Catch up: Canadian Sgt. Doiron’s last words and other stories you may have missed today

Busy day? Here are five stories popular with Globe readers to help you catch up.

The Canadian Forces released heavily censored reports Tuesday from several military investigations into the death of Sergeant Andrew Doiron.

It is an attempt to lay to rest questions about how the special-forces soldier died at the hands of Canada’s allies, Steven Chase reports.

Sgt. Doiron’s last words before the peshmerga fatally shot him - “wow, wow, wow, Canada” - were an effort to persuade his allies that he was one of the good guys.

The military officially described the friendly fire death as a “tragic case of mistaken identity” and absolved Canada of blame.

It pointed the finger at the Kurds for communications errors: The peshmerga fighters had been expecting an attack from Islamic militants that evening, and a shift change meant the Kurds did not know the Canadians would be coming.

But the reports also said the Canadians used proper signals to identify themselves to the Kurds as they approached each defensive position.

Questions remain unanswered, including whether the Kurdish soldier who killed Sgt. Doiron will face discipline or punishment.

Bracing for rising debt-servicing costs, Canadian governments are attempting to lock in low interest rates before the inevitable rise forces unpopular decisions on spending and taxes.

Since the recession hit in 2008, Ottawa has added more than $150-billion to the national debt, Bill Curry reports. Provinces piled on a further $217-billion.

The federal government is currently weighing whether to issue another round of 50-year bonds. (It started that practice last year, raising $3.5-billion with yields below 3 per cent).

Meanwhile, Canada’s two most indebted provinces – Quebec and Ontario – are stretching out the average length of maturity of their debt. (The average maturity of Ontario’s debt is now 14 years, up from eight years prior to the recession).

Some fear that when interest rates return to normal, governments will face crippling debt-servicing costs.

To see the rest of the stories in this series, check out #DebtBinge on Twitter.

Nearly 25 years since Heritage Minutes were first broadcast across Canada, the bite-size history lessons are making a comeback.

That’s because Heritage Minutes are thriving in the digital age, Josh O’Kane writes.

Their original target audience – young, impressionable Canadians – is now a huge, digitally savvy slice of the country’s makeup.

And there’s little they crave more than nostalgia and parody.

Historica Canada launched the one-minute history lessons in public, to more and more people – at an art deco theatre, the Hockey Hall of Fame, a Winnipeg Jets game. They also dropped a mashup of 53 Heritage Minutes to recreate Drake’s Started from the Bottom. It got more than 100,000 YouTube views in 48 hours.

A new Heritage Minute, commemorating Canadian nurses on the First World War’s front lines, launches Wednesday. It premiers in theatres in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Halifax.

Cannes organizers are striving to send a message that women are in the spotlight this year.

They announced the first honorary Palme d’Or to a woman, 86-year-old Agnès Varda. There’s a special screening of the debut film from actress Natalie Portman, A Tale of Love and Darkness. And there’s also a new Cannes initiative called Women in Motion that involves a series of talks on issues pertaining to women and film.

But Cannes’s record is still embarrassingly androcentric, Liam Lacey writes.

There are just two Cannes films by women in the competition this year. There was only one in 2013. Perhaps of greatest concern for the future: There’s not one woman director among the seven feature films in competition in the Critics’ Week sidebar, which focuses on up-and-coming directors from around the world.

While Cannes’s small percentage of women directors is no worse than Hollywood’s, the optics are different, Lacey argues. Cannes is a state-supported, curated artistic festival that aims to represent the best in global cinema.

The director of the festival has said the problem is serious, but that in two weeks, Cannes can’t solve it.

Cannes is too important an event not to try.

The crude trend that sees men sexually harassing female television reporters by yelling the vulgar slur “FHRITP” into their microphones has been pervasive in North America since the stunt went viral a year and a half ago.

And when drivers aren’t screaming it from the safety of their cars, the reporters said men and boys tend to do it when they’re in groups – at sporting events and even film premieres. Call it herd misogyny, Zosia Bielski writes.

But the idea that FHRITP is"not personal" or has “nothing to do with” the women it’s spat at is a diminishing technique that serves to belittle women and distances perps from personal responsibility, Bielski argues.

And for women who have suffered sexual trauma in the past, street harassment or being yelled at while you’re on the job, can be a triggering experience.

While the question for many women tweeting their indignation about the slur has been, “How is this funny?”, the real question should be why is it so widespread, and what does it offer men who do it?

Follow Kat Sieniuc on Twitter: @katsieniuc