The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

A Communist Party Congress may sound a bit dull, but the current one in Vietnam could be a corker.

The party is split between different visions of the future, turn to face the West or look back to old allies.

The stakes are high.

And every successive generation, in recent history anyway, spends more time with their children.

But now that data are in for millennials, some interesting patterns crop up, namely that the generation's dads are far more involved in dadding than their forebears.

But first...

In recent days, fighting has broken out between Syrian government troops and Kurdish forces in the country's northeast.

Syria's Kurds essentially carved out their own autonomous region over the past decade.

They formed a distinct administration and army.

After the Assad regime was toppled, the new president Ahmed al-Shara pledged to bring that

territory back under central control. That moment appears to have come. With events unfolding so

fast, it's hard to gain a clear picture.

Gareth Brown, our Middle East correspondent, has been following Syria closely over the past year.

He's now back on the road, and this week he sent us videos and talked to us via Apache Internet on WhatsApp.

Hi, Gareth, I understand that internet connectivity in northern Syria isn't brilliant. So let's try speaking over voice memos.

Tell me where you are at the moment and what's happening around you, what you can see.

Hi, Rosie. Well, normally I do this from the comfort of my apartment,

but today I'm sat by a military checkpoint

in northeastern Syria. Just this morning I was in Der Azur and I spent the last few hours

...