Audio available:

Listen to Part 1 of As It Happens

Listen to Part 2 of As It Happens

Listen to Part 3 of As It Happens

The As It Happens Podcast

Hello, I'm Carol Off.

Good evening. I'm Barbara Budd.

This is As It Happens.

Tonight:

Going down with the sponsorship. An ethics advisor to Canada's chiefs of police resigns when the group's annual conference gets some questionable corporate support.

Overcoming ad-versity. Adbusters wins the right to sue the networks that won't add its advocacy ads.

The triumphant end of a long engagement. After battling for years, advocates rejoice when Vermont's state legislature votes in favour of same-sex marriage.

The antiquities go marching one by one. Fifteen-hundred Afghan artifacts are returned to the country from which they came.

Good morning, starshine -- the earth says "Hello!" And with those pleasantries out of the way, scientists politely ask just where starlight originates.

And...perps: unknown. Victim: some poor sap. Quebec police refuse to waffle about two big maple-syrup heists.

As It Happens, the Wednesday edition. We may work in radio -- but we still need our pancake make-up.

As the saying goes, you don't get something for nothing. Dr. John Jones is a believer in that adage, and he's been teaching and conducting ethics training for twenty-five years.

Until recently, he was a technical adviser to the ethics committee of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. Now, Dr. Jones has resigned over concerns about corporate sponsorship.

We reached him in Ottawa.

Dr. Jones resigned as a technical adviser to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, or C-A-C-P, because of his concerns about corporate sponsorship.

Peter Cuthbert is the Executive Director of the C-A-C-P. He's in Ottawa.

In a separate but related story, CBC News and the Canadian Press have new information from a joint investigation into the use of Tasers. An analysis of RCMP Taser reports from last year alone reveals sixteen cases where someone was Tasered at least five times.

For more information, go to cbc.ca/news, and listen to CBC Radio's World Report tomorrow morning.

Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs has made it very clear that his government will not countenance any violation of human rights in Afghanistan.

Last night on this program, Lawrence Cannon said he had received assurances from the government of Hamid Karzai that contentious clauses in a controversial family law for Shia Muslims will be changed. However, Minister Cannon's defence of Afghan rights struck some of our listeners as hypocritical.

Here is what Talkback had to say.

If you ask most people, "Where does starlight come from?", they will tell you that they don't know, and also that they think you're high. But tonight, we'll ask someone who's trying to find the answer -- and is himself high on nothing but the joy of a recent scientific discovery.

Scientists from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia have come closer to figuring out the origins of starlight. And they've had a BLAST doing it. Or rather, they needed a BLAST to do it -- BLAST being an acronym for Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope.

Cosmologist Barth Netterfield was on the research team. He's a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.

Well, the first part of As It Happens is about to go supernova. But we'll be back in the twinkling of a white dwarf, or whatever kind of star twinkles. When we return:

Spots of bother. The anti-consumerist organization Adbusters wins the right to sue networks that won't run its ads.

A much-missed list exists. Librarians in South Wales, Australia, are surprised to find Schindler's list in their archives.

After the rush hour. Neil Young's new CD celebrates these bio-fuelish things.

Stay tuned. I'm CO.

And I'm BB.

They've been trying to bust Canada's major broadcasters for nearly fifteen years. Adbusters -- the media foundation that is well-known for its anti-consumerist position -- has been in a long legal fight to get networks like Global, CTV and the CBC to air its advocacy ads. The spots were designed to challenge Canadians about their consumption of cars and fashion.

The case has been in and out of court. And it was only last year that the B.C. Supreme Court rejected Adbusters' claim that the networks' refusal to air its ads violated free-speech Charter rights.

Last Friday, Adbusters got a break. The B.C. Court of Appeal issued a ruling that lets the foundation pursue legal action against the CBC, and the other networks.

To talk about the case, we've reached their co-founder and editor-in-chief, Kalle Lasn.

We did request an interview with a representative of the CBC, but we were told the Corporation is still reviewing the decision. However, spokesperson Jeff Keay provided us with the following statement:

"The effect of the decision is simply that it's premature to deal with the Charter issue in the case, without the benefit of additional evidence. CBC and the private broadcasters take the position that they enjoy journalistic freedom independent of government influence or control, and are not implementing a government policy, subject to Charter review, when they make advertising decisions.

"CBC did not refuse to sell Adbusters airtime. The CBC accepts advocacy advertising, quote -- 'to allow the open exchange of ideas on issues of public interest or concern' -- end quote. At the time the purchases were considered, CBC simply followed its long-standing policy not to place advocacy advertising within news and information programming.

"Our new policy says that while advocacy advertising is still not permitted in or around news programs, it may be permitted in or adjacent to many information shows which include: analysis and interpretation programs, reporting and actualities programs, and long-form documentaries -- and that is only when CBC is satisfied that the advertising doesn't take away from the integrity of the program. CBC won't accept advocacy advertising in these programs when the ad relates to the subject matter dealt with in the program.

Jeff Keay's statement continues, "We will continue to apply our new advocacy advertising policy, which permits Adbusters ads to be accepted for broadcast... even on Newsworld, at times. If Adbusters want to place ads on CBC, instead of spending the money on what is now an ancient legal application, our Sales Office is ready and waiting for their call."

That statement came to us from CBC's spokesperson Jeff Keay.

Things have gone from bad to worse for students in a remote First Nations' community on James Bay.

Nine years ago, the doors of the J.R. Nakogee School in Attawapiskat, Ontario were closed because of contamination. Now, the suggestion of a health risk has prompted the closure of the portable classrooms the elementary school had been using instead. Until the situation is resolved, all of the students and teachers are stuck at home.

On last night's programme, we heard from one of the teachers at the school. Tonight, we hear from Talkback.

Last week at the G-20 conference in London, one man died after a violent altercation between police and protestors. At first, police said a member of the public alerted them to a man who had collapsed -- and that they decided to move him because protestors were throwing missiles at them.

Yesterday, a video emerged that told a very different story.

It appeared to show Ian Tomlinson walking slowly away from police officers, before one of them shoved him to the ground. A few minutes later, Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor who family said was trying to get home from work that day, died of a heart attack.

Today, his stepson Paul King told the BBC Five Live of his reaction to the video. Here's a bit of that interview, for the record.

Move over ice wine, it looks like Canada's latest liquid gold is Maple Syrup. Or at least it is in thieves eyes.

Two big syrup heists have been carried out in Quebec this season. The first happened a couple of weeks ago near Knowlton and the second happened this morning just outside of Quebec city. And we're not talking about pocket change.

David Hall's farm is just down the road from where the first robbery happened. He's a syrup producer himself. We reached him on the road near his farm.

In the end, it passed by the slimmest possible margin.

Yesterday, the Vermont State Legislature voted one-hundred to forty-nine to allow same-sex couples to marry. A two-thirds majority was required -- and that's exactly what the bill garnered, with not a vote to spare.

The legislature's decision overrode Governor Jim Douglas's Monday-night veto of the bill, and ushered in a new era for The Green Mountain State.

Advocates battled for more than a decade to set the stage for this new era. And no one fought more vigorously or more tenaciously than Beth Robinson. She's a lawyer with the firm of Langrock, Sperry, and Wool -- and the co-founder of the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force. We reached her at her office, in Middlebury, Vermont.

They are another one of the many casualties of war: artifacts that are stolen and shipped out of the country, never to be returned. Fortunately, in more recent war zones like Iraq, many of their relics are beginning to com home. Now, that same repatriation process is happening in Afghanistan.

In February, British authorities returned about fifteen-hundred looted objects to the National Museum in Kabul, after they had been held for six years in crates at London's Heathrow Airport. The pieces will go on exhibit in a few weeks.

Fredrik Hiebert is an archaeologist and fellow at the National Geographic Society. It was his job to catalogue all fifteen hundred items before they were put on a plane and sent back to Afghanistan. Today, we reached Fredrik Hiebert in Washington D.C.

It's official: the recession can now add Alberta to its list of victims.

The collapse in energy prices has hit the resource-rich province particularly hard. So hard, in fact, that yesterday, Alberta's government brought down its first deficit budget in sixteen years.

To climb out of the red, the province is turning to some easy targets as a source of revenue. Yesterday's budget calls for a raise in the so-called "sin taxes" on cigarettes, beer, wine, and spirits.

So what do Albertans think about having to pay more for these particular vices? In today's Economy Sound-of-the-Day, we hit the streets of Edmonton to find out.

It's a list that changed history.

During World War Two, the famous Schindler's List was compiled by German industrialist, and Nazi party member, Oskar Schindler -- who saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews. That list was the inspiration for the award-winning book Schindler's Ark, which was later adapted by Steven Spielberg into the Academy Award-winning movie Schindler's List.

But nobody had seen the list for many years -- until it was discovered at the State Library of New South Wales in Australia.

Olwen Pryke is the library's co-curator, we reached her at her home in Sydney.

The only person who really knows what Neil Young is ever trying to do is Neil Young. So it's probably appropriate that the person who best summed up his occasionally foggy trip is...Neil Young. In the liner notes to his sort-of-best-of triple-album "Decade", released in 1979, he wrote about the hit song "Heart of Gold". In his words:

"This song put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there."

Well, it's been thirty years since he wrote that. And by now, Neil Young fans are intimately familiar with every exhilarating twist and turn in that ditch-ride -- as well as every jarring or faintly nauseating bump.

It's too early to say whether his new CD is exhilarating or nauseating, or some mixture of both. But, in one sense at least, he's headed back to the middle of the road. He's just released a collection called Fork In The Road, a sort-of-concept album about cars.

It's not just about cars. It's also about greener car technology, about how much fun it is to drive cars, and about the car as a metaphor for a sexy lady. And it's about the lousy economy -- and how it affects, among other things, cars.

Neil Young has always followed his enthusiasms about as far as they'll go. Sometimes farther. On the "Tonight's The Night" tour in the 'Seventies, he was so excited about his new musical direction -- and the song "Tonight's The Night" in particular -- that when audiences complained about hearing the song, he would eagerly play "Tonight's The Night" again.

When he and his son bonded over model trains, he started inventing parts for model train sets, and he bought part of a company that makes model trains. When he decided he really didn't like George W. Bush, he released the song "Let's Impeach the President". And since he started working on transforming his 1959 Lincoln Continental into a fuel-efficient car, he's commissioned a documentary on the so-called "Linc-Volt" -- and released Fork In The Road. And, probably intentionally, its sound is best described as "garage rock".

So let's be clear: Neil's still in the ditch, it's just that these songs are all about things that drive in the middle of the road. You be the judge how rough the ride is. Here's one of the less raucous songs from Fork In The Road: Neil Young, with "Light A Candle".