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The As It Happens Podcast

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

Good evening. I'm Barbara Budd.

This is As It Happens.

Tonight:

A discriminating choice -- or a discriminatory one? Canada accepts a white South African's refugee claim -- and South Africa calls the decision "racist".

Laughter is the best medicine -- and TV news provides the worst. A watchdog group decries the sickening state of health reporting on American television.

Getting up on the wrong side of the embeds. Uncovering an American military scheme to rate journalists' coverage of Afghanistan -- and to neutralize naysayers.

What's black and white and green all over? The debate over whether to name a California park after a race-obsessed inventor.

Hey hey, they're the monkeys, and people say they monkey around. But when it comes to human singing, they give it two opposable thumbs down.

And...not exactly roads scholars. Feuding French mayors turn a shared street into two opposing one-way streets -- changing a thoroughfare into a thoroughly unfair.

As It Happens, the Wednesday edition. Radio that wonders if the whole thing is two elaborate rues.

Last week, a man named Brandon Huntley was granted refugee status in Canada. At his hearing, the thirty-one-year-old described how he'd endured seven attacks in his home country of South Africa -- including three stabbings -- and how he'd been unable to find a job, all because of the colour of his skin.

Since then, the South African government has criticized the Canadian ruling, saying that it "can only serve to perpetuate racism."

Oh... and I missed one pertinent fact: Brandon Huntley is white.

Brian Sokutu is a spokesperson for the African National Congress. We reached him in Johannesburg.

Stars and Stripes isn't always thought of as the source of choice for hard-hitting investigations of the Pentagon. The newspaper is, after all, funded by the U.S. Military. But Stars and Stripes has been digging up some serious military dirt this summer. And it all began with some files that the Pentagon had put together on journalists asking to be embedded with American troops in Afghanistan.

Terry Leonard is the Editorial Director at Stars and Stripes. We reached him in Washington, D.C.

When a gang of robbers broke into an elderly Australian woman's house over the weekend, it soon became clear they'd picked the wrong person to mess with.

On the other side of the door was eight-time Olympic medallist Dawn Fraser. She's seventy-one years old now. And while her golds didn't play any role in what followed, titanium certainly had something to do with it.

Here's how Channel 7 news in Australia told the story -- our Sound of the Day.

You might not know much about music, but I bet you know what you like. So, let me try out a couple of pieces of music on you.

Ready? Here's the first:

And now, lay your ears on this one:

Decided which one you find more aurally pleasing? O.K., now I want you to try one more thing. Imagine you're a monkey. No, don't start picking your fleas or flinging your waste. Instead, get in touch with your inner primate and think about those two bits of music again. And now which one do you like best?

Well, Chuck Snowdon asked that question of some cotton-top tamarin monkeys in his lab at the University of Wisconsin. And he got some answers. And now, so will we. We reached Professor Snowdon on the Madison campus.

And if you want to hear a few more of the sounds used in Professor Snowdon's study -- including some "monkey music" that was not pleasing to the tamarins' ears -- you can find them on theUniversity of Wisconsin's website.

Hello again, I'm RH.

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

Coming up:

It's his park-y, but they'll cry if they want to: a California community debates whether to name green space after an inventor who was also a eugenicist.

Orchestral maneuvers in the dark: the World Orchestra for Peace performs a concert marking seventy years since the start of World War II.

Those stories are still to come on As It Happens.

When it comes to the debate over health-care reform in the United States, many of the debaters seem to be having trouble using their inside voices. So, for clarity on this and other health issues, Americans turn to their televisions, seeking the truth amid the noise. And that may not be good news.

Health News Review-dot-org is a health-journalism watchdog group that rates news coverage for accuracy and balance. The group has just announced that it will continue to watch TV news segments, but it will no longer be grading the quality of those segments. And part of the reason for the decision is that most TV health coverage is bad -- and showing no signs of getting better.

Gary Schwitzer is the Publisher of Health News Review-dot-org, and a professor of Journalism at the University of Minnesota. We reached him in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

North California has a lot to thank William Shockley for. In 1956, the Stanford Professor won a Nobel prize for inventing the transistor. He decided to make some money from the gizmo and, in the process, founded Silicon Valley. So you may not be surprised to learn that, in March, the town of Auburn, California accepted some land from Shockley's estate and agreed to name a park after the man.

Except that William Shockley was also a prominent American eugenicist. In 1974, PBS host Tony Brown -- an African-American -- asked Dr. Shockley about his ideas on race, for the record.

When Gus Thompson found out that his city was naming a park after Dr. Shockley, he thought his readers might want to know. Mr. Thompson is staff writer for the Auburn Journal. We reached him in Auburn, California.

Well, Mr. Evans, it's no hoax. After Patrick Balkany, the mayor of Levallois-Perret, made his city's section of the road 909 one way towards Clichy, Clichy's mayor responded to the jam by creating one... a traffic jam, that is.

Gilles Catoire is the mayor of Clichy. We reached him in his office.

What do you get when you take ninety-five classical musicians from seventy-five orchestras in thirty-five countries and put them all together? If you do it right, you get some of the most heavenly and eclectic music in the world -- in the form of The World Orchestra for Peace.

The Orchestra was founded in 1995 by the late Hungarian conductor Sir Georg Solti. Mr. Solti was a legendarily brilliant musician -- and he was also a Jew who had to flee his country in 1939, at the start of the Second World War.

This week marks the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of that war -- and to mark the occasion, the World Orchestra for Peace performed a special concert in Krakow, Poland. Here is an excerpt of that performance.