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A Beijing-Brussels-Berlin special: that was quite the video-summit. From Beijing, we had President Xi Jinping. From Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel. And from Brussels, President of the European Council Charles Michel and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. The Chinese billed it as the first summit “of its kind in history”. It was actually the second high-level meeting of the Chinese and European leadership in two months. And it took place only a few days after a high-level tour by Foreign Minister Wang Yi encompassing France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway, and the visit by the powerful “Yoda” of the State Council, Yang Jiechi, to Spain and Greece. The Holy Grail at the end of all these meetings – face-to-face and virtual – is the China-EU investment treaty. Germany currently heads the EU presidency for six months. Berlin wanted the treaty to be signed at a summit in Leipzig this month uniting the EU-27 and Beijing. But Covid-19 had other plans. So the summit was metastasized into this mini videoconference. The treaty is still supposed to be signed before the end of 2020. Adding an intriguing note, the mini-summit also happened one day before Premier Li

We are facing two viral pandemics in 2020 which are oddly related yet profoundly different – the pandemic of a novel Coronavirus, and the extraordinarily contagious virus of disinformation, falsehoods, and bad science about that pandemic, itself being shared and spread in countries around the globe. Such a metaphor may be misleading, but also instructive, and possibly leading us to solutions to both pandemics by thinking about them in a different way. Consider two examples; the “lock-down trap” and the “media echo-chamber”. The lock-down trap is epitomised by the current situation in Melbourne, Australia, where the whole population of five million people is half way through a six-week long “stage 4” lock-down, with a night-time curfew policed by soldiers and enforced with severe on the spot fines. While the introduction of this lock-down might appear to have been justified by the “second wave” outbreak of infections, the origins of that outbreak in an escape from quarantine hotels means that the punishment for government incompetence is being served by the victims. Those victims also include the casualties of COVID, who are almost entirely in insufficiently protected aged care homes, of which an astonishing number were somehow infected. There are few

Private sources in the northern countryside of Aleppo stated that the Turkish forces started recruiting numbers of its armed fighters to send them to Azerbaijan in order to assist the Azerbaijani forces in confronting the Armenian army. According to sources, Turkey opened special promotion offices in different parts of Afrin northern Aleppo, to attract the militants and encourage them to sign contracts by which they would move to fight in Azerbaijan for a period of six months, renewable in case they wanted to. According to the contract, the militants receive a monthly salary of $2500, while the advantage of granting Turkish citizenship to the families of the militants in case they died is absent, contrary to the contracts that Turkey had signed with the armed men who wanted to move to Libya. The sources said that Turkey has designated centers for registering militants wishing to fight in Azerbaijan within the towns of Genderes and Raju, along with Afrin city, and these centers have already started receiving requests by the militants. This Turkish move comes in a scenario identical to the one that Ankara followed during its intervention in the Libyan war, as it sent thousands of militants, mostly from