sands | Biden announced a major reversal of key Trump-administration foreign policy initiatives, including support for the Saudi-led offensive in Yemen and U.S. troop cuts in Germany that stunned European allies. Declaring that "diplomacy is back," he told the State Department the U.S. will take a firm stand in dealing with China and Russia and raise the cap on refugee admittance. Pro-China classrooms | Hong Kong ordered schools to adopt a new national education curriculum that aims to instill "an affection for the Chinese people" and weed out teachers who breach a security law imposed by Beijing last year. Primary and secondary school students will be required to memorize the law's offenses, which include subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers, Kari Lindberg reports. Mysterious graffiti | "The people's savior" is the way Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's Colombian financier Alex Saab is being described in new graffiti across the capital, Caracas. Its appearance ahead of a court hearing today in Cape Verde, where Saab is detained pending a U.S. extradition request, suggests the government is trying to drum up popular support for him.  Photographer: Carlos Becerra/Bloomberg Open up | The United Nations Security Council urged Ethiopia to allow greater access to its war-stricken Tigray region where as many as two million people need humanitarian aid. The U.K.'s permanent representative to the UN said there's agreement that progress so far "is not enough." Diplomats said countries including Kenya, China and Russia are reluctant to put pressure on Ethiopia at this stage. What to Watch - U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is considering using his Group of Seven presidency to forge an alliance on carbon border taxes, sources say.
- Japanese brewer Kirin says it will end its joint-venture partnership with Myanmar's largest beer maker in one of the first responses by a global company to this week's military coup.
- Ecuadorians vote for a new president on Sunday with a binary choice: whether to accept potentially harsh economic reforms or return to a Venezuela-style model of heavy state involvement in the economy.
And finally ... Many nations are struggling to persuade citizens to get Covid-19 inoculations, but the challenges are particularly daunting in Pakistan, where mistrust is fueled by anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and the legacy of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. As Chris Kay, Faseeh Mangi and Ismail Dilawar explain, suspicion deepened when it emerged that a fake vaccination drive was used to hunt down bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where he was assassinated in 2011 by American special forces.  A banner paying tribute to health workers for their fight against Covid-19 in Islamabad in July. Photographer: Aamir Qureshi/AFP | 
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