EsadeGeo Daily Digest, 26/04/2023

Financial Times – Lauren Fedor / Joe Biden announces 2024 re-election bid

• Joe Biden has announced he will seek a second term in the White House, ending months of speculation and firing the starting gun on a 2024 re-election campaign that could result in a rematch of his 2020 clash with Donald Trump. 
• In a video posted to social media on Tuesday that sought to depict him as the voice of moderation against rightwing Republicans and signalled the likely themes of his campaign, the president said: “This is not a time to be complacent; that is why I am running for re-election.” 
• Against images of the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Biden said the question the US was facing “is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer”. He added that “around the country . . . extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms”. 
• Biden has long hinted that he would seek a second term, but the official launch of his campaign quells doubts that the 80-year-old president would run for re-election, and allows him to begin fundraising aggressively to support his campaign apparatus.

The Washington Post – Ana Vanessa Herrero, Diana Durán and Karen DeYoung / Guaidó, former Venezuelan opposition leader, lands in US for ‘refuge’

• Juan Guaidó, the U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition figure who led an abortive uprising against the authoritarian socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro in 2019 but has since seen his support crater, arrived in Miami on Tuesday seeking “refuge” in the United States.
• The 39-year-old engineer, who was at one time recognized by the United States and more than 50 other countries as Venezuela’s rightful leader, said he had entered Colombia on Monday “on foot.” 
• Colombian President Gustavo Petro was hosting an international summit in Bogotá on Tuesday aimed at jump-starting a dialogue between Venezuela’s government and its adversaries. Guaidó made it to Bogotá but said he was “expelled” from the country.
• “The persecution of the dictatorship unfortunately spread to Colombia today,” Guaidó said in a video recorded inside an airplane and posted to his Twitter account. “There have been tough hours.”

Politico – Hans von der Burchard / Germany and China aim for June summit amid Taiwan tensions

• German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is keen to advance economic and climate cooperation with China and defuse tensions over Taiwan as part of high-level government talks he plans to host in June.
• Scholz and key Cabinet ministers will meet with Chinese counterparts, led by Premier Li Qiang, for bilateral government consultations in Berlin on June 20, according to two persons briefed on the plans. A third person cautioned, however, that the date and format of the talks may still change.
• If confirmed, the German-Chinese high-level talks would come about a week ahead of a key EU leaders' summit on June 29-30, where EU-China relations will be high on the agenda, as European Council President Charles Michel announced this week. EU foreign ministers will also discuss China relations at an informal meeting in Sweden on May 12.
• Germany hopes to use its talks with China to deter Beijing from escalating tensions over Taiwan, which Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said earlier this month would be a "horror scenario." Berlin also wants Beijing to halt its (not-so-indirect) support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Politico – Wilhelmine Preussen / WHO: Sudan fighters’ occupation of health lab poses ‘huge biological risk’

• The World Health Organization (WHO) has said there is a "huge biological risk" after fighters in Sudan seized the country’s national public laboratory holding samples of diseases including polio and measles.
• “There is a huge biological risk associated with the occupation of the central public health lab,” said Nima Saeed Abid, the WHO’s representative in Sudan on Tuesday, talking to reporters in Geneva via video link.
• Fighters “kicked out all the technicians from the lab … which is completely under the control of one of the fighting parties as a military base,” Abid said, adding that this created an “extremely, extremely dangerous” situation.
• A power struggle between Sudan’s military leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemeti,” has plunged Sudan into fierce fighting.

Our opinion reads for today: 

• Financial Times – Martin Wolf / US-China relations have entered a frightening new era
• Foreign Affairs – Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage / How China could save Putin’s war in Ukraine