Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Markets are up in Europe today -- but Greece is still hanging by a thread.

If it doesn't receive more money -- a lot more money -- from the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and The European Central Bank, Greece will likely face utter and complete economic collapse. But to get these loans, Greece needs to prove to its potential lenders that it's doing everything it can to cut spending and save money.

So today, the Greek government voted to implement another round of austerity measures -- in this case, massive property taxes.

Yanis Varoufakis is a Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.

We reached him at his home, in Athens.

Three years after she disappeared in England, a seven-year-old girl has been reunited with her father.

Henry Da Massa dropped his daughter, Pearl, off at a Manchester daycare in 2008. That was the last time he saw her. And Mr. Da Massa spent the next three years searching for his missing daughter.

Earlier this month, Pearl's mother, Helena Gavaghan, was arrested in Montreal, in connection with the missing child.

As of this weekend, Mr. Da Massa and Pearl are back in Manchester.

Tim Davis is an investigator with the Missing Children Society, and he has been on the case for more than a year. We reached him in Calgary.

If you look online, you'll find multiple sites where you can order a message in a bottle. You can choose the bottle, pick out a pre-written message, and have the whole thing delivered to someone, without once having to roll up your pantlegs and step into a body of water.

All of which seems to contradict the point of the exercise. When you send out an actual message in a bottle out on the waves, you don't know who will get it, if anyone. And you certainly don't know whether anyone will respond.

But Harold Hackett can give you an idea of your chances. He's had remarkable success sending bottled messages out to sea, the old-fashioned way. And his efforts have garnered more than three thousand responses.

Recently, Mr. Hackett sent his five-thousandth bottle off the north shore of Prince Edward Island. We reached him in Tignish, P.E.I.

Let's face it: regardless of how great and versatile an actor he is, most of us know Christopher Plummer for his role as Captain Von Trapp in "The Sound of Music".

He may resent that fact. He is, after all, a great Shakespearean actor. So much so that, last night, he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. But the Captain Von Trapp role has dogged him all his life, so for years, Mr. Plummer wouldn't even speak about "The Sound of Music". The hoopla surrounding it still drives him nuts.

But there is one role that he doesn't mind discussing. Because as any actor knows, you haven't made the big time until you've made it in a "Star Trek" flim. Mr. Plummer played General Chang -- a Klingon, no less -- in "Star Trek Six: The Undiscovered Country". Perhaps it was the promotion to General that put his mind at ease.

Earlier this year, Christopher Plummer took part in William Shatner's documentary "The Captains". The film includes conversations between Mr. Shatner and the various captains from Star Trek.

Recorded on stage in Stratford, Ontario, here is Christopher Plummer reminiscing with Captain Kirk himself.

For his last meal, condemned Texas prisoner Lawrence Russell Brewer requested the following: two chicken-fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelette, a large bowl of fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat-lover's pizza, a half-loaf of white bread, a pint of Blue Bell ice cream, and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts.

When his meal finally came, Mr. Brewer declined to eat any of it, and he was executed shortly after.

His final act of defiance last Wednesday sparked an angry response from the head of the Texas Senate's criminal justice committee. And almost immediately, the practice of offering last meal requests to death row inmates was scrapped.

Brian D. Price is a former Texas inmate. He's now a restaurateur and author of the book "Meals to Die For", detailing his experiences as a death row chef, while serving a fourteen-year sentence. When he heard that condemned inmates were being denied their final meal requests, he offered to fix -- and finance -- those meals himself.

We reached Mr. Price in San Antonio, Texas.

Pipelines and protests.

Yesterday, environmental activists and concerned citizens gathered on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to protest against the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline. But of course, there are those who strongly support the pipeline as well. So last night, Carol spoke first with Shawn Howard, a spokesperson for TransCanada, the corporation building the pipeline. Mr. Howard dismissed the anti-pipeline arguments. And then Carol spoke with Maude Barlow, the National Chairperson of the Council for Canadians.

And then Talkback piped up.

They should have been out a week ago. Then the deadline was Friday. And then it was moved to yesterday. But a group of travellers living near Basildon in South East England keep managing to delay their eviction.

Travellers are traditionally nomadic people from Ireland. And Basildon Council says a group of them are living illegally on the Dale Farm site near the town.

The council had won the right to evict the travellers. But now, a second court reprieve has put a stop to that eviction.

Tony Ball is the head of Basildon Council. We reached him at his home in Wickford, England.

The Gadhafi regime was defined by violence against its people. Still, the massacre at Abu Salim prison stands out.

In 1996, guards at the Tripoli prison put down a demonstration with bullets and grenades. In all, it is believed that more than twelve thousand inmates were slaughtered in a single day. The bodies, however, disappeared. They may now have been found.

Dr. Saalim Furgany is the deputy forensic investigator at the suspected site of the mass grave of the prisoners. We reached him in Tripoli.

You would think a university's plans to build a new state-of-the-art performing arts centre might get a warm reception from its alumni. But when Mount Allison University made such an announcement, some of their alumni weren't happy at all.

You see, the university's board of regents says that to build the centre, an eighty-four-year old war memorial must first be demolished. And, despite the objections of some of the school's graduates, it recently announced the plan was going ahead.

Bruce Coates is a retired naval officer who graduated from Mount Allison University in 1969. He's been one of the loudest voices arguing the memorial should be preserved. We reached Mr. Coates in Point de Bute, New Brunswick.

British literary judges have made an initial investment.

The initials in question are "D.W." -- as in D.W. Wilson -- a Canadian writer who won the UK's National Short Story Award for a tale called "Dead Roads", set in his native British Columbia.

He received the award yesterday on BBC Radio's Front Row program. For the record, here's Mr. Wilson, accepting his prize from show host John Wilson, and the chair of the judges, British broadcaster Sue MacGregor.

Abdul Raziq is southern Afghanistan's man on the move.

At the age of just thirty-three, Mr. Raziq is the head of his tribal group, the Chief of Police in Kandahar Province, and arguably NATO's single most important ally in that part of the country.

He may also be a torturer and a mass murderer.

Matthieu Aikins shines a light on Mr. Raziq's darker side in an article published in the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine. Mr. Aikins is a Canadian freelance journalist. We reached him in New York.