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The As It Happens Podcast

Hello, I'm Helen Mann, sitting in for Carol Off.

Good evening. I'm Barbara Budd.

This is As It Happens.

Tonight:

Life got you down, Mr. Brown? Beset by cabinet resignations and calls from his party to step down, Britain's prime-minister vows to jolly-well soldier on.

Echoes from Fat Man. Charles Donald Albury, co-pilot of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, dies of heart failure at eighty-eight.

This neighbourhood's going to the birds. Mail carriers in Moose Jaw, Saskatechewan fall prey to a peculiar type of post-traumatic stress -- a paralyzing fear of being attacked by screeching, swooping Swainson's Hawks.

Never let the bustards get too downy -- unless they've been down themselves for a good while. Conservationists in England hail the hatchings of wild bustard babies -- the first in almost two centuries.

Politically-correct digital enhancement. An artist in the nation's capital gives the finger to some members of the House, with a cast of parliamentary finger puppets.

And...what do monkeys find more fun than a barrel of, well...monkeys? A British researcher thinks she has her finger on it...or fingers that is.

As It Happens, the Friday edition. Radio that's a tickler for details.

Despite the resignations of more cabinet ministers and calls from within his own party to step aside, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed to get on with the job. In the wake of the continuing expense scandal, he announced a cabinet shuffle today in an effort to maintain control over his weakened government.

The scandal continues to grab the attention of political watchers around the world, including those who may have thought they'd seen everything in British politics. Watchers like Tony Benn, one of Britain's longest serving members of parliament. The longtime Labour MP served for over half a century until he retired in 2001.

We reached him at home in London.

The memories of June 4th, 1989, may have been suppressed in China, but they are alive in the hearts of many around the world.

This week, we have been bringing you stories and sounds commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre 20 years ago. You, in turn, have remembrances of your own to share.

Hillary Bro in Seattle, Washington, wrote us to say:

"June 4th, 1989. I will never forget because of Tiananmen Square and a night at the theatre.

My mother had bought us tickets to Les Miserables in L-A. During the intermission what was happening in Bejing was announced from the stage.

Although we had a moment of silence, I don't think what had happened in Bejing really registered with the audience until the curtain rose again.

Before intermission we had left students waving their flag in a triumphant song of hope. After intermission the students were shown dead on the barricades. With the weight of current events hanging over us, the waste of life on stage was overwhelming. Soft weeping could be heard in the audience.

We were watching Hugo's France and wept for modern China.

It has been my hope ever since that the courage shown in Bejing would never be forgotten nor extinguished. I am glad it is not."

That was Hillary Bro writing from Seattle. Thank you for all your calls and emails. You can always write us at aih@cbc.ca or call Talkback: 1-866-481-5718.

A witness to two of the most significant events of the twentieth century has died.

Charles Donald Albury was the co-pilot of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9th, 1945. Three days earlier, he piloted a support plane on the mission that dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The bomb that dropped on Nagasaki from Charles Albury's B-29 bomber -- nicknamed "Bockscar", killed an estimated forty thousand people. Another thirty-five thousand later died from injuries and radiation sickness. On the sixtieth anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, As It Happens spoke to Charles Donald Albury from his home in Orlando, Florida.

Here is a part of his interview with guest host, Tom Harrington. We pick the story up with Charles Albury telling Tom about how that fateful flight began.

As humans, we believe that there is something universal in the sound of laughter.

But a researcher in England has found out that it's not only humans that enjoy a good laugh once in a while.

Marina Davila-Ross is a primatologist at the University of Portsmouth in England. We reached her at her home.

It's time for the news, but we'll be back with more As It Happens -- and when we return:

Going gang-bustards, and it's great news for fans of a fledgling species: three Great Bustards hatch from their eggs in the wild, for the first time in almost two-hundred years.

It's enough to drive them to drink. Cheers turn to jeers as Molson workers watch their liquid pensions running dry.

Polka-drop dourness. Talkback sounds off on the decision to cut the Best Polka Album category from the Grammy Awards.

Stay tuned. I'm HM.

And I'm BB.

Hello again, I'm HM.

And I'm BB. This is As It Happens, Part Two.

Coming up:

Pointing out a puppet government. An Ottawa textile artist raises the curtain on a political circus, starring finger puppets that nail the looks of certain Canadian parliamentary players.

Kicking around in a region that's been kicked around. Tomorrow dozens of teams gather in a rural district of northern Uganda, for a week-long soccer tournament.

Those stories and more are still to come, on As It Happens.

They had gone the way of the Dodo in the UK. But the efforts of some dedicated ornith-usiasts has brought them back.

They are great bustards, and last week, three wild bustard babies hatched for the first time in nearly two hundred years. The births were a long time coming -- and not just for the birds, but for the people dedicated to re-introducing them to the United Kingdom. As we first told you on As It Happens two years ago, the group brought forty bustard chicks to the UK from Russia back in 2004.

David Waters is founder of the Great Bustard Group. Today we reached him in Wiltshire, England.

Here's a story that gives the phrase "political puppets" a whole new meaning. Literally.

A textile artist in Ottawa has created a line of finger puppets she called her "Political Circus". They're modelled after some of the players on Parliament Hill.

We reached Gabe Thirlwall in the nation's capital.

In the hallowed halls of the United Nations, people don't often peel off the gloves and go at it -- not even verbally. But it happened today.

In one corner, Sudan's Ambassador to the U.N. In the other, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The prosecutor had just appeared before the U.N. Security Council to pressure the government of Sudan to arrest Omar al-Bashir, the sitting President who stands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Here's the exchange that followed just outside the Council's doors. This is Sudan's U.N. Ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, then Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, for the record.

When Black Sabbath strolled groggily out of the shadows in 1970, they scared people. First, they were called "Black Sabbath", so they were clearly minions of Lucifer. Second, their songs were uncompromisingly heavy. Third, they looked scary, because they dressed in black, wore creepy jewellery, and were ugly.

Kids drawn to darkness thought Sabbath totally rocked. Adults scared of ugly loud guys thought they were ghouls who wanted to eat our hearts.

Well, 1970 is a long time ago. Black Sabbath still plays noisy rock, and the rotating crew of band members are still uniformly unhandsome. But they're not quite as scary any more. Maybe we're all jaded.

Or maybe we've all just seen Ozzy Osbourne in his underwear too many times. Heck, even if you never watched "The Osbournes", and you've only seen the mental image of Ozzy Osbourne in his underwear once, just now, after I mentioned it, that's too many times.

What's a once-menacing band gotta do to strike fear into the hearts of rock audiences acclimatized to the terrors of Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, and the Jonas Brothers? Well, in the case of Black Sabbath, Ozzy's taking things to a whole new level of darkness. He's pursuing litigation against Tony Iommi.

Iommi is the band's guitarist. Throughout its turbulent history, he has been its only constant member. And, as of a couple of years ago, he is the sole owner of the name "Black Sabbath". And that's why Ozzy is saying, "Iommi, you owe me." Last week, Mr. Osbourne filed a lawsuit, seeking a fifty per cent stake in the Sabbath brand.

In a statement he issued, Ozzy writes that "it is with great regret" that he resorts to legal action, but that he and his management team are largely responsible for rehabilitating the name of "Black Sabbath". Prior to his rejoining the band, in Ozzy's words, "the brand of 'Black Sabbath' was literally in the toilet." And thanks to his intervention, it has been restored to its "worldwide prestige and marketing value."

"We've all worked too hard and long in our careers," he continues, "to allow you" -- that's Tony Iommi -- "to sell merchandise that features all our faces, old Black Sabbath album covers and band logos, and then you tell us that you own the copyright now. We're all in our sixties now...Please do the right thing."

Putting aside his claim that the band name was literally somewhere in the bowl or tank area of a commode, Ozzy seems genuinely bummed out. I mean, he's chosen to work with lawyers, rather than directly ask for the help of Satan. We hope everything works out for the best -- but it's kind of pleasant to once again find Black Sabbath terrifying, even if we also find it depressing.

Here's a song that's neither -- the uplifting tale of a guy with "funny clothes" and a "tinkling bell" who spreads magic. No, not Ozzy. It's "The Wizard".

When we in the Western world hear anything of Northern Uganda, it is too often of a tragic nature. On this program alone we have brought you many stories of the devastation caused by the Lord's Resistance Army rebels, who have waged war against the population there for more than two decades. But there are other stories in that part of the world.

Beginning tomorrow, forty-eight teams from the rural district of Soroti in North-Eastern Uganda will take part in a week-long soccer tournament. Soccer is one of the most popular sports in rural Uganda. Organizers hope that the tournament will help some of the young people affected by years of conflict.

Karsten Uhing is one of those organizers. We reached him in Soroti town.

Nineteen-year-old Dennis Oriokot is competing in the Katine 2009 football tournament (or soccer, if you prefer) that begins tomorrow in Northern Uganda. Before him, we heard from Karsten Uhing, one of the tournament's organizers. They were both in Soroti town, in Northeastern Uganda.

Dateline: Moscow, 1984.

It arrived just like the original Nintendo packaging said -- "From Russia With Fun."

And once it got here, we couldn't get it out of our heads.

It transformed the world into a collection of three dimensional shapes, where everything -- cars, buildings, loved ones -- would fit together neatly, if that piece was just rotated this way and this one that way. Players started seeing the pieces in their sleep, holding tournaments in their dreams.

It's called the Tetris Effect, and it's been changing our brains for a quarter century.

Tomorrow marks twenty-five years since Tetris was unleashed upon the world, forever curing office boredom and creating a generation of addicts.

Tetris was the brainchild of Alexey Pajitnov, a twenty-nine year-old computer programmer living in the Soviet Union, in 1984.

It went on to become one of the best selling games of all time and made a tidy sum for the USSR. But Pajitnov didn't see a ruble.

In fact, he didn't get the licencing rights to his own game until 1996 -- seven years after Nintendo released its own version for Gameboy, leading to a global epidemic of early onset carpal tunnel syndrome.

But all's well that ends well. Today Pajitnov controls the Tetris empire. And this week in California, he happily celebrated the anniversary of its creation.

And today, we give a hearty bleeping thank you to Alexey Pajitnov, for reshaping the world with the gift of Tetris. We'll never be the same.

When it comes to beer, age brings prestige. Breweries pride themselves on the lengthy history of their product. The Molson Brewing Company is certainly no exception.

That might be the case with what comes in the case, but it's not necessarily the case when it comes to its employees. The company has announced a cutback to its pension plan. And that has outraged some of its pensioners.

In Newfoundland, this morning, almost all of the province's Molson retirees gathered at the Molson Plant to protest the action.

Kevin Walsh spent forty-one years working for Molson. We reached him at his home in St. John's.

Ah... the excrutiating screech of the Swainson's Hawk.

The elegant raptor used to be common in Western North America. But the birds' preferred diet of grasshoppers made them vulnerable to agricultural pesticides, and ornithologists now prize their rare Swainson's sightings. Not so the residents of the 1000 block of James Street in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. It seems that the birds have developed a taste for something a little bigger than a cricket.

Pamela Peterson lives on James Street. We reached her at her home.

No polka category? No fair. Last night we told you how the Best Polka Album category had been removed from the Grammy awards. The music wasn't felt to be "representative of the current musical landscape".

Not music to the ears of many, apparently, as soon the As It Happens email bag filled up with missives from polka-friendly folks appalled at the decision. One text we received suggested that someone should write The Grammy Polka with a few sour notes in it.

And from Adam PW Smith somewhere out in cyberspace, this note:

"This evening you broke the news that the Grammy people have removed polka recordings as part of their awards, based on it not being part of the landscape of contemporary music (or something to that effect).

I'd like to point out that Vancouver band The Dreadnoughts, who are currently on tour across Canada and then heading for Europe in a few days, feature a polka on their newest CD."

OK, then, a comtemporary version of polka music. Here are the Dreadnoughts: