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The As It Happens Podcast

Programs prior to April 12, 2004 are no longer available.

Hello, I'm Robert Harris, sitting in for Carol Off.

Good evening. I'm Barbara Budd.

This is As It Happens.

Tonight:

Hopeless in Gaza. Refugees and the wounded seek safety from Israeli airstrikes in Egypt -- but the border is closed.

Twelve absent men. Or women. Well, peers. Seeking an economic reprieve, the state of New Hampshire puts jury trials on hold.

A hotel re-opens, with some reservations. Three months after it was destroyed by a suicide bomber, the Islamabad Marriott is back in business.

Rejecting his claim to frames. A physics professor invents revolutionary glasses -- and attempts to parlay his world-changing creation into a get-rich-never scheme.

The Freddiness was all. We pay more than lip service to jazz trumpeter Freddy Hubbard -- a master of hot bop and cold fusion.

And...a short story for all seasons, about a tall guy stuck in one season. We selflessly share Alan Maitland's reading of Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant".

As It Happens, the Tuesday edition. Not even Wilde hoarseness could drag this radio away.

Today -- for the fourth consecutive day -- Israel relentlessly bombarded the Gaza Strip.

As the attacks on the territory continue from the east, the only possible escape route for those in Gaza is through the border with Egypt. But now, that border has been sealed tight. After initially allowing some wounded out of Gaza, and some humanitarian supplies in, Egypt has closed the crossing point. And today, the border itself was also under air assault by Israeli forces.

Hamad Keshta works for the European Union Border Assistance Mission in Rafah, in Gaza, and we reached him there earlier today.

After a short time out of business, it's back in the inn business.

In September, the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad was attacked by a suicide bomber. A truck was detonated in the parking lot, largely destroying the building -- and killing fifty-five people, most of them hotel employees.

At the time, we spoke to a shocked and defiant Sadruddin Hashwani, the owner of the Islamabad Marriott. He told us that, despite the total destruction of the hotel, he was determined to reopen before the New Year.

Well, this week, true to his word, Mr. Hashwani opened the doors of his hotel once again. We reached him today in Dubai.

In a 1995 interview with Down Beat magazine, Freddie Hubbard offered this advice to young jazz musicians: "Please keep your chops cool and don't overblow." Freddie Hubbard, the trumpeter who undoubtedly had some of the coolest chops in jazz, died on Monday. He was 70.

He was born in Indianapolis in 1938. Growing up, he played a variety of instruments, including the mellophone, the French horn, and the tuba -- along with the trumpet. In 1958 he moved to New York to launch his career as one of the most prolific trumpeters in jazz. There he hooked up with the likes of Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. By the early 1960s, he joined the roster of the Blue Note jazz label, and became a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He played on more than three-hundred recordings, including some of the most influential jazz albums of the time -- John Coltrane's Ascension, and Eric Colphy's Out to Lunch among them.

In the 1970s, he moved to his own jazz fusion approach that drew from a wide range of influences. While critics didn't like his more commercial approach, it expanded his audience, and in 1972 he won a Grammy for his album First Light.

Freddie Hubbard was always known for his elastic and intense style of playing. Eventually that intensity caught up with him. His career came to a near-halt in the early '90s, when years of hard playing and touring led to a damaged lip. But eventually, he was able to resume performing and recording -- in a somewhat mellower style. Most recently, he released On the Real Side this year, an album to celebrate his 70th birthday.

But we're going to go back in time to celebrate the man and his horn. Here's a track from his 1961 album Ready for Freddie: a tribute to Charlie Parker in Freddie Hubbard's own unmistakable style. This is "Birdlike".

We've all been recipients of an invitation we'd rather decline, but feel obliged to accept. We moan and complain, searching for the perfect excuse -- "I have family obligations," "the dog is dying," "I need to wash my hair." Even when the invitation is for jury duty, some people try to work up some reason to avoid fulfilling their civic duty.

In the New Year, however, some citizens of New Hampshire won't have to come up with convincing excuses. As part of a new cost-saving plan, state courts are delaying civil and criminal jury trials for at least a month.

John T. Broderick is the Chief Justice of the New Hampshire State Supreme Court. We reached him in Concord, New Hampshire.

Dateline: Bangladesh.

After two years of military rule, Bangladesh has returned to democracy -- and it has done so by a landslide.

In its national elections, held yesterday, the citizens of the South Asian country had the option of electing the hardline Islamist Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by former Prime Minister Khaled Zia. But instead, Bangladeshis chose pluralism, and secularism. They chose the democratic Awami League and its leader Sheikh Hasina, another former Prime Minister.

Zia and Hasina, the two most powerful women in Bangladeshi politics, have been battling for two years to become the definitive voice of the future of their country. Ms. Zia pushed a right-wing agenda, and a rigid interpretation of Islamic law. Hasina, meanwhile, found herself the target of extremist groups because of her secularist policies: in 2004 she survived a grenade attack that killed twenty-three other people.

But yesterday's vote was a decisive blow that will all but obliterate the Islamist party from the political landscape. Out of three-hundred parliamentary seats, Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party won only two. Instead, the Muslims of Bangladesh voted for inclusiveness and peace, and against an Islamist state. And they did so, by many accounts, in celebratory fashion.

It's late December, and across the country, it's already beginning to seem like we're in the grips of a perpetual winter. As we shovel out for the umpteenth time, or watch as a frigid wind sends our toques tumbling down the street, we grumble, "What did we do to deserve this?"

Well, as far as I know, we didn't do anything. Although, just to be safe, maybe we should all try to be a little more selfless. Because, as we learn in Oscar Wilde's story, "The Selfish Giant", sometimes selfishness is the only thing keeping us cold.

In the meantime, get yourself a quilt and a cup of hot cocoa. Here's Alan Maitland, reading "The Selfish Giant".

Josh Silver's glasses are clear. But figuratively, they're rose-coloured. The physics professor has invented something that could solve one of the world's most widespread problems. But he's not making any money from the idea. In fact, he trying his best to give it away.

Professor Silver has come up with an ingenious pair of glasses that could allow billions of people in the developing world to see clearly for the first time in their lives. They're cheap. They don't require a prescription. And the wearer adjusts the strength of the lenses herself.

To explain, we reached Professor Silver at his home in Vieussan, France.

"Hope" is not a word we generally invoke during conversations about climate change. "Global epidemic" and "potentially imminent catastrophe" perhaps, but not "hope". And maybe that is part of the problem. Chris Turner certainly thinks so. He is the author of "The Geography of Hope" -- a Canadian best-seller that was short-listed for the Governor-General's award for non-fiction.

Last fall, Mr. Turner spoke at an event called "Talking About the Planet", at the University of Toronto. He talked about the threats imposed on our physical world by climate change, and the things that we can do - and are doing - to reverse such threats.

Here is part of what he said, followed by a conversation with our very own Carol Off, who moderated the event.