If things don't change soon, more mentally-ill offenders are at risk of dying behind bars.

That's according to a new report from Canada's Correctional Investigator, Howard Sapers.

The assessment looks back nearly three years ago, beginning in October 2007. That's when nineteen year-old Ashley Smith committed suicide in federal custody.

You might have heard her story before on As It Happens.

Before she died, the Moncton teenager was transferred through seventeen institutions, across four provinces, over a period of nearly two years. Much of that time was spent in solitary confinement, often in restraints.

Finally, at Grand Valley Institution in Kitchener, Ontario, seven guards stood by and watched as Ashley choked herself to death using a ligature.

Since her suicide, Mr. Sapers has spent a lot of time recommending ways for Canada's correctional system to prevent more deaths. But, in this latest report, he's discovered a hundred-and-thirty fatalities since Ashley's suicide -- nine of which show some disturbing similarities.

In a moment, we'll hear from Ashley's mother about what she thinks of today's report. But first, we've reached Howard Sapers in Ottawa.

Coralee Smith is Ashley's mother. We've reached her in Moncton along with the family's lawyer, Julian Falconer. He is in Toronto.

A career and a life ended far too soon.

Quebec cabinet minister Claude Bechard died yesterday following a lengthy battle with cancer. He was just forty-one years old.

Claude Bechard was first elected as a Liberal member of the National Assembly in 1997, at the tender age of twenty-eight. But his comparative youth didn't prevent him from distinguishing himself on the Quebec political stage. After the Liberals came to power in 2003, Mr Bechard held a series of key cabinet positions - including Minister of Environment, Natural Resources, Families, and Economic Development.

Just hours before his death yesterday, Mr. Bechard resigned as the Minister of Agriculture and of Intergovernmental Affairs.

Geoff Kelley is a Liberal member of the National Assembly and a friend of Claude Bechard. He is in Montreal.

If you were to pick a Roman god to deliver you a pizza, it would be Mercury. You wouldn't even have to know his name -- you could just look at a line-up of Roman gods and pick the guy with the wings on his shoes. There's a good reason he was the god of pizza delivery. I think.

His name is also embedded in the word "mercurial", which reflects a perception that the god darted all over the place without settling down for long. It means, among many other things, "changeable", "unpredictable", or "fickle". All of which adjectives apply to the British music award called the "Mercury Prize".

Well, to give its current sponsor credit, its full name is the "Barclaycard Mercury Prize". And since 1992, it's been awarded for the best album of the year recorded by a British or Irish artist. Ostensibly, anyway. As you might expect, the results have been wildly mercurial.

There have been winners like Primal Scream, P.J. Harvey and Elbow -- artists who, over time, have proven to have some staying power. But there have also been winners like M People and Ms. Dynamite, whose lasting mark on popular music consists mainly, at this point, of having won the Mercury Prize.

Yesterday, the prize was awarded to a group called The xx -- four talented whippersnappers from London who recorded their winning debut when they were nineteen. And while they're revelling in the victory, it brings with it a tremendous amount of pressure.

For one thing, their keyboardist left mid-tour last year -- leaving the burden of following up a Mercury-winning first album on the shoulders of three young musicians. For another, the spectre of the long-forgotten M People looms like some pop-culture Ghost of Christmas Future.

But let's accentuate the positive. So congratulations to The xx. Good luck surviving your success -- and navigating the mercurial world of pop music. From their award-winning, self-titled CD, here is The xx, with "Islands".

Recently, a Florida pastor with a tiny congregation has become a celebrity. His name is Terry Jones, and he's organizing a mass burning of Islam's holy book, the Koran.

The inferno is planned for Saturday -- the ninth anniversary of the September eleventh terrorist attacks. But the event has already horrified people around the world -- and there are fears that Mr. Jones's actions will spark violent reprisals.

Tomorrow morning at 11 o'clock, three clerics representing Islam, Judaism, and Christianity will present Terry Jones with a petition against the Koran burning. signed by more than three thousand people.

Pastor Larry Reimer is one of those clerics, and he is imploring people to take a moderate stand. We reached him at his church in Gainesville.

Do you remember that scene in "It's A Wonderful Life" -- the one where George Bailey stops a run on the Building and Loan he manages by using his own money to bolster the dwindling assets?

Well, the exact opposite scene is being played out in Afghanistan. And the consequences could be disastrous.

Last week, Kabul Bank's top two directors resigned amid allegations of corruption, and reports that the bank's losses approached three hundred million dollars. For the last several days, Afghans have been lining up outside branches around the country to withdraw their money.

The country's Central Bank has said it is prepared to offer loans to the troubled bank to prevent its collapse. But some are questioning any government intervention -- because some of Kabul Bank's shareholders have close ties to the country's president, Hamid Karzai.

Adam B. Ellick has been covering the story for the New York Times. We reached him via Skype in Kabul.

Have you ever wished that you could read someone's thoughts? Find out what they're really thinking? Yes, you have. But have you ever wished that everyone around you could hear what you're thinking? No, you haven't. You really, really haven't.

Regardless of your opinions, that dream -- or nightmare -- may soon be a reality. Researchers at Utah University have been working on a machine that they claim can translate brain signals into speech. But rather than trying to discover their friends' innermost secrets, these researchers are hoping to use the machine for more altruistic purposes.

Bioengineer Professor Bradley Greger led the team of researchers. We reached him at his office in Salt Lake City, Utah.

There's never a good time for a city to be hit by dengue fever. But for Delhi, this is a worse time than most.

In less than a month, the Indian capital is set to host the 2010 Commonwealth Games. And the location of the Commonwealth village, along the banks of the city's river, happens to be one of the most affected areas. Environmental groups say that, although the monsoon rains have cleaned the river, city authorities are not doing enough to stop the outbreak.

Vimlendu Jha is the executive director of Swechha, an organization that promotes the cleaning of bodies of water in India. We reached him in Delhi.

Sara Raphals is eighty-nine. She's a former schoolteacher. She has survived cancer. And today she appeared before Quebec's "Dying With Dignity" Commission to tell officials what her long life has taught her about what constitutes a good death.

Here is part of what she had to say, for the record.

People have all kinds of things in their garden -- sheds, ponds, water features, assorted gnomes. But there aren't many of us who have an old Prisoner of War camp from World War Two.

That's exactly what plumber David Murray of Much Hadham, England discovered in his garden last yaer. And since then, he's been excavating the site -- and discovering a wealth of wartime artifacts in the process.

Mr. Murray is taking a break from his digging this week. We reached him on holiday in Southwold, England.

For as long as painters have filled canvasses while fuelling themselves with drink, much has been made of the curious relationship between alcohol and great art. Consider the words of renowned eighteenth-century poet and painter William Blake, who wrote:

"For the greater the fool is the pencil more blest,

As when they are drunk they always paint best."

I'll leave it to the artists to debate whether one's creative genius must be coaxed from a bottle. But this next story illustrates how booze can inspire great foolishness in the art of art business. It involves a master artist named Corot, and a disastrously inane art courier named James Haggerty.

Earlier this summer, Mr. Haggerty was assigned to deliver a painting called "Portrait of a Girl", to a prospective buyer at a hotel in Manhattan's Upper East Side. The work is widely considered a masterpiece. It's valued at nearly one-point-four million dollars. It was painted in the mid-nineteenth century by the acclaimed French landscape artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

Now I can't tell you if Mr. Corot was drinking when he created this particular piece, or even if he drank at all. What I can tell you -- thanks to surveillance cameras at the Mark hotel -- is that Mr. Haggerty drinks. A lot. Or at least it appears he did on the night in question.

Here's what the footage reveals: after leaving the portrait at the front desk, Haggerty enters the hotel bar with the potential buyer. The two re-emerge about a half-hour later, at which point Haggerty retrieves the painting. Within minutes, the interested party then leaves the hotel. Haggerty then returns the Corot to the front desk, and returns himself to the bar.

More than an hour passes. Eventually, James Haggerty leaves the bar and fetches the painting from the desk. As he stumbles out of the hotel, he collides with the doorman who asks if he'd like a cab. The art courier declines, allegedly answering "I have a car".

Fast-forward another hour-and-a-half, when security cameras at the courier's apartment catch him arriving home. Sans the Corot.

The next morning, Mr. Haggerty called the painting's owners and said he had lost the masterpiece, and couldn't remember much from the night before. But there may be more than meets the eye to these moving pictures of the missing picture. You see, all these details are according to a suit filed by one of the owners of the Corot. A suit which was withdrawn after it was discovered that her boyfriend, the Corot's other owner, was convicted of stealing a six-hundred-thousand Degas just three years ago. The FBI is now investigating.

I guess only time will tell if this tale is simply a portrait of an artless drunk, or one involving a bit of artful dodgery.

Would the 1984 movie classic Ghostbusters have been the same without Hollywood producer-director Ivan Reitman? Or what about the classic camp comedy Meatballs? How about Space Jam? The epic story of how Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes team up to take on evil space aliens in an intergalactic game of basketball? Actually, never mind Space Jam. My point is, Ivan Reitman has had a hand in a lot of blockbusters.

But the question today, in downtown Toronto is: would the Toronto International Film Festival be the same today without the Reitman family? That's because, for the first time in thirty-five years, the festival has its own theatre: the TIFF Bell Lightbox, a theatre in the centre of the city. And the land it sits on was donated by the Reitman family.

But long before Ivan could become a blockbuster producer and director, and before the Reitmans could donate their parcel of land to the festival, the family had to make the harrowing trek across the Atlantic.

It was nineteen-fifty-one. They had just survived the Holocaust. Ivan's parents, Clara and Leslie, immigrated after the war, leaving behind their native Czechoslovakia. Clara had survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, and Leslie had been an underground resistance fighter.

After the Second World War, Leslie, Clara and Ivan -- their only child at the time --- made the voyage across the Atlantic as new immigrants to Canada.

In the nineteen-sixties, the Reitmans bought a patch of land in downtown Toronto. On it stood an old car-wash, which they turned into a parking lot.

And today, it's the site of the brand new, twinkling Bell Lightbox --- the first venue that the Toronto International Film Festival can call its own.

The city has just renamed the land it sits on "Reitman Square".

Today, at the Lightbox, Ivan Reitman and his family -- including his son, Jason, director of "Up In The Air" and "Juno" -- attended the dedication ceremony for Reitman Square. For the record, here's part of what Ivan Reiman said about his memories of that first day in Canada.