They are the worst winter storms to hit the region in a decade.

From Lebanon and Syria to Jordan, there has been rain, snow and freezing temperatures. And for the people fleeing the violence in Syria, an already dire situation just got a lot worse.

Dominique Hyde is the country representative for UNICEF at the Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan. We reached her in Amman.

Kim Nguyen was positive his Oscar chances had vanished.

This morning, the Quebec director was waiting to find out whether his film Rebelle would get a nomination in the best foreign language category. The folks at the Academy were to name the nominees by country, in alphabetical order.

So when the announcer got to a film from Chile, and there'd been no mention of Canada, Mr. Nguyen believed he hadn't made the cut.

But he had. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was just having a little trouble with its A-B-C's. Rebelle, or War Witch as it's called in English, is one of five contenders for that little gold man.

We reached Kim Nguyen in Montreal.

Nothing was out of the ordinary on Tuesday morning, when Joe Karetak and his twenty-year-old son set out for a day's seal hunting off the west coast of Hudson Bay in Nunavut.

But when they didn't come home that night, Mr. Karetak's uncle went out to search for them.

With the wind, the temperatures were around minus fifty degrees Celsius when he found their abandoned snowmobile.

Don't worry, though -- we reached Joe Karetak in Arviat, Nunavut.

For whatever reason, we're not supposed to compare apples to oranges. Personally, I think it's because stupid old oranges realize they would lose, with their dumb peels, and that white stuff that stays stuck to the segments. Whereas apples --

I'm getting off track. My actual point is that sometimes a comparison between apples and oranges -- figuratively speaking -- can be illuminating. Or -- if you're the figurative oranges -- depressing.

In the case of a recent poll, the oranges were the United States Congress. Now, it's not news that Congress is not popular at the moment amongst Americans. Its favourability rating has sunk to single digits. But what is news is just how unpopular Congress is, in comparison with a number of other deeply unpopular things.

Public Policy Polling -- considered a Democratic polling firm -- recently contacted more than eight hundred Americans, and asked them to say whether they liked Congress more or less than a series of terrible things. The results are distressing.

For example: fifty-six per cent of those polled chose root canals than the U.S. Congress. Fifty-eight per cent said they liked colonoscopies better than Congress. The Kardashians, the disastrous NFL replacement referees, and even Donald Trump were more popular than Congress. Also Genghis Khan.

And Nickelback. Nickelback. Seven percentage points more popular than the United States Congress.

To be fair, there are things the respondents apparently hate more than their bicameral legislature. They prefer Congress to ebola, for example. And gonorrhea. And Communism. And -- unsurprisingly -- Lindsay Lohan.

All of which goes to show that apples-and-oranges comparisons serve a purpose. Although when you're the oranges, and the apples are Nickelback, your situation just might be fruitless.

Now, here's Nickelback, with -- just kidding. Here's a song the U.S. Congress should probably send out to the American public. It's The Slakadeliqs, with "Call Me Your Friend".

It is, perhaps, the most important meeting of Shawn Atleo's career.

Tomorrow in Ottawa, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, and chiefs from across the country, will meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The meeting comes after growing pressure from the Idle No More movement, and the demands of fasting Attawapiskat Chief, Theresa Spence.

At a news conference today, Chief Atleo listed his expectations for tomorrow's meeting.

But before that, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs voiced their own demands for the meeting. Here's part of what Manitoba Grand Chief Derek Nepinak had to say, for the record.

It has all the earmarks of a political execution.

Three Kurdish women were found dead today at the Paris office of the Kurdistan Information Centre. Among them was Sakine Cansiz, one of the co-founders of the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK. The PKK has been at war against the Turkish state for the past three decades. They claim to be fighting for an autonomous Kurdistan.

The killings in Paris took place at a crucial moment, with peace talks between the Turkish government and the PKK progressing like never before.

Aliza Marcus is a former correspondent who spent time reporting for Reuters from Istanbul in the 'nineties. More recently, she wrote a book called "Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence". We reached Aliza Marcus in Washington D.C.

It may have been that Chris Hadfield didn't want millions of people to notice he was wearing shorts and socks without shoes, but one of the perils of giving a press conference in zero gravity is that it can be hard to keep yourself centred in the picture.

Today, the soon-to-be commander of the International Space Station gave the first live televised news conference from space. And, along with his socks, he revealed a little more of what it's like be spending several months four hundred kilometres above the planet. Here's part of what he had to say, for the record.

He was only forty-five, but he'd created a lifetime's worth of music.

B-C jazz pianist and saxophonist Ross Taggart died yesterday, after a long bout with renal cancer.

The talented musician took up jazz at fourteen, and began playing professionally at nineteen, releasing or performing on dozens of albums, especially with his group, the Ross Taggart Trio.

When he wasn't playing with his trio, he often teamed up to perform with his friend, trombonist Ian McDougall, in the Ian McDougall Sextet.We reached Ian McDougall in Victoria, B.C.

In Christmas songs and stories, they're heroes. But on an uninhabited island near the South Pole, reindeer are better known as invading tyrants.

Now, officials for the Island of South Georgia -- a British territory off the east coast of the Falkland Islands -- are planning to cull thousands of reindeer on the island.

Martin Collins is the Chief Executive of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and he's overseeing the slaughter. We reached him on South Georgia Island.

And now, Quote/Unquote.Since the gang-rape of a woman in India in December -- and her death, less than two weeks later -- the country has been searching its collective conscience. And while the outpouring of sorrow and rage shows there are thousands who don't like what they've found, there are also some people who apparently feel there's really no problem at all. And if there is, it's not their problem.

People like Ramesh Bais, an MP with the Indian People's Party, who said, quote:

"The rape of grown-up girls and women might be understandable, but if someone does this to an infant, it is a heinous crime and the offenders should be hanged."

Unquote.

And a Hindu guru named Asaram Bapu, who said, on Sunday, quote:

"The victim-daughter is as guilty as her rapists . . . she should have called the culprits brothers and begged before them to stop . . This would have saved her dignity and life. Can one hand clap? I don't think so."

Unquote.

Today, in response to such remarks, MP Jairam Ramesh of the United Progressive Alliance coalition said, quote:

"None of us have come out of this looking good. Personally, as a man, as an Indian, I felt demeaned by what happened. I felt diminished as a human being."

Unquote.

Don't bug the whales. Or else.

That seems to be the message from a Campbell River court yesterday.

It handed down the first-ever conviction for harassing a marine mammal under Canada's new endangered-species legislation. To go with his precedent-setting conviction, the whale-botherer now faces a somewhat peculiar-seeming sentence.

Larry Reynolds was the federal prosecutor on the case. We spoke to him in Comox Valley, British Columbia.

A warning: this is a provocative new public service announement with language that is meant to offend.

"No homophobes dot com" was started last July as a project to track homophobic language on Twitter. Kristopher Wells is a professor with the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services at the University of Alberta. He started the no homophobes website, and he's happy with the attention the PSA is bringing to his project.

And Professor Wells says the website results were beyond anything he expected. And again, I'll let you know that he uses offensive language -- which, again, is kind of the point.

Mike Myers is responsible for several bad things. "The Love Guru". The fact that some people still say, "Schwiiing!" And the myth that you can't "drawr" with prune hands.

Yes, I said myth. During his time on "Saturday Night Live", he had a recurring role as a young British lad named Simon who did art in the bathtub. And often, Simon had to wrap-up his bubbly sketching sessions because he claimed he couldn't do his "drawrings" with wrinkly fingers -- prune hands.

Well, one scientist have now proven Mr. Myers wrong. Not about "The Love Guru". About Simon, and prune hands.

Tom Smulders is an evolutionary biologist at Newcastle University in England. After reading a report that compared the puckered skin on hands and feet soaked in water to the treads on car tires, he decided to investigate whether prune hands gave people a better grip.

Mr. Smulders had twenty people move marbles and fishing weights submerged in water through a hole in a screen with their thumbs and forefingers. Some of the people began the task with dry hands. The others had their hands soaking in water for half an hour before they started. And those with prune hands moved the small objects faster than those with dry hands.

Mr. Smulders thinks that perhaps humans evolved this way to help us uproot wet plants when we were looking for food. Or maybe we got wrinkly feet in the water to help us keep from slipping. It might have even helped us hold onto wet harpoons.

So next time someone tells you they can't draw you a picture in the bath, just tell them to get a grip.

Sifting through the digested remains of an animal's lunch will probably do nothing for your own appetite. But when that nauseating goop can tell you all kinds of detailed information about its environment -- and its fellow creatures -- you put your sandwich aside, and get to work.

That's what Sebastian Calvignac and his colleagues are doing with flies. And what they're discovering inside those tiny, disgusting stomachs is remarkable.

Mr. Calvignac is a researcher at the Robert Koch Institute. We reached him in Berlin.

Earlier in the show, we played a clip from Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, giving the first-ever news conference from space. In it, Commander Hadfield was explaining that he's a little clumsy when he gets up into the a zero-gravity environment of the International Space Station.

But he also had a serious message -- after being asked about a photograph he'd posted on Twitter of Syria, and the contrast between the beauty of its geography when seen from space and the turmoil on the ground.

Here is more of what he had to say, for the record.