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Today's episode is brought to you by the European Training Foundation,

the EU agency supporting neighbourhood countries to reform the education, training and labour market systems.

We're dealing with a pandemic and this is not seeking to punish any countries.

We are the strongest supporters of global solidarity.

And I think that it is extremely important that what we have now is an instrument that will just give us more scope.

Welcome to EU Confidential. I'm Andrew Gray Politico's EU editor in Brussels. And you just heard European Health Commissioner

Stella Kiriakidis defending plans announced this week that would let EU members block

vaccine exports to countries they don't think are trading fairly when it comes to vaccines.

They don't name the UK, but that seems to be very much who they have in mind.

We'll explore how the plan is meant to work and whether it will ever be used in just a moment.

And later in the podcast, we'll focus on the war in Syria, 10 years after it began.

It's a war that sometimes seems forgotten in Europe. We'll look at what's being done on the humanitarian front, particularly to help children and what aid workers want from Europe. But first, let's get to our podcast panel. So it's a warm welcome to Riem Montez in Paris. Hi, Riem. Hello, all. Hi to Matt Karnichnik in Berlin. Hi, Matt. Hello. And it's high also to our trade reporter, Jakob Hanca Vela. Hi, Jacob. Hello. So you may have noticed we are sounding a bit more downbeat than usual, as you may have read. We lost our editor-in-chief Stephen Brown last week to a sudden heart attack.

As you can imagine, the whole political newsroom, the whole company is devastated, heartbroken at the loss of someone who was at the very center of our professional lives and in many ways

our personal lives too because he was for all of us a great friend as well as a great

journalist and a great boss. We're going to pay proper tribute to him with a special edition

of the podcast. But before we do that, I just wanted to give each of you a chance

to say a few words and maybe give our listeners a sense of Stephen, who I should say was also

a devoted listener to this podcast. He often used to listen when he was driving in his mini

and would always give us some feedback, very positive feedback, very positive person.

Riem, if you could sum them up in a few words or an anecdote or something, what would you say?

Yeah, the thing that really has always stuck with me since I met him two years ago,

...