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The As It Happens Podcast

Hello, I'm Carol Off.

Good evening. I'm Chris Howden, sitting in for Barbara Budd.

This is As It Happens.

Tonight:

Island hopping. Four Uighurs held at Guantanamo Bay for more than seven years are provided a new home in Bermuda.

Way more than one toke over the line. A feature interview with Jim Lynch, whose novel Border Songs establishes that the grass is far greener on the Canadian side.

The consequences of radio-inactivity. Canada announces it's getting out of the isotope game -- and the United States is ready to step into the breach.

First, do no harm. Second: go to jail. Three Sri Lankan doctors who risked their lives to treat patients during the recent conflict are promptly, and indefinitely, detained.

Holden his own. The author of Seymour wants to see less of a so-called sequel to "The Catcher in the Rye" -- so J.D. Salinger files suit.

And...gong gong gong, they've been gongin' so long. A court decision may mean the end of the centuries-old bells at Malvery Priory -- and bell-ringers desperately hope for a re-peal.

As It Happens, the Friday edition. Radio with Carol Off on carillons.

"Welcome".

That's a word seventeen Chinese Muslim Uighurs have been waiting months to hear. After being held for more than seven years at Guantanamo Bay, the group has been stuck in a legal limbo lately. The U.S. no longer considers them enemy combatants and last year, a federal court ordered them to be released. But the problem has always been: released where?

Well, for a small group of those Uighurs, that's not a problem anymore. On Wednesday, four of the former detainees were put on a plane and sent to Bermuda -- where the weather may be warm, but the reception, so far, a little cooler.

Sabin Willett is the lawyer for the Uighur men. He's with them now in Hamilton.

They were some of Sri Lanka's top doctors. And they worked for the government in state-run hospitals in the north.

This winter, as fighting escalated between government forces and the LTTE -- or Tamil Tiger Rebels -- those hospitals were bombed. But that didn't stop the doctors. They moved their practice into abandoned schools, where they set-up makeshift hospitals, to continue to treat the war's wounded.

When the makeshift hospitals were shelled, the doctors continued to treat patients -- sometimes with no shelter, and with violence all around.

But rather than being celebrated as heroes at the end of Sri Lanka's civil war, three of these doctors have been in government detention for the past month. They are being charged with aiding the rebel forces, and supplying false information to the foreign press about the war.

Sahn Mugam is the brother of one of the doctors being held. We reached him in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Last night, we told you about a foxy German lady with a shoe fetish. Well, OK, it was actually a German lady fox. But the little vixen did indeed have a thing for shoes.

The townsfolk of Föhren, Germany spent several angst-filled months trying to figure who was stealing the shoes from their doorsteps...until the local count, Rudolf von Kesselstat, caught the fox red-pawed in his forest -- with a horde of shoes that would have made Imelda Marcos proud.

Well, Talkback had a few slippery tales of its own to tell.

BRUNO SK CONCERTS KR JUNE 12/09

CH:

For those about to rock: we'd like to take a moment to shake hands and get to know you.

You're never going to hear that when you see a band play GM Place or the Molson Centre. But things are a little more intimate in Bruno, Saskatchewan. Bruno has a population of a little under six hundred, and the big venue there is called the All Citizens. Only the All Citizens isn't very big. In fact it barely has room for the band. But that hasn't stopped some big names in Canadian music from stopping by.

Tyler Brett is the co-owner of the All Citizens. We reached him at home in Bruno.

We're going to take a short break now so that you can catch up on the news, but we'll be back before you know it with more As It Happens. When we return:

No Can nukes is good news. Now that Prime Minister Harper has announced "no more isotopes", the Americans are saying, "Good riddance".

Hymns of the 49th parallel. Hysteria over cross-border terrorism and drugs are key elements of Jim Lynch's sometimes-hysterical new novel, Border Songs.

We've got a new "Best of As It Happens" podcast, free for the downloading, on our website: cbc.ca/aih. Stay tuned. I'm CO.

And I'm CH.

Hello again, I'm CO.

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

Coming up:

When a body sue a body, comin' through the rye: J.D. Salinger gets litigious with a guy who's written a "sequel" to "Catcher in the Rye".

If they'd tolled for us once, they've tolled for us a thousand times. Well, make that a million -- but soon, the bells of Malvern Priory may go silent.

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

It may turn out to be a case of one country's loss being another country's gain.

This week, the Prime Minister said Canada will get out of the business of producing medical isotopes. This, despite the fact that we've been the world's biggest provider of the material used in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Stephen Harper says we can't afford to fix the agèd reactors at Chalk River, Ontario. And he's not willing to breathe life into the MAPLE project -- new reactors that were supposed to be the hope for the future.

Tonight, a perspective from the United States, which also depends on Canadian isotopes. Dr. Alan Kuperman teaches at the University of Texas. He's also the Director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. We reached him in Austin, Texas.

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much though."

Those are the words of Holden Caulfield, the uncertain, unreliable narrator of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye -- a book that has made millions of people wish that J.D. Salinger was a terrific friend of theirs and they could call him up on the phone whenever they felt like it.

And you know what really knocks that reclusive author out? A book that, before you've even started reading it, you wish the author that wrote it hadn't.

Recently, Mr. Salinger launched a lawsuit over a "sequel" to his 1951 classic. That sequel is entitled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, by the pseudonymous "John David California". Now, it turns out the author's real name is Fredrik Colting -- a Swede whose previous work includes classics like The Macho Man's (Bad) Joke Book and the immortal Erotic A to Z.

To talk about the suit, we reached Ron Rosenbaum, a culture columnist for Slate Magazine. He's in New York

Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for some other bells.

Specifically, the bells of Malvern Priory in England -- which have been pealing since the mid-sixteenth century. And several years ago, the parish and its bell-ringers realized that, if the bells were to keep clanging, the bell tower needed to be fixed up. Unfortunately, a British government body called English Heritage disagreed. It believes that parts of the dilapidated tower are of historical importance. And now that English Heritage has won a court case on the subject, each gong of the Priory bells brings them one gong closer to silence.

Mark Regan is the Bell Advisor for the diocese that includes Malvern Priory. He's also the tower master and bell-ringer at Worcester Cathedral. We reached him in Worcester, England.

When looking at the global fight against HIV and AIDS, there are signs both encouraging and discouraging.

It is true that the number of people receiving treatment globally has expanded. But two-thirds of those in need of potentially life-saving anti-retroviral drugs still don't get them. And now, there's another potential cause for concern. Participants at an international AIDS conference taking place this week in Namibia are warning that the global financial crisis could undo much of the good work being done in the fight against the disease.

Michaela Clayton has first-hand knowledge of that fight. The human rights lawyer from Namibia is the Director of the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa.

Today, she was awarded the 2009 International Award for Action on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights. The award was presented in Toronto, and that is where we reached Ms. Clayton.

Since that whole "Fifty-Four-Forty or Fight!" hullaballoo back in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, things have been relatively tranquil along the Canada-U.S. border. Until recently, that is.

Nowadays, residents of both countries need a passport to travel back and forth. And the American Department of Homeland Defence Secretary, Janet Napolitano, is endorsing tougher border-security measures -- partly because she apparently believed, as recently as a couple of months ago, that terrorists involved in the attacks of September 11th crossed over from Canada. Which, you know, they didn't.

If you're thinking, "This stuff would all make for a great novel," you're too late. Jim Lynch has already written it. It's called Border Songs, and it's about communities separated by little more than a ditch in Washington State and British Columbia.

It's about the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. And it's about a very tall, very dyslexic, very unusual Border Patrol agent named Brandon Vanderkool.

Jim Lynch joined Carol earlier this week in our Toronto studio.