Tonight:

They know where he is -- now they want to know how he got there. Scientists exhume the body of Yasser Arafat, in an effort to find out whether the late PLO leader was the victim of poisoning.

The Maud squad. In Nunavut, we reach the man who's going to get the wreck of Roald Amundsen's ship The Maud back to its rightful home in Norway.

Pirates, prepare to be keelhauled. In a legal sense. A Montreal company is monitoring illegal downloads -- and their information may be used against you.

Back to dry land. A community in the Northwest Territories votes away its liquor restrictions -- and now surrounding communities are dealing with the hangover.

The camera adds ten cameras. And then thousands more. Twenty years ago, an Austrian enthusiast started touting the virtues of the Russian-made Lomo -- and it's since become a global phenomenon.

And...biking yourself horse. Presenting an invention so utterly stupid that it's genius: the "Trotify", a device that makes your bicycle sound like a trotting horse, by banging two coconuts together.

As It Happens, the Tuesday edition. Radio that separates cyclists into two camps: the hooves and the hoof-nots.

That was Suha Arafat speaking to Al Jazeera this morning.

Yasser Arafat's widow was in Malta, while scientists and Palestinian authorities opened the Palestinian leader's mausoleum in Ramallah. They took twenty samples of human tissue and the surrounding soil. Now, three international teams will use those samples in an attempt to determine whether the Palestinian leader was the victim of a poison plot.

Clayton Swisher led the Al Jazeera investigation that first uncovered elevated levels of radioactive polonium in Mr. Arafat's personal effects. Mr. Swisher was at the exhumation this morning. We reached him tonight in Jerusalem.

"Ford Nation" is shaken up.

Today, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford spoke to reporters at a press conference about being kicked out of office, and what he plans to do next.

Yesterday, a judge found Mayor Ford guilty of conflict-of-interest violations, and told him to vacate his office in two weeks. The mayor used city letterhead paper to solicit donations for the football charity he runs for young men.

Some say that justice has been served, while others believe the punishment is too harsh for the crime -- or that there was no crime at all.

This is what the mayor had to say this afternoon, for the record.

Last night, we spoke with City Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti about the mayor's predicament -- and then Talkback cast its vote.

There may be trouble in the offing for people who watch pirated movies and TV shows.

Last week, a federal court ordered several Internet service providers to hand over the names and addresses of fifty people whose computers were allegedly used to download copyrighted video.

Canipire is a Montreal software company that tracks people who download such content, and the company says it is tracking illegal downloaders all over the country.

Barry Logan is the managing director of Canipire. We reached him in Waterloo, Ontario.

Soviet-era technology isn't usually heralded for its mechanical genius. So it's kind of surprising that a camera from the former Soviet Union has become such a fixture for hip photographers -- with the help of a guy named Mathais Fiegel.

More than twenty years ago, Mr. Fiegel found an old Russian camera called the Lomo. And when he saw what it could do, he promptly formed what he called The Lomographic Society, in Vienna, Austria. And as a result of the Society's enthusiasm, the Lomo has emerged as one of the most remarkable analogue triumphs of the digital age.

Over the weekend, The Lomographic Society celebrated its twentieth anniversary. So we gave Mathias Fiegel a call, in Vienna.

It's been more than ninety years since explorer Roald Amundsen left Norway on his ship The Maud. And just a few months from now, the shipwrecked vessel will finally return home.

Jan Wanggaard is one of those behind the project to take The Maud back to Norway, from the site in Canada's Arctic where it was eventually abandoned. He's there now, filming the ship's remains for the first time in the winter. We reached him in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

In an age of A-Rod and annual salaries in the tens of millions, it's hard to imagine a time when professional baseball players made, well, peanuts.

But that was the case until Marvin Miller came along. In 1966, the labour economist built a meaningful union for baseball players, and negotiated Major League Baseball's first collective-bargaining agreement -- a deal that, for the first time, guaranteed players a minimum wage of at least five thousand dollars.

Marvin Miller died today, in New York City. He was ninety-five.

Besides merely negotiating collective contracts for baseball players, Marvin Miller helped create a class of player who is now found in all professional major American leagues: the free agent.

In 1974, the Oakland Athletics failed to make an annuity payment to pitcher Catfish Hunter. Mr. Miller took the case to an arbitrator, who ruled the A's had broken their contract with Mr. Hunter, and that he was now free to negotiate to play with any other team. He then negotiated a three-point-five-million-dollar contract with the Yankees, and players saw the value in letting their contracts expire, rather than panicking.

As a result, salaries went up considerably. Until 1985, that is, when the teams decided not to hire any free agents, despite having signed a collective agreement that forbade collusion.

In 1987, that collusion scandal was at its peak. And even though Mr. Miller was no longer the executive director of the players' union, he still had a big role.

Here is Marvin Miller speaking to Mark Lee, the host of CBC Radio's Inside Track about that scandal, in February, 1987.

And now, Quote/Unquote.Alexander Lukashenko is proud. Proudly dictatorial.

Mr. Lukashenko has been in power in Belarus for eighteen years -- during which time he has all but crushed any opposition to his rule. And that has made him a pariah to most Western governments.

But he's not the type of guy to let his pariah status prevent him from crowing about his awful achievements to a Western media outlet. This week, he gave a rare interview to a Reuters reporter in the capital of Belarus, Minsk. And he was not hiding his light, or his darkness, under a bushel.

Quote:

"I am the last and only dictator in Europe. Indeed there are none anywhere else in the world...You came here and looked at a living dictator. Where else would you see one? There is something in this. They say that even bad publicity is good publicity."

Unquote.

They kept coming out today, in the hundreds of thousands.

Egyptians are angry at their president. Some may still support him, but it seems most do not.

On Thursday, Egypt's President Mohamed Morsi announced he was giving himself sweeping powers that enable him to rule by decree.

Since then the protests have not stopped.

Alaa Ibrahim Mostafa is a spokeswoman for Egypt's ruling Freedom and Justice Party -- President Morsi's party. She's in Cairo.

It's a question that comes up this time of year: "What do you get for the person who has everything?" And if you're anything like me, the answer is usually either, "Nothing," or "Resentment."

But if you're not like me, you keep your eye out for the gift you can give the person who has everything. Something that's new, something that's unusual, something no one's ever seen before. Which generally also means: something that's really stupid and unnecessary.

Well, feast your ears on this:If you were listening closely, you heard what sounded like a bicycle riding alongside a horse. But guess what: the bicycle was the horse. Or the horse was the bicycle, if you want to look at it that way -- thanks to a fantastically ridiculous new invention called "Trotify".

You may wonder how the Trotify device makes a bicycle sound like a horse. I'll give you a hint:That was from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", of course. An obvious inspiration for Trotify, which is a wooden thing that sits on the front wheel of your bike, and uses a system of linked wheels to...bang two empty halves of coconut together.

If you believe you've just discovered the perfect Christmas present... bad news: not this year. The people behind Trotify are taking orders to determine whether there's enough interest for them to bother manufacturing this wonderfully inessential item in bulk. You could call it a gallop poll.

If it's popular enough, it'll be available for that person-with-everything by March. Or you could leave them to their own devices -- their many, many devices -- just get one for yourself, and embrace the notion of pedalling nonsense.

It was supposed to be a safe place -- a place where children could get a square meal and be looked after when their parents couldn't take care of them. But for many former residents, The Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children -- which first opened as an orphanage in 1921 -- turned out to be the worst place they'd ever been.

Allegations of sexual and physical abuse by former care-givers prompted the police to launch an investigation last spring. But charges have yet to be laid in thirty-eight criminal complaints against former workers. And now, former school residents have learned it's unlikely the RCMP will charge anyone. So today, they took their fight for a public inquiry straight to the provincial government.

Harriet Johnson is a former resident of the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children. She confronted Justice Minister Ross Landry about the government's reluctance to call an inquiry. Here is part of their exchange.

It's been nearly a year since the people of Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories voted to end restrictions on their liquor sales. And now, members of the surrounding Sahtu First Nation communities are trying to bring the restrictions back.

There is one liquor store in Norman Wells, which serves its own citizens as well as the people of the four Sahtu communities around Norman Wells. For forty years, liquor restrictions meant shoppers could only buy just one case of beer, and either wine or a forty-ouncer in one day. Since those restrictions were lifted, liquor sales have gone by up by nearly fifty per cent. And that's raising concerns for the Sahtu community.

Norman Yakeleya is the Sahtu MLA for the Northwest Territories. We reached him in Norman Wells.

It's a big week in federal court for Mohammad Mahjoub.

Mr. Mahjoub has been the subject of a Canadian Security Certificate since 2000, and has been in detention or under house arrest for the past 12 years. He is accused by the Canadian government of being a terrorism suspect.

This week, Mr. Mahjoub's lawyers are asking the federal court to immediately end proceedings against him, and free him. But Mr. Mahjoub is also speaking out, and making a request of his own.

Here's part of what he said outside federal court yesterday in Toronto, for the record. And a warning: he uses language some listeners might find offensive.

He was the calm voice of reason during a long period of chaos.

Neil Jahnke, the Canadian rancher who helped guide fellow cattlemen through the mad cow crisis a decade ago, died yesterday at his home outside Herbert, Saskatchewan. He was seventy.

Mr. Jahnke is the former president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Assocation, and he helped open more than sixty foreign markets to Canadian beef.

On May twentieth, 2003, a single case of mad cow disease was discovered in an Alberta cow. The United States immediately closed its borders to Canadian beef. And thus began the most difficult period in the history of the Canadian cattle industry.

Neil Jahnke spoke with As it Happens on that fateful day. And on the two-year anniversary of the crisis, he spoke again with former As it Happens host, Mary Lou Finlay. Here's part of their conversation, from our archives.

Our next story proves that good things often come from the most unexpected places.

In the past, scientists looked to charcoal to assess the impact of ancient humans on their environment. But in a recent study out of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, researchers have found a far more accurate tool. Old poo. Or put another way, prehistoric excrement.

Robert D'Anjou was the lead researcher on the study. He published his findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We reached him in Amherst, Massachusetts.

And now… a little music. Goodbye indeed.

That was Portugal's 1980 entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, "Un Grande, Grande Amor" by Jose Cid. A song that was both profoundly awful and profoundly prophetic. The "Goodbye" part, anyway.

It seems that all areas of the Eurozone have been suffering from the region's financial crisis. And now another institution has fallen victim: the Eurovision Song Contest itself -- the annual pop music extravaganza that is virtually guaranteed to make your ears vomit.

For decades, European friends and foes have been battling it out through song -- or at least, something resembling song -- to see which country will reign supreme, and win the right to host this most prestigious cheese-fest the following year.

Well, next year they will have to do so without Portugal and Poland. The two countries have announced they will not take part, because they are scared of winning -- and the financial burden that the subsequent hosting would involve.

But were these two players actually ever in danger of that happening? Well, probably not. Neither country has ever won the competition. And on two occasions, Portuguese entries have scored a whopping zero points. In fact, they have never placed higher than sixth. Admittedly, Poland did manage to come second in 1994, but since then there has been a rapid decline -- in their last seven tries the Poles have only managed to reach the finals once.

So what will a Portugal and Poland-less contest mean for Eurovision? Perhaps a better a question would be 'what difference does it make'?