Tonight:

From euphoria to horror. What began as a regular night out in Santa Maria, Brazil ends with more than two-hundred-and-thirty clubgoers dead, after a pyrotechnics display goes terribly wrong.

Lost for now -- and forever. Rescue crews say it could be months before the wreckage of a plane can be recovered in Antarctica -- and a friend of the pilot remembers a man who was a role model to others.

The not-especially-old man and the sea. A baby is alive today thanks to the efforts of sixty-three-year-old George Reeder -- who leaped into action when its stroller was blown into the frigid ocean.

There goes the neighbourhood -- and here comes another one. How a two-hundred-and-forty-nine-year-old home got moved from one end of Halifax to the other.

A tights squeeze. Around North America, schools are banning skin-tight leggings -- but as far as American Apparel CEO Dov Charney is concerned, that's a stretch.

And...Number One: check the stars. Number Two: Number Two. Exhaustive new research finds dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate their precious ball of excrement.

As It Happens, the Monday edition. Radio that examines extensive logs on the journeys of partial logs.

A country famous for its joyous celebrations is in mourning today.

More two hundred people died when a nightclub caught fire on the weekend in Brazil. Most of them were university students.

The fire started when a band set off fireworks in the Kiss Club -- and it spread quickly.

It happened in the southern city of Santa Maria, where nearly a tenth of population is made up of students who come from all over the country to study.

Guilherme Becker is reporting this story for Zero Hora newspaper. We reached him in Porto Alegre.

George Reeder doesn't consider himself a hero. But he was -- without a doubt -- the right man in the right place at the right time.

Mr. Reeder is a marina dockmaster in Watchet, Somerset, England -- where yesterday, he literally pulled crisis back from the brink of disaster.

Credible.

That's a word that came up several times during Question Period today -- and I expect it's one that we're likely to hear again from the government, as it looks to replace outgoing Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page.

Yesterday, on Global Television, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty suggested that the PBO should be a sounding board, and that the job's mandate should be better-defined. He went on to say that Kevin Page had quote "been kind of wandering off and going in other places" unquote.

Mr. Flaherty has previously described Kevin Page is unbelievable, unreliable and incredible.

Not surprisingly, the future of the Parliamentary Budget Office came up in Question Period. Here's a sampling of the back-and-forth, starting with Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae.

At first glance, a Vermont school's ban on wearing skin-tight leggings with nothing over them -- issued last week -- doesn't seem to merit much attention.

But step back and you can see a trend of similar bans spreading across North America -- in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Halifax, to name a few places.

The newfound puritanism has pitted students against school principals and feminists against parents who say to young women: cover it up.

There's one man at the centre of the so-called "War On Leggings."

Dov Charney is the Chairman and CEO of American Apparel, a leading retailer and manufacturer of leggings. We reached him in Miami.

Bob Heath was one of the best.

Other pilots who flew with him to remote locations looked up to him. And those pilots -- and many others -- are now mourning his death in Antarctica.

Mr. Heath was one of three people who died on board the Twin Otter near Mount Elizabeth. Search and rescue officials now say it will be months before they will be able to recover the wreckage.

Willard Hagen is a pilot and he was a friend of Bob Heath. We reached him in Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories.

It was a polarizing decision then, and it continues to polarize Canadians even now.

Twenty-five years ago today, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the country's abortion law in the landmark decision known as R. versus Morgentaler. The court ruled five-to-two that criminalizing the procedure violated a woman's rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Prior to the Supreme Court ruling, a woman required certification from a Therapeutic Action Committee -- comprised of three medical doctors -- to have the procedure legally performed. Abortion was considered legal only if a) the committee deemed continued pregnancy would put the mother at medical risk; and b) it was carried out at an accredited hospital.

By that point, Dr. Henry Morgentaler had been performing abortions illegally across Canada for twenty years. In 1983, he and two other doctors opened a clinic in Toronto for women without the required certification. A year later, a Toronto jury acquitted him and his colleagues of "conspiracy to procure a miscarriage". But the Ontario Court of Appeal set aside that acquittal -- R. versus Morgentaler marked the doctor's challenge to the lower court's ruling.

"As It Happens" spoke with Dr. Morgentaler the night the Supreme Court ruled in his favour. From January twenty-eighth, 1988, here is part of his conversation with former host Michael Enright.

Somewhere on the edge of the Kalahari, right this minute, there is a dung beetle scuttling away with its piece of the feces.

You're probably familiar with the stories of how they create their balls of dung and dance them away from the pile. But there have always been questions about how they manage to roll their precious spheres of poop in such straight lines. You may not have asked those questions, but they were there.

Now, researchers have discovered that the nocturnal variety of dung beetle has been relying heavily on the stars to do its work.

Eric Warrant is a researcher at the University of Lund in Sweden.

If you got an interview with a drunken Ernest Hemingway in Paris after the war, you might be tempted to build your entire reputation on it. Especially if you asked Mr. Hemingway how he felt about winning the Nobel Prize for literature, and he replied, quote:

"Oh, that little Swedish thing. Gave it to the mayor of Havana."

But for Stanley Karnow, that encounter was just a minor event -- a trivial blip in a career spent helping his fellow Americans understand East Asia -- in particular, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Stanley Karnow -- who won an Emmy and a Pulitzer Prize for his work -- died yesterday, at the age of eighty-seven.

There wasn't a lot of uncertainity in his mind about what he wanted to do: the week after he graduated from Harvard, he was on a boat to Europe. He settled in Paris for a decade, where he embraced the role of "foreign correspondent" -- according to colleagues, he shaved and dressed in a suit and tie, regardless of the heat.

Which meant his most significant reporting, from Vietnam, was probably done in extreme discomfort.

He was there in 1959, when the first Americans were killed. At the time, he supported American intervention. But over the years, and over the hours of conversation he shared with officials, and the Vietnamese people, his views changed. In 1968, a colleague asked him what he thought of the war. Mr. Karnow replied, "It stinks."

He won an Emmy for his ten-part 1983 PBS series called "Vietnam: A Television History". And in 1990, he won a Pulitzer for his book, "In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines".

In 1973, Stanley Karnow spoke to then-"As It Happens" host Harry Brown about the change in American involvement in Cambodia. The Senate had just voted to cut off funds for the bombing of Cambodia. But even after the bombing stopped, the Pentagon was working to arm the Cambodian army, ostensibly against the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese. Here's what Mr. Karnow had to say to Harry Brown about who exactly the U.S. was fighting -- from our archives.

It has not been an easy few years for people living on the coast of Queensland, Australia. Many communities were hit -- and many people died -- in raging flood waters in January two years ago. And the floods are back this year.

At least four people have already been killed in the state. Telephone lines are down and homes are being evacuated.

Brenda Hogan runs the White Lion Hotel in Maryborough -- a community that's already been hit by the floods -- but where people are bracing for more to come.

We reached Brenda Hogan at the White Lion.

He hoped it would be a huge success. It was anything but.

David Keith is a well-known climate scientist. A decade ago he was recruited to head and help establish the University of Calgary's Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy - also known as I-SEEE. The goal of I-SEEE was to improve communications between the energy industry and academics.

But David Keith now says the institute is a failure, and he's left to take a position at Harvard University.

Here's part of Professor Keith's conversation with the host CBC Radio's Calgary Eyeopener, David Gray.

Just because it's still underground doesn't mean the oil of the Haldimand 4 well in Gaspe Quebec can't fuel a good debate.

On one side: the Petrolia gas exploration company, which owns the rights to the nearly eight million barrels in the well. On the other: Gaspe city council, and its decision to ban drilling within ten kilometres of a municipal water source.

Lise Chartrand lives in Gaspe, and heads the citizens' group that pushed city hall to put the ban in place. We reached her at home in Gaspe.

And now, Quote/Unquote.

Yesterday was International Holocaust Awareness Day. And with trademark sensitivity, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi avoided the spotlight during a ceremony to mark the occasion. When asked to comment, he demurred, saying he had no words.

Just kidding. He actually praised Mussolini.

Today in Italy, there are calls for Mr. Berlusconi to be prosecuted under Italian laws prohibiting any defense of Fascism. That's because, on the sidelines of the ceremony in Milan, he seemed to absolve the dictator of responsibility for allying himself with Hitler.

It was apparent that Mr. Berlusconi had given the history some thought. He said, quote:

"It's difficult now to put yourself in the shoes of people who were making decisions at that time...Obviously the government of that time, out of fear that German power might lead to complete victory, preferred to ally itself with Hitler's Germany rather than opposing it.

"As part of this alliance, there were impositions, including combating and exterminating Jews. The racial laws were the worst fault of Mussolini as a leader, who in so many other ways did well."

Unquote.

In a statement issued a few hours later, he clarified his remarks, saying he had neglected to make it clear that he has always been against dictatorships.

But that didn't placate those who were disgusted by his remarks. Pier Luigi Bersani, leader of the Left Democratic Party -- which is currently leading in the polls -- described the comments as, quote,

"...An electoral maneuver to reclaim votes from the fascist Right by giving a friendly wink to Mussolini."

Unquote. And the president of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities also condemned Mr. Berlusconi's remarks, saying, quote:

"They are without moral awareness or historical foundation."

Unquote.

If you know Halifax, you know it's not such a long trip from one end of the city to the other. Unless, of course, you're hauling an eighty-tonne home.

This weekend, a home of that approximate weight -- a historic, two-hundred-and-forty-nine-year-old home that's been through a lot over those two-and-a-half centuries -- was moved from near the train station to up near the bridge. A project that took two days and a lot of help to pull off.

Phil Pacey is a member of the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia, the group that currently owns Morris House. We reached him today in Halifax.

Regina is experiencing its coldest, nastiest winter in almost two decades. So, of course, that makes it a good time to strip down to your Speedo and frolic at one of the city's outdoor swimming pools.

At least that was the thinking yesterday of almost two dozen shivering people posing for photos at Maple Leaf Community Pool. The group came together to protest the potential closure of the Maple Leaf Pool, along with one other, in Regina's downtown core neighborhood.

CBC Regina was there and spoke to the organizer, clad in her bikini, on a minus fourteen-degrees Celsius afternoon.