For the past four years, journalists and environmental bloggers have been churning out alarming stories that insects are vanishing, in the United States and globally. Limited available evidence lends credence to reasonable concerns, not least because insects are crucial components of many ecosystems. But the issue has often been framed in catastrophic terms, with predictions of a near-inevitable and imminent ecological collapse that would break ecosystems, destroy harvests, and trigger widespread starvation. Most of the proposed solutions would require a dramatic retooling of many aspects of modern life, from urbanization to agriculture.

Considering the disruptive economic and social trade-offs being demanded by some of those promoting the crisis hypothesis, it's prudent to separate genuine threats from agenda-driven hyperbole. Are insect declines really threatening to precipitate a catastrophic ecological crisis? And, given the available data, what should a responsible society be doing?

Roots of the crisis narrative

The recent hyper-focus on insects can be traced back to a 2017 study conducted by an obscure German entomological society, which claimed that flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 76 percent over just 26 years. The study, co-authored by 12 scientists, lit a fire in advocacy circles and became the sixth-most-discussed scientific paper of that year. It remains popular today.

Londoners have seen streets flooded by torrential streams and a tube station being submerged under water as a heatwave in the UK capital was replaced by heavy rains. Some people even had to abandon cars stranded in flooded roads.

Earlier this week, the British capital saw some of the hottest days of the year as the temperatures rose over 30 degrees Celsius. Now, the heat seems to be the least of the Londoners' problems as some parts of the city were submerged in water and resembled the alarming images from the massive flooding which hit Germany and Belgium earlier this month.

Photos and videos posted to social media on Sunday showed cars ploughing through flooded streets while some roads looked more like turbulent rivers. Some car owners had to abandon their vehicles that were caught in the streams and almost fully submerged.

The narrative that domestic anti-government extremism is the greatest threat to U.S. national security — the official position of the U.S. security state and the Biden administration — received its most potent boost in October 2020, less than one month before the 2020 presidential election. That was when the F.B.I. and Michigan state officials announced the arrest of thirteen people on terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges, with six of them accused of participating in a plot to kidnap Michigan's Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had been a particular target of criticism from President Trump for her advocacy for harsh COVID lockdown measures.

The headlines that followed were dramatic and fear-inducing: "F.B.I. Says Michigan Anti-Government Group Plotted to Kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer," announced The New York Times. That same night, ABC News began its broadcast this way: "Tonight, we take you into a hidden world, a place authorities say gave birth to a violent domestic terror plot in Michigan — foiled by the FBI."

Democrats and liberal journalists instantly seized on this storyline to spin a pre-election theme that was as extreme as it was predictable. Gov. Whitmer herself blamed Trump, claiming that the plotters "heard the president's words not as a rebuke but as a rallying cry — as a call to action." Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) claimed that "the president is a deranged lunatic and he's inspired white supremacists to violence, the latest of which was a plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer," adding: "these groups have attempted to KILL many of us in recent years. They are following Trump's lead." Vox's paid television-watcher and video-manipulator, Aaron Rupar, drew this inference: "Trump hasn't commended the FBI for breaking up Whitmer kidnapping/murder plot because as always he doesn't want to denounce his base." Michael Moore called for Trump's arrest for having incited the kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer. One viral tweet from a popular Democratic Party activist similarly declared: "Trump should be arrested for this plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. There's no doubt he inspired this terrorism."

Three quarters of Singapore's Covid-19 infections in the last four weeks were among vaccinated individuals, government data shows, as a rapid ramp-up in the city state's inoculations leaves fewer people unvaccinated.

Singapore has already inoculated nearly 75% of its 5.7 million people, the world's second highest after the United Arab Emirates, a Reuters tracker shows, and half its population is fully vaccinated.

It reported 1,096 locally transmitted cases in the last 28 days, of which 484, or 44%, were fully vaccinated people, while 30% were partially vaccinated and the remaining 25% were unvaccinated.

Haiti, reeling from the assassination of its president and the coronavirus pandemic, has received its first half-million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund said Thursday.

UNICEF said in a statement the doses were donated by the U.S. and delivered Wednesday through COVAX, an initiative for the equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.

"Until yesterday, Haiti was the only country in the Americas without a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine," UNICEF said in a statement Thursday.

"Thanks to this donation, hundreds of thousands of Haitians will receive their shots against COVID-19," UNICEF said. "Yet, despite the collective efforts to kickstart the vaccination campaign soon, most of the Haitian population is at risk of remaining unvaccinated due to the limited availability of doses currently in the country."

In an exclusive interview with VOA, U.S. National Security Council member Juan Gonzalez said the decision to speed up vaccine delivery came after a U.S. delegation visited Port-au-Prince on Sunday.

Remember a while back when it hit the news that the FBI busted up a ring of people who were looking to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer at the height of the Covid-19 lockdown insanity? Buzzfeed News has just published a lengthy story examining the plot and what led up to the bust.

The piece is framed as this big exposé on right-wing domestic terrorism culminating in the plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

The only problem? Yeah, it looks like it might have been a setup from the start.

Now, remember, this is from left-wing Buzzfeed. Not some conservative news outlet or Alex Jones conspiracist network.

Here is the important conclusion from the Buzzfeed story that, for some reason, they don't see as a very important issue.

If we look back throughout history, all societies whose government attempted to, or actually succeeded in, controlling the speech of their citizens, have been totalitarian nightmares. It is for this reason that the founders crafted the first and most important Amendment to the Constitution, barring government from doing exactly that.

Aside from a few constitutionally illiterate politicians over the past couple of decades and the horrid atrocities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, recently Americans have had the ability to express their protected speech in any manner they see fit. Over the last several years, however, tech giants and social media companies have brought down the hammer in the name of protecting society from "disinformation."

Many have argued — although incorrectly — that companies like Facebook and Twitter are private entities and therefore can censor whatever speech they want to on their own platforms. As TFTP has been reporting for years, however, this censorship was anything but private.

While there has been a grey area as to the relationship between social media and government, on Thursday, the White House made sure to clear up any doubt. During a press briefing, Jen Psaki removed any uncertainty that Facebook is a wholly private entity by claiming that the United States government will now dictate to the social media behemoth, exactly what is and isn't allowed on their platform.

"We are in regular touch with the social media platforms," said Psaki, adding, "we're flagging problematic posts for Facebook."

Britain's food supply chains are "right on the edge of failing" as absence related to COVID-19 has aggravated a critical shortage of labour, a meat industry body said on Wednesday.

The British Meat Processors' Association (BMPA) said the shortage of skills was so critical, some plants had reported vacancies of 10% to 16% of permanent positions, discounting the impact of the pandemic. BMPA CEO Nick Allen said:

"On top of the underlying worker shortage, we're also hearing from some members that between 5% and 10% of their workforce have been 'pinged' by the (health service) app and asked to self-isolate."

The shortage of workers affected the meat products that require more labour to produce, he said, meaning those lines would be the first to be cut.

On Monday, England's car plants, railways, supermarkets and pubs warned the government that the COVID-19 tracing app, which has told hundreds of thousands of workers to isolate, was wrecking the recovery and pushing supply chains to the brink of collapse.

Alerts, or "pings", from the official app telling anyone identified as a contact of someone with the disease to self-isolate for 10 days have also disrupted schools and the healthcare system.

China cannot accept the World Health Organization's plan for the second phase of a study into the origins of COVID-19, a senior Chinese health official said Thursday.

Zeng Yixin, the vice minister of the National Health Commission, said he was "rather taken aback" that the plan includes further investigation of the theory that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab.

He dismissed the lab leak idea as a rumor that runs counter to common sense and science.

"It is impossible for us to accept such an origin-tracing plan," he said at a news conference called to address the COVID-19 origins issue.

White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci has told Kentucky Senator Rand Paul "You don't know what you're talking about," after Paul accused him of lying about his alleged role in controversial virus research in China.

Questioning Fauci during a Senate Health Committee hearing on Tuesday about the government's coronavirus response, Sen. Paul (R) implied that Fauci lied to Congress in May when he said that the National Institute of Health (NIH) did not fund so-called 'gain-of-function' research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, believed by many to be the source of the coronavirus pandemic.

"I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement," Fauci replied.

Paul presented a 2015 academic paper that asserts such research did take place at the Wuhan lab, and was partly funded by the NIH. One US scientist has reviewed the paper and concluded that the research within "seemed to meet the definition of gain-of-function," — but that it did not lead to the creation of the novel coronavirus. The term 'gain-of-function' refers to modifying and increasing the transmissibility of animal viruses to better study their effect on humans.