Tonight:

A "radical" response. We'll talk to the vice-president of Tides Canada -- a group the Minister of Natural Resources has claimed is foreign-funded, and out to ruin our economy.

Oil and water. The Chief Councillor for B.C.'s Haisla First Nation tells Carol why his community doesn't support the Northern Gateway pipeline project.

Falling through the snow. Four people die when a small plane goes down on in bad winter weather, in remote northwestern Ontario.

Iran to U.S.: whaddaya gonna do about it? With a series of provocations, Iran pushes the United States -- all but forcing the Americans to push back.

Friends, Romans, countrymen. An ancient helmet reveals that the Britons may have been chummier with their invaders than we thought.

And...oinkers away. A British community basks in the disgusting smell of success -- after spreading pig dung around to scatter loitering teenagers.

As It Happens, the Tuesday edition. Radio that minds its manures.

It's not built yet, but the Northern Gateway pipeline has already ventured into some contentious territory.

Today, the public hearings for the proposed project are under way in the coastal town of Kitimaat, B.C. As we told you on the program yesterday, there are more than forty-five hundred individuals, and more than two-hundred organizations, set to appear at the hearing.

Yesterday, we spoke with Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver. In that interview, Mr. Oliver suggested that many of the opponents to the project are funded by "radical" environmental groups based in the U.S. He told us that the review process for development projects ought to be changed, to avoid interference from environmental lobby groups.

That interview prompted a lot of response from you. Sara Klimes wrote to us from Calgary: "I especially enjoyed when Carol asked "Do these 'radical environmental groups' have more or less funding than the oil companies lobbying for the pipeline?" Thank you Carol! What a joke and how insulting that this minister (and by extension, this government) reverts to Bush-era scare language, using such terms as "extremists" and "radical," to try to subdue the Canadian population into compliance. What a joke hearing the minister repeatedly say "these environmentalists are a threat to the economic development of Canada."

And Robin Easton from Toronto wrote: Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver is correct that enormous amounts of foreign money are being spent to influence Canadian public policy, but he is intentionally trying to mislead the public about who these "foreign influences" are. The big money flowing in to influence policy is coming from the oil industry!!"

Our interview also got a lot of response from Talkback.

That was just some of the Talkback we received after our interview with Minister Joe Oliver. And to be clear, that last call was the only one we received in support of the Minister's position, out of dozens of emails and calls.

During last night's interview, when pressed. Minister Oliver singled out only one group -- Tides.

Sarah Goodman is the Vice-President of Tides Canada. We reached her in Vancouver.

They were approaching the airport in remote North Spirit Lake, Ontario, when their plane went down.

Four of the five passengers -- who were flying to the remote community from Winnipeg -- were killed. The lone survivor is in hospital.

The chief and band council from the remote First Nation community went to the site, and requested some time to process what they saw. But resident Melinda Henderson was willing to tell us what she knows about the fatal crash. We reached her earlier this afternoon, at her home in North Spirit Lake.

And now, Quote/Unquote.The people of Middlesbrough, England are -- at last -- happier than a pig in the proverbial. And all because of pig proverbial.

A woodland area of the city had been besieged by youths drinking booze, smoking drugs and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Much to the annoyance of local residents.

So to tackle the issue, Middlesbrough City Council came up with a novel solution: pig dung. And lots of it.

The council sprayed a thick layer of manure over the woodland. And since the spreading of the proverbial, residents haven't had to put up with any.

That said, there is a slight whiff in the air. But as a council spokesman said, locals would - quote - "rather have a pong than a bong" - unquote.

It's a pithy comment. But I'm pretty sure those troublesome kids think it's a load of proverbial.

Alexis Weissenberg once wrote that "Luck is a nasty miscalculation which sometimes produces tiny miracles." In his case, the luck consisted of an accordion, and a German officer who loved Schubert. The tiny miracle was that Mr. Weissenberg and his mother were spared death in a concentration camp. And for the rest of his stellar career, he relied on his exquisite technique and skill, rather than luck.

Alexis Weissenberg, a Bulgarian pianist whose precise performances evoked both praise and scorn, died on Sunday. He was eighty-two.

At the age of ten, Mr. Weissenberg and his mother were swept up in Bulgaria by the Nazis, and put in a provisional concentration camp. In a personal essay, Mr. Weissenberg wrote that they were spared because of his skill with a keyboard: one of his German guards was deeply moved listening to him play Schubert on the accordion.

And one day, that guard stuck the Weissenbergs on a train to safety in Istanbul. He said two words as the train departed: "Viel Glück" -- "Good luck."

Alexis Weissenberg went on to win the Leventritt Award -- at the time the most prestigious international award for classical piano and violin. He was eighteen. A year later, he played Carnegie Hall. And a little while after that, he took a ten-year break from the stage, to teach. He said he'd become too successful too fast.

He went back to performing, of course, and was considered one of the great interpreters of Rachmaninoff, Schumann, and Chopin. He was an amazingly precise and dramatic pianist. But some critics dismissed his precision as soullessness, and his drama as bluster.

He didn't much care, telling the New York Times, "I remember in school, as a child, I learned that the flame of a candle is composed of a yellow light, which actually burns, and a blue light within it, which is ice cold. That is true of human beings as well. Perhaps it is the sight of that blue light in me that frightens certain people."

Here's a glimpse of that blue light now: it's Tchaikovsky's Concerto Number One, Third Movement. It's performed by Alexis Weissenberg with the Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

As you heard earlier in the program, today is the first day of the public review into the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. The process is intended to determine whether the project is in the public interest.

The debate has already been framed as a battle between Big Oil and environmental activists. But those who will be most affected are the members of the Haisla First Nation.

If it's approved, the pipeline will run from the Alberta oil sands to the coastal village of Kitimaat, B.C. And Kitimaat is where we reached Ross Ellis -- the Chief Councillor for the Haisla First Nations.

A school is nothing without its teachers. And right now, there are very few teachers at the school in the Pikangikum First Nation in Northwestern Ontario. And because of that, most of the elementary school classes and all of the secondary school classes have been cancelled.

In 2007, the community's only school burned to the ground, and has since been replaced by portable classrooms. The government promised to build a new school in 2007, but that promise has yet to be kept.

In December, we spoke with Gordon Peters, the community's former chief. At that time the school had just re-opened, after being forced to close because it had no running water.

Today, many classes are cancelled because most of the teachers have left the community.

Terry Waboose is the Deputy Grand Chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation - also known as NAN - which represents Pikangikum. We reached him in Thunder Bay, Ontario where, we should note, Chief Waboose is fighting a bad cold.

At times, we might think that history is just stuff that happened. But the truth is, history is the stuff we think happened. And sometimes, when find ourselves surprised by history -- when we discover that the stuff we think happened isn't the stuff that actually happened.

For example: just when we think we know all about how the Romans interacted with the Britons, we find an ancient artifact -- a Roman helmet, to be exact -- that tells a different story.

Jeremy Hill is the head of research at the British Museum. We reached him in London, England.

Dateline: Effin, Ireland.Whoa, whoa there -- if you're hurling truncated cuss-words at the radio right now, or scrambling to your computer to fire off a mildly-incensed email, because you believe I've just gingerly insulted an entire nation of saints and scholars -- stand down. I assure you I am not insulting the Emerald Isle. But don't knock yourself for getting upset -- you're certainly not the first to get irate over Ireland's Effin issue. If you ask me, though, it's the Effin people themselves who should be offended, and no one else.

Effin -- spelt E-f-f-i-n -- is the name of a small parish town in County Limerick, in the south of Ireland. And far from being the euphemistic contraction of an expletive, the name Effin has holy roots.

The town was named for an Irish saint. But try explaining that to Facebook, if you happen to be an Effiner...or is it Effinian? Effonian?

Whatever. Here's the thing: in updating her Facebook account last year, Effin resident Ann Marie Kennedy's found that the social network site refused to recognize the name of her hometown -- deeming it an offensive term. Which spurred Ms. Kennedy to launch a Facebook page, entitled "Please get my hometown Effin recognized". As she explained on the page:

"It keeps coming up as Effingham, Illinois; Effingham, New Hampshire; and it gives suggestions of other places. It will recognize Limerick -- but I'm not from Limerick city, I'm from Effin. I'm a proud Effin woman. And I always will be an Effin woman."

Ms. Kennedy even wrote directly to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, urging him and his staff to sort out the Effin misunderstanding.

Well, finally, almost a year after her campaign began, Ann Marie Kennedy and other Effin residents can now enter their hometown's proper name in their Facebook profiles. But the battle isn't quite over, as many Effin expatriates are still not able to set up their profiles to reflect where they're from.

And that's no small bother. As Kennedy points out, "...hopefully that will be overcome soon as there is a lot of Effin people abroad."

To survive in this world, you have to have a tough shell. In some cases, quite literally. And that shell may be what has kept the giant Galapagos tortoise known to scientists as Chelonoidis Elephantopus alive. "But Jeff," you retort, "Chelonoidis Elephantopus is not alive." Aha. Well, I'm getting to that. The giant tortoise with the giant name was thought to be extinct. Until scientists discovered hybrid tortoises that told them otherwise. Gisella Caccone is a senior research scientist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. We reached her in New Haven, Connecticut.

Her film career never really took off, but Denise Darcel managed to leave her mark on Hollywood. Not bad for a singer who got her start in the cabaret clubs of Paris.

Today, her son Craig confirmed that the French-born actress had died in Los Angeles. She passed away on December twenty-third, at the age of eighty-seven.

Maybe it was her blonde ambition, but it wasn't long before the bombshell singer left Paris's clubs for the glitz and stardom of Hollywood. She arrived in the U.S. in 1947, and became an American citizen a few years later.

Some of Ms. Darcel's film roles are about as un-French as you can get: she starred in westerns like "Westward the Women", or American war films like "Battle Ground". And her most successful role was in another western called "Vera Cruz" -- in which she starred alongside Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper.

Soon after "Vera Cruz" Ms. Darcel's celebrity started to fade. She would only star in one more film. And, after that, in her early forties, Ms. Darcel returned to her roots, in a sense. She began working in theatres as a striptease artist in venues in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

The CBC spoke with Denise Darcel back in 1957. And that conversation is a snapshot of where her career must have been heading at the time. She was in Toronto starring in a fashion show for, of all things, Libby's canned corn. And, if there was any question of the effect Ms. Darcel had on men, just listen to CBC reporter Tony Thomas. Here he is, meeting Denise Darcel back on October 18th, 1957 ... from our archives.