Hello, I'm Helen Mann, sitting in for Carol Off.

Good evening, I'm Chris Howden sitting in for Jeff Douglas.

This is As It Happens.

Tonight:

In the heat of the night. Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair tells us how his force is handling a deadly shooting at a block party.

Shot over shots. Gunmen seriously injure a doctor doing polio immunizations in Karachi, Pakistan, raising fears of a targeted assassination attempt.

A home away from home. Arkansas is home to a growing community of immigrants from the Marshall Islands -- and now, a Marshallese princess is working as their advocate.

A man without a country. A refugee marathoner from South Sudan has met the Olympic standard to race -- but faces hurdles before he can compete.

Science is full of ups and dunes. To find out why some creatures run effortlessly across sand, American researchers employ a robotic lizard.

And...double or nothing. After years of slogging away, a fifty-six-year-old Maine man gets his big break -- because he happens to look exactly like Mitt Romney.

As It Happens, the Tuesday edition. Radio that digs out a matching pair of Mitts.

When a block party began yesterday afternoon in the Toronto east end neighbourhood of Scarborough, children were playing soccer and organizers were handing out free school supplies.

But last night, the gathering turned chaotic. As you've heard in the news, someone sprayed the crowd with gunfire. Two people were killed -- one of them a fourteen-year-old girl. And twenty-three were injured, including a twenty-two-month-old child.

This shooting comes only a month-and-a-half after a similar scene of public gun violence at Toronto's Eaton's Centre mall.

Both incidents have raised questions about public safety in Canada's largest city.

Bill Blair is Toronto's Police Chief. We reached him at police headquarters in Toronto.

Last year, Guor Marial ran his first marathon. For most of us, simply completing a forty-kilometre race would be a tremendous accomplishment. But Mr. Marial didn't just finish the race -- he met the Olympic "A" standard, qualifying him for the London Games.

There's just one problem. Mr. Marial is a refugee from Sudan. He fled the country during its brutal civil war. He was born into that war, and lost eight of his ten siblings at the hands of Sudanese militias. After being kidnapped, tortured, released and then attacked and beaten by the Sudanese army, Mr. Marial finally arrived as a refugee in the United States in 2001.

His home territory is in what's now South Sudan, which gained its independence last year -- but so far has no national Olympic Committee. And although he now has permanent resident status in the United States, he's not an American citizen either.

So now he's appealing to Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, to see if there's some way he can still compete.

We reached Guor Marial in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Dateline: somewhere in the sky above Penn State University.

As Penn State deals with the fall-out of the Sandusky abuse scandal, a new debate is raging on the campus.

Over his nearly forty-six years as head coach, Joe Paterno won award after award for Penn State football. But after an independent report implicated the late Mr. Paterno of covering up one-time assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's child abuse, a dark cloud has formed over his reputation. And that is raising questions about what to do about the statue honouring the former coach outside Penn State's Beaver Stadium.

The university has made no decision about removing or keeping the statue. But, in the clouds today, someone was making their opinion blatantly clear. A plane circled above Penn State with a banner saying, "Take the Statue Down or We Will".

There is no word yet on who the "We" is behind the ultimatum. Or when the "We" will carry out their threat.

Dr. Constant Dedo was going about his business today in Karachi when he and the driver of his UN truck were shot. Dr. Dedo's work -- immunizing children against polio.

Here, giving people vaccinations might not be all that controversial. But in parts of Pakistan, it's become the kind of thing that can get you killed -- raising the possibility that Dr. Dedo was targeted for assassination.

Maryam Yunus is the UN World Health Organization's spokesperson in Pakistan. We reached her in Islamabad.

The sorriest-looking men in Washington today were multinational bankers.

HSBC had sent its senior brass to apologize to a U-S Senate sub-committee. HSBC is Europe's biggest bank, with operations around the world, including a U-S affiliate, HBUS.

The Senators had accused the bank of systematically allowing everyone from Al-Qaeda affiliates to Mexican drug cartels to launder billions of dollars.

Senator Carl Levin, the Chair of the subcommittee outlined the Mexican operation, for the record.

Running on a beach seems like a great idea. Splashing through the surf, gulls wheeling overhead, your heart beating in time with the waves. And then you do it, and it's the worst. The gulls sound like they're making fun of you, your heart feels like a can of paint falling downstairs, and every step sinks your stupid feet into the stupid sand.

For lizards, on the other hand, running on sand is a walk in the park. And a team of researchers at Georgia Tech wanted to figure out just how they do it. So they did the easy thing, and used a robotic lizard.

Daniel Goldman is the director of that team. We reached him at his lab in Atlanta.

As the story goes, it all started with one man, who moved to Arkansas from the Marshall Islands. And today, the community of immigrants from those Pacific islands number in the thousands.

That first man, John Moody, sent home news of plentiful jobs and good pay at the local Tyson Foods plant -- news that traveled quickly and caused an influx of Marshallese looking to start a new life.

Melisa Laelan -- who happens to be a princess of royal descent back home -- came along with that wave of immigrants.

Since then, she's come to see some problems in the relatively new community, and she wants to make life better there. First on her list: convince the state to let Marshallese take their driver's tests in their own language.

We reached Ms. Laelan in Springdale, Arkansas.

I think we can all agree that there's no "best album of the year". Except, of course, for the year 1983, when Huey Lewis and the News released a little record called "Sports".

Here in two-thousand-and-twelve, Canadian artists and music fans have spent the last several hours arguing about the short list for this year's Polaris Music Prize -- which honours the best full-length album made by a Canadian artist.

That short list was announced today. You can check it out at www.polarismusicprize.ca. And you're about to hear an artist whose debut album made the list.

The album is called I Predict a Graceful Expulsion. It's by Cold Specks. And here's what it sounds like: this is called "Winter Solstice".