Spill, baby, spill. As millions of litres of oil spew from the Gulf of Mexico, a group of American senators urges the U.S. President to reinstate a ban on offshore drilling.

Falling because of deaf ears. A British woman on Death Row in Texas says protocol was not followed -- but Texan authorities don't follow her argument.

Greece lightning. Public sector workers start a forty-eight hour strike, in protest against austerity measures meant to help Greece's desolate economy.

Nashville underwater. Torrential rains cause terrible flooding in Tennessee -- leading to evacuations, and the deaths of nineteen people.

The brainy season. Since May is Zombie Awareness Month, we ask an expert on the subject to show a little esprit de corpse.

And...interpretive dance. In China, a choreographed team is dispatched to eradicate poorly translated English phrases from the streets of Shanghai.

As It Happens, the Tuesday edition. Radio that knows sometimes the cat gets your tongue -- and sometimes the cats get your tongue wrong.

Spilled ink over spilled oil.

Last month, American President Barack Obama announced he was lifting a long-standing moratorium on offshore drilling along vast stretches of the U.S. coast. But given the growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, that seems less like a good idea than ever. Last week, several Democratic Senators drafted a letter to the President saying just that -- and asking him to re-instate the drilling ban.

Benjamin Cardin is a Senator for Maryland, and one of the letter's co-authors. We reached him in Washington, D.C.

Greece is between a rock and a hard place.

With the IMF and the European Union planning a rescue package totaling one-hundred-and-forty-five billion dollars American, it wants to keep its creditors happy. But in the process, it's making Greek public sector workers very unhappy.

The country's new austerity plan means those workers will lose their bonuses, see their wages frozen or slashed, and their pensions cut. Which, unsurprisingly, they're not pleased about. So tomorrow, they will start a forty-eight hour general strike.

Despina Koutsoumba is an elected member of the Greek Civil Servants' Trade Union. We reached her in Athens.

Being a member of the class of 2010 has taken on a whole new meaning for the First Nations University of Canada in Saskatoon.

They may be the last graduates from that campus.

Earlier this year, both the federal and provincial governments cut funding to the struggling university. And yesterday, the school announced it would be selling and closing its Saskatoon campus. That campus is currently home to nearly two hundred students whose academic future is now uncertain.

Tania Lafontaine is a graduate of the School of Indian Social Work, and now teaches at the school. We reached her in Saskatoon.

Fela Kuti lived an extraordinary life.

Born in Nigeria in 1938, he was a singer, a composer, a bandleader, and a musician -- playing trumpet, saxophone and keyboard. In the 'sixties and 'seventies, he was one of Africa's best-known and most controversial musicians, pioneering a brand of music he called "Afrobeat". And Fela Kuti was also a high-profile human-rights activist and politician, who spent his life battling the corrupt military regime that ran Nigeria. When he died from complications due to AIDS in 1997, more than a million people attended his funeral.

With such a remarkable personal story, it was perhaps inevitable that Fela Kuti's life would be turned into theatre. This season, the musical "Fela" premiered on Broadway, to much critical acclaim.

Today, it was announced that "Fela" had earned eleven Tony nominations. Which gives us the perfect excuse to play some of his music. From his 1973 album "Afrodisiac", here is Fela Kuti, with "Je nwi temi", or "Don't Gag Me".

The news is coming up next on CBC Radio One -- and then we'll be back with more As It Happens -- and these stories:

Danger in a strange land. The state of Texas refuses to change a British woman's death sentence -- despite a serious breach of diplomatic protocol.

The beautiful game meets some ugly history. When their country hosts North Korea's World Cup team, Zimbabweans look back in anger.

A lot on their plates. The Northwest Territories prepares to stamp out its old license plates -- but the bear necessities will remain.

Stay tuned. I'm CO.

And I'm RF.

Hello again, I'm CO.

And I'm RF. This is As It Happens, Part Two.

Coming up:

A British documentary maker attempts to go incognito in a country where surveillance cameras monitor your every move.

And a former First Lady's vague allegations about being poisoned at a G-8 summit lead to some Germanic depression.

Those stories are still to come on As It Happens.

Time is running out for Linda Carty.

In 2002, the British grandmother was convicted of murder in Texas, and sentenced to death. Ms. Carty was born in the Caribbean, and is a British national. Under international law, British authorities should have been notified of her arrest without delay. But they were not.

Ms. Carty therefore appealed her case to the United States Supreme Court, on the grounds that the she was not informed of her rights as a foreign national, and that her defence counsel was ineffective. But yesterday, the court decided not to review her death sentence. If she is killed, it will be the first execution of a British woman in fifty-five years.

Paul Lynch is Britain's Consul-General in Houston, and that's where we reached him.

Across the Southeastern United States, the month of May came in with a vengence.

Over the weekend, nearly half a metre of rain fell in Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi, causing mass flooding and evacuations. In Nashville, ten deaths have been blamed on the flooding -- and more are expected. Cars are stacked on top of one another like toys. Schools are closed. And even the beacon of country music -- The Grand Ole Opry -- has shut its doors.

Lipscomb University in Nashville is one of seventeen emergency shelters for flood victims. Walt Leaver is the school's Vice-President of University Relations.

If you're in China, and find yourself craving some fried enema, it's easy enough to get. Just make sure to stop by the cash recycling machine first.

You heard me right -- it's the words that are wrong. Those are just two of the many strange English translations that have popped up in China. But sadly, "fried enema" may soon be off the menu there. In the lead-up to the World's Fair in Shanghai, the Chinese government has dispatched an army of language police to scrub the city's signs of these goofy misinterpretations -- which are referred to as "Chinglish".

Oliver Lutz Radtke, for one, doesn't see the clean-up as an improvement. He's the author of two books documenting Chinglish signage -- and one of the world's leading experts on the dialect. We reached him in Heidelberg, Germany.

It's just over a month before the World Cup begins, and South Africa's neighbours are all trying to get a piece of the action. Many nations are hosting training camps for countries taking part, or arranging friendly matches against some of the competing teams.

One such nation is Zimbabwe, which is currently lined up to host North Korea. Two countries with two of the worst human-rights records in the world.

This has caused particular outrage in Zimbabwe's Matabeleland province, where the Communist team is set to train. But not for the reasons you might think. The outrage is more personal than that. The people of Matabeleland believe North Korea was complicit in a massacre that ravaged the region just over thirty years ago.

Dumiso Dabengwa is the leader of the Zapu party, an opposition party based in the Matabeleland region. We reached him by mobile phone in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

It's hard to disappear in the U.K..

Britain now has nearly five million CCTV cameras in operation, and the average citizen appears on more than seven hundred different databases. For one documentary filmmaker, enough was enough. Sick of all the information available to authorities and companies about his life, David Bond wanted to see if he could vanish without a trace from authorities' prying eyes.

He made his attempt into a film called "Erasing David" -- which has just been released. We reached Bond -- David Bond -- in Ayrshire, Scotland.

It seems that zombies just won't die.

Last week we brought you the story of the CURE party, who are running for election in the U.K. The party is fighting under the banner of rights and equality for the undead. Well, they aren't alone in championing the causes of zombies -- because as you know, May is Zombie Awareness Month.

Now in its third year, Zombie Awareness Month is intended to highlight zombie issues, encourage zombie research, and convince everyone to keep their brains protected at all times. It's organized by the Zombie Research Organization -- of which Matt Mogk is the Chief Executive.

We reached him precisely where you'd expect we'd reach the Chief Executive of the Zombie Research Organization: Los Angeles.

Compared to license plates from the Northwest Territories, other plates seem a little square. But after nearly twenty-five years, the polar bear-shaped license plate needs an upgrade.

The North West Territories is one of the last places in North America still issuing steel plates. And the territorial government has decided to switch over to a more enviornmentally-friendly material: aluminum. And it's going to have a new slogan too -- instead of "Explore the Arctic" the plates will now read "Spectacular NWT." But not to worry, it's not all going pear-shaped: the plates will still be bear-shaped.

Bob Morris is an avid collector of Northwest Territories license plates and we reached him in Yellowknife.

For a couple of guys who prided themselves on their guts, the Presidents Bush -- George H. W. and George W. -- actually lacked intestinal fortitude. Not in the figurative sense, necessarily, but in the literal sense.

You may recall, as George H.W. wishes you would not, that the then-President vomited, quite dramatically, on the Prime Minister of Japan in 1992. That incident apparently led to the Japanese coinage "bushu suru" -- meaning "to do a Bush"; specifically, to regurgitate in public.

According to a press conference shortly after that incident, President Bush Senior's public expulsion was due to the flu. But now, there's a more sinister theory regarding some gastro-intestinal distress suffered by his son, President George W. Bush, in 2007. And the theorist is none other than former First Lady Laura Bush.

Ms. Bush's memoir comes out today. In that book, which is called "Spoken From The Heart", she writes about the 2007 G-8 summit, which was held in Germany. While there, she, her husband, and various members of staff felt sick. And now she's suggesting that they may have been poisoned.

She doesn't actually accuse anyone. She just describes the terrible illness that befell her and her husband and their colleagues.

Then she mentions other high-profile poisonings. She raises the spectre of terrorists planting dangerous substances.

She mentions that the Secret Service did an investigation, and that doctors diagnosed a virus.

And she concludes, "we never learned if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one."

As you might imagine, the chef who cooked for the President at that German summit is finding Ms. Bush's toxic musings difficult to stomach.

Steffen Duckhorn says that, as soon as he heard about the American contingent's illness, he called German authorities.

They investigated, and found no traces of poison. Which wasn't really surprising, because during the summit, a team of toxicologists had been taking samples of every single food item that left the kitchen.

And everyone who worked in the kitchen had been carefully vetted. And everyone who supplied the food -- which included calf schnitzel and herring tartar -- had undergone a background check.

Oh, and also, Mr. Duckhorn says that he and his staff would have ingested any poison before the Americans did. "We do taste our things," he sniffed to Der Spiegel.

You'd think Laura Bush -- who got paid one-point-six million dollars for the book -- might have called someone up before making vague allegations about toxic herring tartar. She would have been wise to remember the old adage that one man's poisson is another man's poison.

Or, in the case of this music, one woman's pop hit is another man's jazz exploration. Here's Damian Graham, with a somewhat rearranged version of Britney Spears's song "Toxic".