Radio communications were severely disturbed last week, and the local newspaper says that solar activity is to blame. which types of solar activity could the newspaper be talking about?

Possibly the solar activity which causes cosmic rays (whatever they are) to be transmitted from the sun to the earth. I think they're called "solar flares" and are like thermonuclear bonfires on the sun's surface. There are also things called "mu mesons" which seem to be present for short lifetimes at various altitudes above the earth's surface. There's a relatively famous experiment carried out on Mount Washington near the Massachussetts Institute of Technology using said mesons, and before that some bloke got a Nobel Prize for getting in a hot air balloon and going up to altitude and detecting the mesons in the first place I wonder whether the journalists would actually know what they were talking about.