Hello, I'm Laura Lynch.

Good evening. I'm Mio Adilman.

This is As It Happens.

Tonight:

Confession of a dangerous kind. The Iranian woman recently reprieved from death by stoning now says she killed her husband and took her accomplice as a lover.

HSTeaser. British Columbians successfully petition the province to drop the Harmonized Sales Tax -- but whether their effort will work still isn't clear.

Hard landing. As a ship carrying hundreds of Sri Lankans arrives in Canada, one of the lawyers who will represent them is concerned they're in for a rough ride.

Not taking the bait. A Louisiana shrimper is pressured by would-be fake fishermen to trick BP into giving them compensation money.

Fare enough! A group of radical, turnstile-hopping subway riders in Paris creates an insurance scheme to pay for their fines.

And . . . You've heard of a lead foot. Well, this guy must have a gold one. A Swedish man drives Swiss authorities to slap him with a million-dollar speeding ticket, after he's clocked doing two-ninety.

As It Happens, the Thursday edition. Radio that feels the need, the need for Swede.

It's a confession with deadly consequences.

Last night, the Iranian woman who caught the world's attention when she was sentenced to death by stoning, appeared on national state television. Her face was blurred and her words voiced over by a translator. But the message was clear enough. Sakineh Ashtiani admitted to playing a role in the murder of her husband, then committing adultery with her co-conspirator.

Ms. Ashtiani is now facing execution -- a sentence that was recently commuted to death by hanging.

Ahmad Fatimi is with the International Committee Against Stoning. His group has been in regular contact with Ms. Ashtiani's laywer, who is now in hiding. We reached Mr. Fatimi in Sweden.

It's been a long and arduous journey, but, for the passengers of the MV Sun Sea, the waiting has just begun.

Last May, the ship left Thailand, headed for Australia. Then it inexplicably changed course and began a several-month-long voyage towards Canada's west coast. Canadian authorities have been monitoring the ship's progress and, today, they boarded the MV Sea Sun off the coast of British Columbia.

This afternoon, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews confirmed the ship was carrying four-hundred-and-ninety Tamil refugee claimants from Sri Lanka.

Daniel Mcleod is an immigration lawyer in Vancouver and has been appointed as duty council for some of the migrants, once they arrive on shore. We reached him at his office.

It's perhaps the ultimate slippery fish maneuver.

With the waters off the Lousiana coast shut down in the aftermath of the BP spill, many fishermen are depending on compensation payments the oil company has said it will hand out. But fishermen may not be the only ones getting this money. There are some slick players in the area, trying to pass themselves off as out-of-work anglers.

George Barisich is a legitimate shimp fisherman and the president of the United Commercial Fisherman's Association in Saint Bernard, Lousiana. That's were we reached him.

In France's long history of protest and rebellion, there are a few pivotal moments that come to mind. There's the French revolution, the Resistance during the war, the student protests of the Sixties. But for all the revolution, there's something in Paris that doesn't revolve as often as it perhaps should. The metro's turnstiles.

That's because some metro users don't pay. Instead, they jump over the turnstiles, or sneak through the exits.

Any big city has them -- commuters who can't afford, or can't be bothered to pay the fare. But in Paris, there are fare dodgers who haven't forgotten the centuries-old chant for liberte, égalite, fraternite. They cheat the system as a form of rebellion. Highly-organized rebellion.

The group is called the Mutuelles des fraudeurs, and, in true form, it subscribes to the "All for one, one for all" approach -- with an insurance fund. For a seven-euro monthly fee, metro scofflaws become insured scofflaws. If they get caught jumping the turnstile, the group covers their fine, which can run up to fifty euro.

The group's leader calls it "a way to resist together." He says there should be no confusion: The Mutuelle des fraudeurs is not just about getting a free ride. It's "the beginning of our struggle" down the path to free public transport.

They have monthly meetings, where they open their finance books for all the members to see. They even boast that commuters once too shy -- or law abiding -- to cheat the transit system have found strength in numbers, and no longer fear the tyranny of the metro ticket inspectors.

And, since every revolution needs a song, we thought we'd suggest Neil Young's "For The Turnstiles." With their cover version, here are The Be Good Tanyas.

The Harmonized Sales Tax has been in effect for six weeks in British Columbia and Ontario. And for some B.C. residents, that's six weeks too long.

While Ontarians accepted the new tax without a lot of fuss, some British Columbians have been railing against the tax.

Yesterday, they scored a small victory. An anti-HST petition with seven-hundred-thousand signatures was validated by Elections B.C. The idea is to force lawmakers to pass a bill reversing the tax. But now, there seems to be a new roadblock ahead.

British Columbia MLA Blair Lekstrom has been thinking a lot about the controversial tax. In June, he left the Liberal Party and his cabinet post over the HST. We reached Mr. Lekstrom at his constituency office in Dawson Creek.

It's not what's on the outside that matters, its what's on the inside that counts.

This is particularly true for a man from Brewster, Massuchusetts named Rob Sveden. Doctors feared Mr. Sveden was suffering from lung cancer. But on closer inspection, it turned out to be something far different. Rob Sveden had a pea growing in his lung.

Here is a clip of Rob telling us his story on last night's show.

This is a story that will sound all too familiar to our regular listeners. Sadly, the atrocities committed by the Lord's Resistance Army are nothing new. But now there is fresh evidence that the horrors are continuing.

For more than two decades, the Ugandan rebel group has been terrorizing villagers in northern Uganda, southern Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Anneke Van Woudenberg is a senior Africa researcher with Human Rights Watch. She has just returned from a mission to the Central African Republic and Northern DRC. While there, she learned that over the past eighteen months, LRA rebels have abducted about seven hundred adults and children.

We reached Anneke Van Woudenberg in Washington, D.C. And a warning that some of the details of this interview are disturbing.

Dateline: The A-12 highway, somewhere between Bern and Lausanne, Switzerland."Do you know how fast you were going?"

If you've ever been caught speeding, you'll know that's one of the first questions you're asked. By the way, if you're driving while listening to the show, now would be a good time to check your speedometer. Because it would be ironic to find yourself being asked that question in earnest by an officer, just after hearing me ask it over the radio.

If I just saved you getting a ticket, you're welcome.

Because you know, if the guy I'm about to tell you about had been tuned in to a radio show whose host suggested he check his speed, well, he might not be in the costly pickle in which he now finds himself.

Except, of course, I wouldn't be telling you about him, if he wasn't . . .

Also, that driver claimed he wasn't to blame for his excessive speeding. He claimed he did check his speedometer, but the newly-installed guage was faulty.

But I find that hard to believe. Given that he was driving more than two-and-a-half times the limit. And given that the limit on this particular stretch of highway in the Swiss Alps is one-hundred-twenty-kilometres per hour. That's right. The Swedish driver of the Mercedes S-L-S A-M-G was clocked travelling at about two-hundred-ninety kilometres per hour.

Initially, the Swiss police were unable to determine just how fast he was going. Because, despite blasting by several radars along the way, the machines were not equipped to capture speeds beyond two-hundred kilometres per hour. In the end, he was zapped by a newer generation of speed camera, and forced to stop.

Of course stopping, as you can imagine, happened rather slowly, over more than a half-of-a-kilometre.

Now the thirty-seven-year-old driver is set to pay a high price for his high speeds. In Switzerland, any offence more than thirty kilometres over the speed limit is considered criminal. Fines are determined using a formula that accounts for both the severity of the offence and the driver's income. Prosecutors say the man faces the highest possible penalty -- about thirty-five-hundred dollars a day for three-hundred days -- a total of more than a million dollars.

Granted, that shouldn't be too much of a problem for a fellow who can afford a car valued at nearly a quarter-of-a-million bucks. Just one sign he's got a great many more dollars than sense.

If you're listening to this on your radio, chances are it's coming to you after bouncing off several satellites. It's what we use here at the CBC to send our programs across the country.

Well, fifty years ago today, none of that was possible. The only satellites in orbit, like Sputnik, broadcast messages, but couldn't relay transmissions originating from Earth. But that all changed when a thirty-metre-high, nitrogen-filled balloon called Echo One reached orbit -- which it did five decades ago tonight. It was the first "passive" satellite -- one that could transfer a radio broadcast from one side of a country to the other.

For the record, here is a news report following the launch of Echo One, which predicts, quite accurately, just how important passive sattelites would become.

We now depend on them, of course, for everything from television to the internet to even simple phone calls.

Dateline: Australia.If you believe the research -- and there's no reason not to -- young people in the UK are sick and tired of working.

A recent poll suggests the majority of young Brits feel they're subject to a lot of B.S. at work -- you know: long hours, poor pay and a serious lack of excitement. And the future doesn't look much brighter: along with the dull drudgery of the present UK workday, unemployment among British university graduates is on the rise.

South Australia, in contrast, has the opposite problem: it's got a booming economy and a lot of unfilled jobs. Thrilling jobs. Strange and previously unheard of jobs. Jobs like shark-tagger and shark personality profiler.

These are just a few of the ten-thousand or so jobs the government of South Australia is advertizing to British youth in order to entice them to move Down Under. And, looking over the jobs, the enticements are considerable: there are openings for beer tasters, "beach babe judgers" and whale watchers. Oh, and, what may be the world's easiest job: an opening for a greenskeeper on a grassless golf course.

But, it all sounds a little too rosy. Sure, being a koala catcher may be exciting and strangely fulfilling -- and, yes, that is an actual job -- but it's probably a little naive to think these dream jobs don't have their own share of B.S. Or K.S., as the case may be. South Australia is also advertizing for "kangaroo poo harvesters."

Crikey. I think the young Brits who take up that offer may come to rue their decision.