1 Week, 7 Stories - Newsletter #38

Every edition features 7 stories, from the past week. I’ll draw on my background in media, journalism, agriculture, biotech, and renewable energy to come up with an interesting selection and to offer some context.

‘Tis the season to be on the look out for wasp nests either of the familiar papery kind or the ones hidden underground that that can lead to some uncomfortable stings. Or worse.

• A well known Italian chef died from anaphylactic shock after being stung while putting flowers on his mother’s grave.
• In France a man died from multiple wasp stings to his head while helping to clear a garden.
• A golf course employee died in Arizona after he was attacked by wasps.

And a trip to the beach for a Ukrainian tourist ended in tragedy when he was attacked by wasps. He was allergic to stings and ran from the wasps but died from a heart attack brought on by his panic even though he was not stung.

Less than 1% of the population are allergic to bee or wasp stings and in Canada mostly it is from yellow jackets, hornets, wasps and bees. Reaction to insect stings accounts for only a few deaths per year in this country. ?It is normal for the area around a sting to be affected.? Problems occur when the systemic reaction starts to affect the rest of the body. Your immune system kicks in, you may go into shock, blood pressure drops and airways narrow.

The Allergy Asthma & Immunology Society of Ontario has a few tips to avoid insect stings including not walking barefoot outside, avoid scented products such as perfumes or hairspray which tend to attract insects, and always be on the lookout for nests.? If you do have allergies, keeping your EpiPen handy and making sure anyone you may be hiking or walking with knows of your allergy are ?both good ideas.

The NHS in the United Kingdom has a good video listing 14 different insect bites, how to tell the difference and how to treat them.? When it comes to dedication to insect bites that must go to the late Justin Schmidt who described and ranked 70 painful stings for insect species.? Top of his list was the Honey Wasp which he described as “Spicy, blistering. A cotton swab of habanero sauce has been pushed up your nose”.

Enjoy the rest of the summer!

Now for something with the potential for a much bigger sting. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for resuming production of intermediate missiles. Given that he has near total control of what goes on in his country it is not clear what “called for” really means in the context of the Associated Press story. A warning for Western countries? Or letting them know what is already in progress?? He made the statement after the United States said in July during the NATO summit that it intended to deploy more long-range missiles in Germany in 2026. Starts & Stripes magazine reported that Putin had vowed “mirror measures”.

Recent geopolitical events have ramped up the rhetoric between the 2 countries, but the latest round of sabre-rattling really got underway in 2019 when the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was an agreement with Russia to limit the types of weapons systems the signatories could pursue. In its official statement at the time the US Department of Defence said, "Russia has failed to comply with its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and as such, the United States has withdrawn from the INF Treaty effective today, Aug. 2, 2019". The Monthly Review which? describes itself as an “Independent Socialist Magazine” said this week that the US decision has left a “nuclear ‘sword of damocles’ hanging over Europeans’ heads”. A Reuters story echoes the sentiment and says the fallout from the unravelling of the agreement is only becoming apparent now. China was never part of that agreement so has been free to build up its arsenal which adds to the global arms rabbit hole we seem to be falling into. The Reuters story also quotes a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research who said all sides need to be prepared for “more scenarios for direct military confrontation between Russia and NATO countries".

August 6, 1945, was the when the “Little Boy” nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. That should serve as a reminder to world leaders of what our future holds if the new arms race continues and if political and military trash talk moves onto the front lines.

According to this MSN story, as a baby-boomer I am about to “cripple the economy”.? As more of those born between 1946 and 1964 retire, there will be a smaller percentage of the overall population still putting in their daily work routine. I guess while the rest of us put our feet up and watch TikTok videos.

A Statistics Canada study posted this week tries to address “What will happen once baby boomers retire”. Though it does not suggest that we are about to railroad the Canadian economy, there are definitely some adjustments ahead. The percentage of working age people who are employed or looking for work hit 65% last year which is the lowest level in two decades. Over the next two decades however immigration will ease the effect, and we can expect to see a rise in the labour force participation rate which will stabilize by 2041 according to the report. All because one generation is starting to cut back on hours or retire completely.

In the meantime the Boomers are holding the most wealth, but according to The Economist we are stingy with it. (You might need a subscription to read the WSJ, but here is a similar story from Yahoo!Finance )

Why? Well Boomers are living longer so want to make sure they have a financial cushion, they are part of a saving generation and continue that practice, and they lived through the ups and downs of the seventies and eighties and are cautious.

Meanwhile they are taking money out of the stock market, drawing down social security, increasing public health care costs, and passing on those impacts and costs to a new generation.

While all the factors seem to indicate Boomers are doing okay and living well there is a caveat to it all. High costs of housing and recent stock market volatility have been cutting into the Boomer buckets of cash. Last year Deloitte Canada found that only 14% of near-retirees will be able to afford a comfortable retirement and at the lower end, nearly a million households will rely heavily on public support in retirement.

We Boomers really did not intend to mess things up according to the National Post. We were idealistic about so many things and got carried away. Sorry about that.

The last of the woolly mammoths to roam the planet were probably on an Arctic island about 4,000 years ago.? The prehistoric mammal tipped the scales somewhere between 5,500 and 7,300 kg (between about 6 and 8 tons) and stood about 3 to 3.7 metres (about 10 to 12 feet) tall. About the size of our modern elephants. They may have also called British Columbia home at one point as well according to a paper in the latest peer-reviewed edition of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. You won’t be able to get full access to the paper, but a news release from Simon Fraser University can hep fill in some of the details. The researchers examined 32 suspected mammoth samples from Vancouver Island and found the oldest was more than 45,000 years old and the most recent was 23,000 years old. Determining the when and if question for woolly mammoths in BC is hard because intact samples are rare and tend to be small fragments. ?

They likely evolved in Africa 4 million years ago, made it to Europe 3 million years ago and found their way to North America around 1.5 million years ago. In 2022 a well-preserved baby mammoth that had died 42,000 years ago was found in the Yukon. At the time of the discovery, Tr’ond?k Hw?ch’in elders offered a blessing and named the mammoth Nun cho ga, which means “big baby animal” in the H?n language.

In July, scientists were able to recreate a multi-dimensional structure of the genome of a 52,000-year-old female woolly mammoth genome found in Siberia. The breakthrough was compared to the first human genome assembly accomplished in 1999 by the Human Genome Project. There has long been speculation that with the right tools, technology, and genetic information, a woolly mammoth (or at least a version of it) could once again wander around the Arctic tundra.

What could possibly go wrong!

After increasing unrest and violence across the country, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh stepped down and headed to India. In her place will be Nobel laureate, Muhammad Yunus who received the Peace Prize in 2006 for his efforts to develop microcredit markets. His microcredit journey began when he made personal loans to poor basket weavers in Bangladesh in the mid-70s so they could buy raw material and not have to pay the high interest rates they were forced to accept. He became known as “Banker to the Poor”.

Microcredit is the practice of loaning very small amounts of money to people to help them become self-sufficient. In the case of the basket weavers, Yunus found that all it took was 856 Bangladesh taka which at the time was about 30 Canadian dollars to help them break the cycle of poverty. Based on that experience Yunis established the Grameen Bank to provide small, long-term loans with no collateral. When the 2006 Peace Prize was awarded, the Bank had served 7 million borrowers with a repayment percentage of more that 95 percent.

World Vision Canada says that microfinance has existed for centuries and has empowered women and helped the poor avoid loan sharks. Modern microfinancing includes training programs which equips farmers, fishers, and entrepreneurs with some of the basic knowledge they need to make a small business and profitable one.

Today the global microfinance market has been valued at $215 billion USD ( $295 billion Cdn) and it will continue to grow. Microfinancing is not just for poor countries. In Canada non-profit organizations such as ?Futurpreneur, Community Futures Network of Canada, Microcrédit Montréal,?Canada Microcredit Educators Group, and Windmill Microlending offer micro-loans, training and support.

Whether the interim Prime Minister of Bangladesh can bring his notion of lifting up those stuck at the bottom of the economy to a broader political belief remains to be seen.

The International Space Station and the Boeing Starliner spacecraft are back in the news.? As I wrote in Newsletter #33, it is because the spacecraft has some technical problems that have it stalled on the ISS well out of reach of a AAA tow truck.

In July NASA said it could be another 90 days before the problems were identified and fixed. The latest ETA for a return to Earth is sometime in 2025. Boeing says preparations for the flight back are underway. ?Perhaps it is not just the propulsion system that is a bit dodgy. Communication lines are broken as well. In a NASA briefing call this week, Boeing was “notably absent”.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams blasted off from Cape Canaveral on June 5th after a series of delays. Not just delays for the crewed mission, but years of delays and problems after being awarded a contract in 2014 to provide a reusable vehicle to ferry crews to the ISS. SpaceX was given a similar contract at the same time and flew its first official mission in 2020.

Space X may also be the way the crew finally gets back home. Phys.org says planning is underway to launch the already scheduled Dragon mission in September with only 2 astronauts on board, leaving 2 vacant seats for the Boeing crew for the trip home.? Hardly embarrassing at all for Boeing.

As for the spacecraft itself, it could be modified for a remote controlled trip back home but there have been concerns about the software that would control that maneuver. There are only 2 docking ports on the space station for a crewed spacecraft so one way or another, the Starliner needs to be punted eventually.

The astronauts originally were prepared for a 5-day trip to the ISS and didn’t bring enough changes of clothes for several months in space.

And you thought your lost luggage was a problem! ?

“Journalism. It’s a tough job with insane pressure and pretty crappy pay. On the other hand, everybody hates you.”

It is one of those quotes that has been floating around the Internet for years (the earliest mention I found was 2013), but it is as true today as it was then. Today we can add “forever under the threat of layoffs and of “verbal and physical abuse when you are out on assignment”. ?Even the definition of journalism is a matter of discussion. The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) says the purpose of journalism is to combine evidence-based research and verification with the creative act of storytelling, that it contains an element of original production, and that it provides clear evidence of self-conscious discipline. Work BC defines a journalist as someone who researches, investigates, interprets and communicates news and public affairs through newspapers, television, radio and other media.

The final say however seems to lie with the receiver of news, journalism, and media: the audience of readers, listeners, and viewers.

Research released this week by Nieman Labs highlights at least one of the challenges facing journalists and how the audience views their news. Those CAJ elements that suggest journalism should be evidence-based and verified makes it difficult to lay out the facts and offer up the evidence. The paper, “Whose Pants Are on Fire? Journalists Correcting False Claims are Distrusted More Than Journalists Confirming Claims”, was published in the journal, Communications Research. It concluded that people generally trust journalists when they confirm something as true but are more distrusting when they correct false claims. The challenge is compounded by the backlash heaped on journalists who “reveal misdeeds”.

Perhaps the harshest reality a journalist must face in 2024 is that after following all the ethical and legal guidelines to get to the truth and publish a story, false postings on social media can go viral and are not subject to the same guidelines. The most recent and one of the most appalling examples came after the killing of three young girls in Southport, England in July. A social media post gave an incorrect name for the killer and said he was an asylum seeker on an M16 watch list. Not only was none of that true, but an investigation by British media also seems to have proved it was made up by the woman who posted the information on X. She has claimed the information came from someone else, but the media investigation has found no truth to the claim. The BBC Media Show podcast will walk you through the steps to trace the origin of the claims which have played a key role in inciting riots across the UK. She may also face criminal charges for her actions.

Which takes us back to the research that shows people have less trust in journalism that debunks information that they do in those who confirm stories. I spent a significant amount of time working in media and most of the time miss the mediocre pay, deadline pressures, and hate mail. Most of the time…

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I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

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