Tonight:

Exploiting a golden opportunity. A new report warns a Canadian mining company to address the terrible working conditions at an Eritrean mine -- including the use of forced labour.

The reporters become the reported. In Greece, anarchists express their disgust with several journalists' coverage of the financial crisis by planting bombs at their homes.

Rubber match. Two companies that produce porn go to court to challenge a state law requiring performers to wear condoms on the set.

It's enough to take their breadth away. The B.C. Supreme Court strikes down part of the government's human smuggling legislation, saying it's "unnecessarily broad".

One for the robed. After nearly seven years of perplexing silence, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas makes a single remark during open court -- well, half a remark.

And...filet meat to the moon. If you've ever wondered the height from which you would have to drop a fancy cut of beef in order for it to be adequately cooked by passing through the Earth's atmosphere, or if you haven't, you'll find out tonight.

As It Happens, the Tuesday edition. Radio where every story is high steaks.

Few people actually know what takes place inside the tiny East African nation of Eritrea.

When the Vancouver-based gold company Nevsun Resources Ltd. became the first outside firm to establish a mining operation in Eritrea, it found itself entangled with a murky government initiative called the National Service Program, and a string of disturbing human rights violations.

Felix Horne is an Eritrea researcher with the watchdog Human Rights Watch. We reached him in Ottawa.

The right to free speech is a freedom afforded to all Americans -- including those in the adult film industry.

That's what American pornographic companies are arguing, as two of them file lawsuits against Los Angeles County.

The companies, Vivid Entertainment and Califa Productions, are protesting a law called Measure B. The law, which was approved by voters last November, requires adult film stars to wear condoms on set.

Jessica Stoya is a well-known actress in the adult film industry. She has spoken out against Measure B in the past. We reached her in Los Angeles. And a warning: parts of the following interview may not be appropriate for younger ears.

For seventy years, Nancy Pritchard Morgan has been waiting for her brother's remains to be returned home.

Very soon, she may finally be able to bury him.

In 1942, Lieutenant John Pritchard was flying a Coast Guard rescue plane that went down near the coast of Greenland. He and two other servicemen died in the crash. Since then, the single-engine Grumman Duck aircraft has been encased in a glacier.

The Coast Guard has now -- on its second attempt -- found the plane. Commander James Blow led the expedition. We reached him in Washington.

Canada can thank the Cold War for Yuli Turovsky.

The cellist, conductor and impressario died last night in Montreal -- the city he made home after he fled the Soviet Union in 1976.

Mr. Turovsky quickly made his mark on Canada's classical music scene. In 1983, he formed I Musici de Montreal and began building the chamber orchestra into a great Canadian institution. With his wife Eleanor as principal violin, Mr. Turovsky led I Musici around the world and made more than thirty recordings.

But Mr. Turovsky never forgot the Soviet Union, the country he called home for the first thirty-seven years of his life.

Here is Yuli Turovsky on stage during a Montreal symposium on the work of the Soviet composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. It was broadcast in 2007 on CBC Radio's In Performance.

Today, the EU assured a multi-billion dollar aid package to Greece so the country can avoid bankruptcy. And not a moment too soon, as the Greek government struggles with both the national debt, and rising public frustration.

Over the past few days, that frustration turned violent. Shots were fired at the ruling New Democracy Party's headquarters yesterday. And a few days before that, five journalists in Athens were the targets of coordinated bombings. Luckily, none of them was injured.

Chris Konstas is one of the journalists who was targeted. We reached him in Athens.

Dateline: Fairfax, Virginia. Yesterday, the grieving community of Newtown, Connecticut marked the one-month anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre. But the National Rifle Association has its own way of coping with the tragedy: on Sunday, it released a video game aimed at helping children brush up on their shooting skills.

The game is called "NRA: Practice Range", and it's now available as a free download from iTunes. Initially, it was recommended for kids four and up -- but today, that rating was changed to twelve and up.

On iTunes, the app is described as, quote, "a 3D shooting game that instills safe and responsible ownership through fun challenges and realistic simulations."

The description continues, "It strikes the right balance of gaming and safety education, allowing you to enjoy the most authentic experience possible."

The release comes just three weeks after Wayne Lapierre -- head of the NRA -- made these memorable public comments about the rampage.Players of NRA: Practice Range can also benefit from handy tips, offered up by the game. For example: "Never use alcohol or drugs before or while shooting." And: "The NRA Eddie Eagle Gunsafe program has reached more than twenty-five million children -- in all fifty states -- since 1998."

Which goes to show, once again, that even an organization obsessed with guns can be wildly off-target.

Have you ever heard of having your steak "Pittsburgh rare?" According to legend, steel workers in the city put their steaks on metal fresh from the foundry for a minute or so, creating a piece of meat that was charred on the outside and pretty much raw in the middle. It's available in better restaurants through the city. And probably worse ones, too.

And now, at least theoretically, we have "Thermosphere rare".

That's according to a mathematical analysis that considers the optimal altitude from which to drop an eight-ounce filet mignon, to ensure it's ideally cooked by the time it hits the ground.

Inspired by daredevil Felix Baumgartner's jump from the edge of space last fall, the folks at geek comic X-K-C-D decided to use physics to figure out whether it would be possible to cook a steak from the heat it encounters passing through the Earth's atmosphere.

It turns out that dropping it from forty kilometres up -- the height from which Mr. Baumgartner jumped -- isn't enough. Although the steak would get moving very fast, and probably break the sound barrier, the heat it would generate would be outstripped by the cold temperature, and it wouldn't really cook at all.

Ditto for seventy or even a hundred kilometres up, which would expose the steak to temperatures of three-hundred-and-fifty degrees Fahrenheit for about a minute or so. Which, as anyone knows, isn't really enough to even brown the surface.

But from upwards of two-hundred-and-fifty kilometres up -- a low-earth orbit in the thermosphere -- things get cooking. Then, the steak would reach superbly hypersonic speeds, and would probably catch fire on its descent, as it's exposed to thousands of degrees of heat.

But then it would freeze as it reached the lower levels of the atmosphere.

So what you'd pick up, out of a decent-sized crater, would be a flash-frozen, charred steak, that's still pretty much raw in the middle.

So unless you have access to a low-earth orbiter, don't mind a bit of dirt on your meat, and are really a fan of physics, it's probably easier just to go to Pittsburgh.

Two years ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood on the deck of a ship allegedly used to bring Tamil migrants illegally into British Columbia and promised a new, tougher law to deal with human smuggling.

Yesterday, a B-C Supreme Court judge struck down part of that law, saying it was too broad in its scope.

The decision is expected to affect upcoming trials involving allegedly illegal migrants.

Scott Watson is a political science professor at the University of Victoria who specializes in refugee law. We reached him at his office.

It was a cryptic announcement -- and all the more devastating for it.

Reverend John Galbraith Graham began making crosswords in 1958. And in the late 'seventies, after a divorce forced him to leave the church, he took up cryptic compilation full-time. As a puzzle-maker, he goes by the pseudonym "Araucaria" -- the Latin name for the monkey-puzzle tree. And nowadays, he puts together six cryptic crosswords a month for the Guardian newspaper, plus more for different publications. Which is impressive for anyone, but particularly for a ninety-one-year-old -- whose brain you might expect to be slightly diminished.

That brain, of course, remains almost impossibly sharp. But his body is a different story.

Last week's Guardian puzzle -- which was originally published in December, in "One Across" magazine -- came with "special instructions" at the top, which read as follows:

"Araucaria has eighteen down of the nineteen, which is being treated with thirteen fifteen."

It was an ominous preamble. And as crossword fans worked through the puzzle, the solutions proved both poignant and unwelcome.

As Guardian crossword blogger Alan Connor wrote yesterday, "I doubt that anyone who solved Friday's crossword will ever forget it. Uniquely for an Araucaria puzzle, the experience was not in the least fun."

The solution to eighteen was "cancer". Nineteen was "oesophagus". And the answer to the treatment clue was "palliative care".

Rare is the cryptic crossword that works your heart as well as your brain. And since its publication, Reverend Graham has received an outpouring of support from his many, devoted fans. As for his chosen forum for the announcement, he says, "It seemed the natural thing to do somehow. It just seemed right."

With his prognosis uncertain, Araucaria found a typically ingenious way to get his point across. And down.

We'll send this out to him. From Woodstock, Ontario, this is J.J. Ipsen and the Paper Crown, with "Crossword Puzzle Riddles".

By now you've likely heard about Lance Armstrong's interview with Oprah Winfrey, during which he apparently confesses to using performance-enhancing drugs. That's according to Ms. Winfrey.

The U.S. Anti-Doping agency stripped Mr. Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles in August, after concluding that he had used banned substances, something the cyclist had long, and vehemently, denied.

Beyond damaging hhis own career, Mr. Armstrong's alleged doping also put the brakes on many other cycling careers. That's something British cyclist Nicole Cooke spoke out about yesterday in announcing her retirement from the sport.

Ms. Cooke won the Olympic gold medal in Beijing. And in an interview with the BBC, she was asked what she would say to Mr. Armstrong. Here's her reply.

The job of a tugboat is to help other boats get in and out of harbours. But in the case of one tugboat in particular, even another tugboat can't help.

The tugboat in question is called the Craig Trans. Its eight-member crew has been stranded in Halifax since Transport Canada impounded the boat on December eighteenth. The owner of the boat has reportedly abandoned the ship and its crew. And the eight men say they haven't been paid since November.

Pedro Andrade is the Chief Mate of the Craig Trans. We reached him in Halifax.

And now, Quote/Unquote.If you didn't speak for an entire day at work, people would start to wonder about you. Some would worry. Some would begin to find you alluringly mysterious. And some would think you were an idiot.

If you continued not speaking day after day, month after month, year after year, people would develop all kinds of theories about you. And something else would happen: you would begin to realize that, when you eventually opened your mouth to speak, your long-withheld words would carry tremendous weight. So when you finally spoke in the workplace, each word would be dense with meaning, a string of verbal jewels, a haiku freighted with profundity.

Unless you're U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Yesterday, he spoke in open court for the first time in nearly seven years. And according to the official transcript, he broke his long, self-imposed silence to say the following. Quote:

"Well -- he did not -- "

Unquote.

Experts are awaiting the release of the tape of the session to determine what the second half of his remark might have been.

Workers in Maine are standing tall again. Two-dimensional workers, that is.

Almost two years ago, the state's governor, Paul LePage, ordered a mural illustrating the state's labour history be removed from the walls of a government building. Governor LePage said the images were too pro-union.

Now, twenty-two months and a series of court battles later, the murals are back on public display.

From our archives, here is the artist who created the piece, Judy Taylor, speaking to As It Happens guest host Robert Harris about the removal of her work back in March 2011.

Once again, tensions in the southern Bosnian town of Mostar are high.

On Monday morning, a monument to fallen soldiers of Bosnia's Muslim-dominated wartime army was ripped apart by a bomb.

During the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, Mostar was the sight of heavy fighting between Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks, and Croats. Today, the town remains largely segregated.

The Neretva river runs through Mostar...and a historic bridge both connects and divides the two sides.

For Valentin Inzko this bombing raises real concerns about the possibility of renewed ethnic violence. He is the EU Peace Implementation Council's High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina. We reached Mr. Inzko in Sarajevo.

It's a very adult message -- delivered by a child.

Yesterday, the municipal council of Vernon, British Columbia, received a stern message about climate change, and what the council could do to slow it down. And it came from a ten-year-old.

Vernon resident Neave Allen is in Grade Five. And here's what she had to say to Vernon City Council, for the record.

As music retailers go -- and they do, nowadays -- the British chain HMV was once Number One. But yesterday, HMV stopped trading and appointed administrators to oversee their stores in the UK and Ireland. The administrators will also try to find a buyer for the struggling chain. Without a buyer, the chain will likely close.

HMV opened its first store on London's Oxford Street in 1921. It's named for Francis Barraud's painting, "His Master's Voice," which shows a terrier named "Nipper" staring into a gramophone. The store still uses that image as its logo.

Over the years, HMV survived the move from vinyl, to eight-tracks and cassettes, to CDs. But the era of digital music has proven too difficult.

Canadian shoppers needn't worry... yet. HMV stores in Canada were bought out by another company in 2011. But in the U.K. and Ireland, more than four thousand people are employed by the chain. And so, for them, we have a little song. Composer Edward Elgar was in attendance for the pomp and circumstance of the first store's opening more than ninety years ago. Here's cellist Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi with Edward Elgar's "Salut d'Amour."