Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The seismic changes that COVID-19 has brought to the healthcare industry have led to many

worse outcomes quite aside from the virus itself. Yet the pandemic has brought one silver

lining. It's shown a better way to carry out early stage abortions.

And for all the dangerous fauna of Australia, the funnel web spider is one of the most fearsome.

Its bite is lethal. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it shouldn't be. We look at new

research that may at last explain this unhappy accident of evolution.

First, Armenia and Azerbaijan rejected international calls for a ceasefire yesterday. After deadly

clashes broke out on Sunday, pushing the two countries to the brink of war. Both have declared

martial law and total military mobilization. At least a hundred people have been killed

in the fighting, which has involved artillery strikes and air power. The two former Soviet

republics are locked in a decades-old conflict over the disputed province of Nagorno-Karabakh.

This marks the second time in less than three months that the countries have come to blows.

But this time, they're edging closer to all-out war, one which could ensnare both Turkey

and Russia.

We haven't seen detailed death tolls from the Azerbaijanis side, but the overall death toll

now seems to be, well, north of 100.

Piltra Zelewski is our Turkey correspondent.

That would make the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh the heaviest since 2016, when at least 200

people were killed, and on pace to be the worst since 1994, the end of the war between

Armenia and Azerbaijan.

...