Please send your tips and thoughts to rheath@politico.com and follow me on Twitter WHERE YOU CAN JOIN GLOBAL TRANSLATIONS THIS COMING WEEK Clubhouse. 6 p.m. ET, Friday: Ryan and editor Ben Pauker will breakdown Joe Biden's European Zoom Tour and answer all your questions. Remember: we'd love your active participation — so don't be shy to raise your hand in the room, AFL-CIO, 4.30 p.m. ET, Friday: Ryan will moderate a discussion on what's next for essential workers at the Labor Innovation & Technology Summit, with union leaders including Randi Weingarten (teachers), Bonnie Castillo (nurses), Marc Perrone (retail) and AFL-CIO treasurer Liz Shuler. Register here Denver Democracy Summit Feb. 25 and 26: Ryan is co-hosting. Register here and see the full program. TURNING HEADS — NANO-ORIGAMI: University of Sussex researchers have created computer chips 100 times smaller than conventional microchips. Your phone could end up working thousands of times faster. TEAM BIDEN DOES EUROPE WADING THROUGH THE IRAN DEAL HYPE: The U.S. confirmed it will rejoin formal talks with Iran, Europe and other signatories around reviving the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal that Donald Trump did his best to trash. But don't get too excited, my colleague Nahal Toosi urges "Don't be fooled by the noise over the EU invite for US-Iran talks. There have been internal Biden admin debates over whether even to save the original Iran nuclear deal." Nahal's story here. BIDEN AND BLINKEN SET TO "STOP THE BLEEDING" AND CLEAR LOW BAR SET BY EUROPEAN LEADERS: "These next four days will set the tone," for the following four years, Finland's former prime minister Alexander Stubb told Global Translations. The bar is set low for Biden and secretary of State Antony Blinken . European capitals are giving them an easy ride because of domestic divisions and will be happy with the expected boilerplate commitments to multilateralism and democracy. "Biden doesn't need to come to this (G-7) meeting with a suite of creative policy announcements," said a senior British diplomat, adding "it's enough to stop America's image bleeding." Watch world leaders at the Munich Security Conference from 10 a.m. ET. Inside word: European leaders expect Biden to act as a transatlantic good cop to Blinken's bad cop. Homework: Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo told Global Translations "both President Biden and Secretary Blinken know Europe very well. But this also means they know Europe could be a better partner and ally. We need to put our European house in order by being united on foreign policy and defense." Where Biden will play hardball today: "He will specifically talk to what he believes is a concerted effort by the Kremlin to carry out a strategy to discredit, undermine and destabilize democracies," said a senior administration official. Global vaccination road-bump: U.S. won't share vaccine before all Americans receive shots, officials say , putting the Biden administration at odds with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. Biden's choice may make domestic political sense, but given widespread vaccine skepticism, the world could be waiting a long time for leftover U.S. doses. Biden will today announce the U.S. is directing $2 billion toward subsidizing Covid vaccine doses for 92 poor and developing countries. RISING TRANSATLANTIC TRADE TENSIONS: Europeans worry about the state of America's fragile democracy and a divided legislature that's going to make it tough on Biden and his reform agenda. Privately, they fear the pendulum effect: that Republicans will simply reverse all of Biden's work in 2025 (if not sooner, when midterms come calling). While Washington grates at the politics of projects like the Nordstream II gas pipeline between Russia and Germany (House Republicans insist that preventing the pipeline's completion is the only acceptable option to them), Berlin is making plans for long-term energy security. But its trade and China where tension is clearest and deepest. Sebastian Kurz, Austria's 34-year-old chancellor, told Global Translations he is optimistic but firm: "we should give our trade relations a fresh start by settling ongoing trade disputes and ending punitive measures as soon as possible." Translation: get rid of Trump-era tariffs the new administration is yet ot unwind, and limit Made in America policies. Brussels is also worried that Washington may outlaw EU companies from shipping goods (like cars) made with U.S. microchips to China, on national security grounds. The EU, for its part, is setting out an aggressive trade position: inking an investment agreement with China, and developing an "anti-coercion" trade instrument (which would allow it to retaliate against any U.S. efforts to block EU-Iran trade, for example), and pushing for "tech sovereignty" a concept Washington and Silicon Valley see as a disguise for blatant protectionism. "CHINA WILL BE THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM": That's according to Alexander Stubb, but others including Austria's Sebastian Kurz are happy to bring the discussion into the spotlight via "an open dialogue." Blinken will start that dialogue at his meeting with European foreign ministers Monday, as he weighs up whether the EU can be a strong ally on China policy. The EU itself is deeply split on China. Smaller countries are uncomfortable with how Beijing wields power, but find China too big to ignore or handle alone. China overtook the U.S. as the EU's biggest trading partner in 2020, leading bigger countries like Germany and France to prefer engagement over forming a Cold War-style bloc against it. NATO, which includes 21 EU countries as members, has quietly expanded its remit to China: Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says the alliance's strategy must be based on defending democracy against China and Russia's "authoritarian pushback against rules-based international order." GLOBAL RISKS AND TRENDS AUSTRALIANS OUT-MANEUVER FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE The latest battle of who gets to profit — tech companies or traditional media publishers — from the news we see on our screens is going badly for the tech giants. Just as Google and Facebook feared, newspapers and governments around the world are lapping up the rumble Down Under, watching to see what they can copy. First, Google threatened to quit Australia rather than comply with a proposed News Media Bargaining Code , designed to get them to split some of their profits from news with the people who create it. After Microsoft championed the Australian government proposals (so its Bing search engine could eat up market share if Google did quit the country), Google did a 180-degree turn and struck a three-year licensing agreement with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which controls two-thirds of Australia's newspaper circulation and a major TV network. Google takeaway: Google's threats to quit major markets aren't scaring anyone, especially since it's public knowledge that Google, through its News Showcase product, has licensing deals with more than 500 publishers in countries from Argentina to the U.K. Facebook then chose an even more disastrous route : Even before the law went into effect, the Zuckerberg empire struck preemptively, graying out links to news articles shared across its platform in Australia. But that scorched earth tactic backfired badly, as it wiped the Facebook pages of Australian health, fire, weather and sporting services, before being the tech giant was quickly forced to reverse course. The plan was months in the making: Facebook's local managing director, Will Easton, wrote in August 2020 that the Australian government plan "misunderstands the dynamics of the internet," but it was Facebook that misunderstood the dynamics of Australia. Cutting off cricket and fire service information during summer in sports-mad, extreme weather Australia, was the equivalent of telling Facebook users in Paris they were banning French language from the platform. The center-left governor of Western Australia, Mark McGowan, compared the ban to the North Korean dictatorship. With Australia also planning to start Covid-19 vaccinations next week: the timing "couldn't be worse," said University of Sydney vaccine expert Julie Leask. An ocean of problems: Facebook's Australian move also threatens to leave Pacific island nations without key news sources. Facebook takeaway: Making Facebook users collateral damage in a political fight only eggs on Facebook skeptics in other jurisdictions, while highlighting that it's really a news publisher making editorial judgments, and not merely a platform, as it has long argued. ( here's the view of Australia's regulator who spoke to POLITICO's Mark Scott) Counter punch: Jeff Jarvis thinks the Australian model is a terrible idea, arguing that it amounts to "media blackmail." Next battle stops, Canada and Congress: The Trudeau government called Facebook's Aussie tactics "highly irresponsible" and insists Canada is undeterred as it prepares similar legislation. "Canada is at the forefront of this battle," cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault said Thursday. Guilbeault has been in regular contact with his Australian and French counterparts on digital platform legislation and predicted the group's unofficial membership would multiply over the coming months to 10 or 15 countries. The battlefronts between tech giants and government authorities are spreading well beyond news licensing. Facebook, Google and Twitter CEOs are testifying again before Congress next month, while Apple faces its own transatlantic battle. EPIC BATTLES IN EUROPE AND … NORTH DAKOTA: Epic Games, the creator of the Fortnite video game, has expanded its antitrust complaints against Apple to the EU, after an earlier U.S. complaint about Apple's app store and payment policies. Epic is a key player, along with Spotify, in Coalition for App Fairness (CAF) working globally to loosen Apple's control of its app store. This week they fell short in the North Dakota Senate (36 to 11), after getting a radical bill (SB 2333 ) passed by the state's House of Representatives. The bill existed in simple two-page form and would have forced Apple to separate the iPhone from the app store, so that the phone worked more like a Macbook computer: you could get an app from Apple's store, or from anywhere else, and Apple wouldn't be guaranteed a 30 percent cut of all price charged. CLIMATE CORNER BIDEN'S ENVOYS BACK 50 PERCENT EMISSIONS CUT BY 2030: "America Is All In" launches today (merging several climate organizations that formed to provide local and state climate action during the Trump years), under the sponsorship of Michael Bloomberg — freshly re-minted as a U.N. climate envoy. It's got the backing of Biden's climate chiefs John Kerry (global) and Gina McCarthy (domestic). Together they're supporting a "whole of society" approach to climate action. With these three figures coalescing around a 50 percent or greater U.S. emissions cut by 2030, the landing zone for the administration's planned 2030 target is now clear. Bloomberg told Global Translations: "national governments for many years were the only voices at the table on climate change, but that has all changed. We need to help cities and states do more, faster." INDIA, THE PARTNER EVERYONE WANTS : Kerry started the week advising that clean energy in India is a "red-hot investment opportunity" (no pun intended, we think), then Alok Sharma, president of this year's annual U.N. climate conference, turned up in Delhi to press for new Indian climate commitments, and now the Center for American Progress and India's Council on Energy, Environment and Water have a new report recommending President Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi launch a U.S.-India Green Transition Finance Initiative, to mobilize private finance for India's sustainable transitions for. Report | Fact Sheet. JOBS RECOVERY SPOTLIGHT JOBS AND COVID DECOUPLE: New jobs are not rising in line with rising Covid vaccinations (and falling infections). The unemployment rate fell slightly over the last month from 6.7 percent to 6.3 percent, but because fewer people are looking for jobs. Employers added a mere 49,000 jobs in January after cutting workers in December, and the number of Americans applying for unemployment aid rose last week to 861,000. Before Covid-19 weekly applications for unemployment benefits had never topped 700,000. BIDEN RE-FRAMES APPRENTICESHIPS: Biden plans to revoke former President Donald Trump's executive order creating an industry-led apprenticeship program, which sought to reduce the federal government's role in training opportunities. The White House argues that the program has "fewer quality standards" and plans to reinstate a National Advisory Committee on Apprenticeships. Biden is endorsing Democrats' National Apprenticeship Act, which passed the House with bipartisan support earlier this month, on the Democrat promise that it would create nearly 1 million new job training opportunities. Biden privately tells governors: $15 minimum wage hike likely isn't happening GLOBETROTTERS CONCORDIA EMBRACES HYBRID CONFERENCING: Concordia Summit, the biggest annual U.N. General Assembly side event, is plowing ahead with a plan to convene on Sept. 20. "We believe in the power of in-person engagement, of identity, and of looking one another in the eye," Matthew Swift, Concordia's CEO, told Global Translations. That's why Concordia is planning to mix physical and digital, though big question marks remain over September's wider U.N. General Assembly gathering: because most of the world will still be waiting for a vaccination. Swift's case for hybrid events. MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Giuseppe Conte may be out as Italy's prime minister, but it wasn't for lack of popularity: he was booted out with a 24-point net positive approval rating (compare world leaders' ratings here, from Morning Consult). David Frost ( now titled Baron Frost), is joining Boris Johnson's cabinet. The long-time civil servant, who led the negotiation of the U.K.'s post-Brexit trade deal with the EU, now has effectively the same gig but with a political title on his office door. Makhtar Diop is the new CEO of the World Bank's private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation. MOVERS AND SHAKE-DOWNS: Consulting giants Boston Consulting Group, PwC, and McKinsey made tens of millions from a project to modernize Angola's state-owned oil company Sonangol, despite red flags indicating corruption, ICIJ's Will Fitzgibbon reported. The Angolan government is trying to recoup assets it alleges the Dos Santos family siphoned off to their personal holdings. Thanks to editor Ben Pauker | 
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