AP: E.U. agrees on $2.1 trillion deal after marathon summit
“After four days and nights of wrangling, exhausted European Union leaders finally clinched a deal on an unprecedented 1.8 trillion-euro ($2.1 trillion) budget and coronavirus recovery fund early Tuesday, after one of their longest summits ever. The 27 leaders grudgingly committed to a costly, massive aid package for those hit hardest by COVID-19, which has already killed 135,000 people within the bloc alone. … To confront the biggest recession in its history, the E.U. will establish a 750 billion-euro coronavirus fund, partly based on common borrowing, to be sent as loans and grants to the hardest-hit countries. That is in addition to the agreement on the seven-year, 1 trillion-euro E.U. budget that leaders had been haggling over for months even before the pandemic…” (Casert, 7/21).

Science: E.U. leaders slash science spending in €1.8 trillion deal
“Following a marathon E.U. summit in Brussels, national leaders this morning agreed to a €1.8 trillion seven-year budget and pandemic recovery fund that will spend €81 billion on Horizon Europe, the main E.U. research program. That’s far less than what researchers had hoped for — and €13.5 billion less than a proposal two months ago from the European Commission, the E.U. executive arm…” (Wallace, 7/21).

Additional coverage of the E.U. budget and pandemic recovery fund is available from New York Times, NPR, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.