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.

Even before COVID-19, online misinformation was poisoning public discourse.

Now it can be a matter of life and death.

We take a look at the infodemic and discover that your political leanings can affect just how susceptible you are to the lies.

And why have pedigree puppies become so pricey in Britain?

Partly, the answer is that lockdowns have made it as hard for dogs to hook up as it is for humans.

But partly, breeders can't vet potential owners and worry about fair-weather best friends.

First up, though.

It's hard to overstate how much the shipping industry means to global trade.

iPhones from China, dresses from Bangladesh, soy soy beans from Brazil, oil from the Gulf,

as the industry itself puts it, it's responsible for 90% of everything. At any one time,

more than a million merchant seamen are ferrying cargo on more than 60,000 ships. But COVID travel restrictions are stopping crew members from returning home, even months after their contracts end.

Hundreds of thousands of them are now stranded at sea, forced to keep working as safety concerns mount and governments dither.

On Friday, UN chief Antonio Gutierrez called on all countries to designate seafarers as key workers so that systems

could be put in place to get them home. Today, the emergency contract extensions that have kept

them toiling during the pandemic are set to expire. The impact of the pandemic on seafarers

has been absolutely pernicious. Helen Joyce is the economist's executive events editor. They're some of the world's most important workers. I mean, if there were ever key workers, it's the 1.3 million merchant seamen who are at any one time on the high seas delivering pretty much anything you can think of. And since countries started to lock down, they've basically been shut on board. They haven't been allowed to get off. They haven't been allowed to be relieved. And at this point, there's 250,000 of them who are more than one month over contract and have no idea when they're ever going to get home. So why is it they can't just go home when their contracts come to a close? Well, you have to get off somewhere, and that port has to actually accept you.

And the way that the global shipping industry works is that most of the people to work on these ships are from developing countries, in particular, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, parts of Eastern Europe.

But where you do your crew changes is mostly in either very big importing and exporting nations, say America, or big shipping hubs like Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai. And so you're flown in and out to wherever it suits your ship

to stop. And there haven't been any commercial flights, but also a lot of these countries

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