It's a little late for a phone call. And yet Joe Biden is offering to ring up Emmanuel Macron for the first time since the United States poached a multibillion-dollar submarine contract and sprang the surprise of an Australia-UK-US military alliance. Excluded are the French and their sizeable Indo-Pacific fleet. For all those stateside leaders who love Paris and refer to France as America's oldest ally, how much can the French trust Washington?

Back in 2016, French branded it the deal of the century. So why is the agreement to sell military-grade submarines to Australia suddenly dead in the water? Canberra has ditched the 2016 deal for the chance to buy nuclear-powered subs whose technology is made in the US, with Washington also announcing an Indo-Pacific military alliance with the Australia and the UK.

This Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen gave her State of the Union speech to the European Parliament – an update on the state of play across the 27-nation bloc. But how is Europe tackling the big issues? For instance, vaccination against Covid-19 is running at more than 70 percent. It’s a success story, but when you look at the detail, there are big variations between the member states.

In seven months from now, people across France will be heading to the polls to vote in presidential elections, which will determine whether President Emmanuel Macron becomes the country's third consecutive one-term head of state, or whether he will manage to do what his two predecessors failed to achieve and win a second term.

As France bids the fondest of farewells to a true cinema legend, we're asking: where does this leave French film and French culture? After Jean-Paul Belmondo died on Monday at the age of 88, the tributes continue to flood in. One perhaps sums him up best: an extraordinary hero of ordinary France. In other words, a man of the people who was also the biggest star of his generation.

France is beginning to relive the atrocity that changed French life forever. The trial of 20 men over the terror atrocities of November 13, 2015 has begun in Paris. One of the accused was actively part of the attacks that night. Salah Abdeslam spoke in court to say he was a fighter of the Islamic State group. It is the most he has said since his 2016 arrest in Brussels.

Is Brazil's president really reaching for the Trump playbook? On Independence Day, Jair Bolsonaro is in the capital to lead a rally against Congress and the Supreme Court in what critics had warned could be his January 6 moment. Just like during the storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters, Bolsonaro claims the system is rigged, with corruption probes against the current administration gaining steam.

The optics play to old stereotypes about Africa: men in fatigues holding the deposed president who has outlasted his stay. In 2010, Alpha Condé became Guinea's first civilian president to win through the ballot box. We ask if the once courageous opposition leader lost his way when he saw fit to lift term limits to hang on to power.

The European Union has hit the milestone of 70 percent of adults inoculated against Covid-19. It is quite a feat for a pandemic that is less than two years old and a vaccine that has only been available since January. Fury over the EU's misfires at the start of the campaign may already be fading from memory. However, Covid is not done with us. The vaccination rates vary wildly inside the EU and in many parts of the developing world, the inoculation rate remains below 2 percent.

On Tuesday, the US president marked the departure of the final troops from Afghanistan with a speech in which he insisted that foreign military intervention can solely be in cases of vital national security threats. What does that mean for other theatres of operation, like South Korea, the Sahel in Africa and all points where the world's largest army is deployed? Does the end of forever wars also mean the end of the US acting as the world's policeman?