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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:

Hell on wheels. After a repeat drunk driver kills a Quebec woman, the Crown seeks to have him designated a "dangerous offender".

An unprecedented vote, an un-Presidented country. Two-and-a-half weeks after the Afghan election, there is no official result -- and there are lots of official complaints.

Capturing lightning in a bottle. A British jury convicts three men of plotting to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners with liquid bombs.

The ace of diamonds. We'll take you out to the ball game, with a crackerjack reading by Ms. Barbara Budd.

What's it all about, algae? A robot researching algal blooms off the coast of Florida goes from "in sync" to "possibly sunk".

And...who wants to be a milliner? Given the details of new research into the stone caps on Easter Island statues, the answer is probably: no one with back problems.

As It Happens, the Monday edition. Radio that tells the story of the men they loved to hat.

The designation of "dangerous offender" is usually reserved for murderers and rapists. But this week, a Quebec judge could make legal history in Canada, by giving the status a drunk driver.

Last October, Roger Walsh drove while under the influence. He hit and killed forty-seven-year-old, wheelchair-bound Anee Khudaverdian as she was walking her dog. Last December, Mr. Walsh pleaded guilty in court. It was his nineteenth guilty plea for impaired driving -- and in total, he has one-hundred-and-fourteen previous convictions for crimes including assault, uttering threats, breaking-and-entering, and theft. Now the judge, and all Canadians, face the question: should a repeat drunk driver be declared a dangerous offender?

Clara Khudaverdian is the sister of the late Anee Khudaverdian. We reached her in Montreal.

They changed the way we travel. And now, they won't be travelling anywhere for a very long time.

After a second trial, three of the men who became known as the "Liquid Bombers" have been convicted by a British jury of plotting to blow up seven trans-atlantic airlliners in a simultaneous attack. The plot was to involve home-made liquid bombs hidden in pop bottles and smuggled aboard planes. The case led to sweeping changes in airline security -- and also marked a definitive change in the "war on terror".

Ron Suskind wrote about the case, which launched the largest counterterrorist investigation in British history, in his book The Way of the World. We reached him in Washington, D.C.

We'd like to offer a tip of the cap -- but we can't lift the caps in question.

You probably know about those giant head statues on the shore of Easter Island. But did you know that some of them have equally giant hats? Well, they do. And now a team of archaeologists in the U.K. has some more clues about the bright red berets being sported by a few of those imposing sculptures, known as the Moai.

The British researchers were the first ever to excavate Easter Island's so-called "hat quarry". That's where they made their big discovery: that the gigantic crimson caps were rolled from a top-secret volcanic quarry down to the water's edge, as part of a sacred ritual.

But today the archaeology world is in a hubbub about the headgear for a bigger reason. Experts think this new clue could help to answer one of the island's enduring mysteries: why hats?

Dr. Sue Hamilton was part of the Easter Island hat excavation. She teaches at University College in London.

You can say this about elections in Canada. They are frequent. They are costly. And lately, they've had the odd effect of having almost no effect on the make-up of Parliament. Yes, there are good reasons for Canadians to sniff at the looming possibility of another election. And here's another one: They're downright bad for your health.

Or they could be. The Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada is concerned that politicians could be spreading a lot more than catchy slogans if they hit the hustings this gall: they could spread the flu. The problem is, when you shake hands with politicians, you're shaking hands with every person they've shaken hands with before. Same goes for baby-kissing. In fact, H-1-N-1 has this in common with most political diseases: it can be easily spread orally. And forget meetings in church basements and bingo halls. They are more likely to promote high fevers than partisan fervor.

What is a poor -- and possibly infected -- politician to do? You can't turn your nose up at your opponent if it's dripping all the time. Maybe the time is ripe to try a new way of doing politics. A different style of campaigning. Maybe politicians could try gaining support from a distance. Perhaps less time in their ridings and a little more time at the office. And to reduce the risk of spreading anything unpleasant they could all vow to stick together, in one place, for awhile. Like say Parliament Hill. Who knows? New ideas like this are sometimes contagious.

Well, Chris and I are going to take a break to have the studio decontaminated.

I'm starting to think I should have washed my hands after arm-wrestling my MP at that barbecue on the weekend.

And I'm starting to think I should stop sharing your Gatorade. And while the haz-mat team cleans up in here, you'll be hearing the news. But then there's much more As It Happens. When we return:

Results may vary. An Afghan presidential candidate surveys the aftermath of an as-yet unresolved election.

Covering all the bases. A Labour Day reading by Barbara, of a story that celebrates the great American pastime -- from a Canadian perspective.

What is the location of Waldo? A marine robot named for an elusive guy in a red-and-white striped shirt becomes, itself, elusive.

And if the fate of Waldo the robot keeps you awake tonight, we'll keep you company. At midnight, the inaugural episode of As It Happens: The Midnight Edition will be aired on CBC Radio One. It's a slightly shorter package of some of the stories from tonight's program. That's starting twelve-oh-five tomorrow morning. Set your alarm.

Stay tuned. I'm CH.

And I'm CO.

Hello again, I'm CO.

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

Coming up:

Samoa traffic changes, Samoa problems. What happens when a whole country stops driving on the right, and starts driving on the left.

What do you give the Bowie who has everything? Well, if it's David Bowie, you give him his very own huge, furry, yellow spider.

Those stories are still to come on As It Happens.

Canadians have invested heavily in Afghan democracy. But it may be a while before we see stable returns.

Tonight, the bodies of two soldiers are on their way home to Canada. That brings the number of Canadians killed in Afghanistan to one-hundred-and-thirty.

Meanwhile, Afghans are waiting to find out who won last month's presidential election. Preliminary results have the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, just short of the fifty-percent-plus-one that he needs to avoid a run-off. But an increasing number of observers say the results have been skewed by fraud. Yesterday the Afghan electoral commission voided the ballots from four-hundred-and-fifty polling stations. And this morning, the New York Times reported suspicions that Karzai's supporters operated eight-hundred fake polling booths.

Ashraf Ghani is one of Hamid Karzai's more prominent rivals in the race for the Presidency. He is also a former Finance Minister under Karzai. We reached him in Kabul.

Today has been a day of change in Samoa. Politicians fought over the issue for months. Religious leaders and their followers have prayed to God for guidance. And hospitals pleaded for blood donations, to be prepared for the worst. Battle lines were drawn, and nobody was switching sides. But in the end, everybody switched sides. They had to.

Samoa became the first country in nearly forty years to demand its residents switch the side of the road they drive on. And today, the Pacific Island state of about one-hundred-and-eighty thousand crossed from right to left.

We reached Mata'afa Keni Lesa, an editor with the Samoa Observer, on the road in Apia.

Where's Waldo? No, not the grinning doofus in the beret. He's behind the guy in the green shirt. I'm talking about Waldo the bright-yellow, cylindrical robot.

Scientists at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida are trying to locate that Waldo -- an underwater robot that went missing about a week ago. Robot Waldo was designed to glide up and down, through the Gulf stream, in search of algal blooms. And for a while, he was sending reports back to the lab. But on August 31, he went incommunicado -- and he hasn't been heard from since.

Dr.Gary Kirkpatrick is a senior scientist at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida.

At one point, he wore shiny jumpsuits, and sported a blazing-red mullet. At another, he lost a disturbing amount of weight, sported impeccable white shirts and waistcoats onstage, and said stupid things about Fascism. And in one of the creepiest videos of all time, he dressed as a commedia dell'arte clown character and walked in front of a bulldozer. He also painted a lightning bolt on his face, performed in a sumo wrestler's loincloth, did mime, announced he was bisexual, and appeared on an album cover in the form of a half-man half-dog creature.

It's pretty clear, in retrospect, that David Bowie was trying to get our attention.

Now, at the time, people assumed he was just doing all this goofy stuff to sell records and become famous. But a recent development may provide a hint to what he was really up to: he wanted a spider named after him. And now, at last, he has succeeded.

German spider expert Dr. Peter Jäger has announced he's naming a recently-discovered Malaysian spider after Mr. Bowie. Heteropoda davidbowie is gargantuan, and covered with yellow fur -- so probably a tribute to post-Let's Dance Bowie, when he put on some weight and had Bon Jovi hair.

Dr. Jäger is open about the PR benefits of naming spiders after celebrities. Apparently, getting the authorities to place spiders on an endangered list is difficult -- probably because most people would rather drive over them with steamrollers than protect them. And as a result, Dr. Jäger says, natural diversity is declining with the extinction of every spider species that disappears. So the David Bowie spider makes the news, and people think, however briefly, about not hating spiders.

It seems that Mr. Bowie won this tribute because of his 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and possibly because of his lucrative, overblown Glass Spider tour in 1987. In retrospect, he was obviously pandering shamelessly to arachnologists the whole time.

Some may wonder if this kind of self-promotion in the egotistical pursuit of getting a spider named after oneself should be rewarded. I say yes. And I'll also say that, considering how many stories we've done on spiders on this show, it is an outrageous slight that there is no spider named gastropoda asithappens. What more do we have to do, spider-namers? I mean, we'll keep trying -- but it ain't easy.

I don't know about you, but ever since I was a kid, the arrival of Labour Day has triggered a sinking feeling in my stomach. I could never be entirely grateful for the twenty-four-hour reprieve from a return to books and bells, weighted as it was with the reminder that the endless days of summer were abruptly about to end. Still, I always wished we could somehow combine Labour Day with Daylight Savings, and turn our clocks back an hour, to squeeze out every last possible ounce of light and leisure before the inevitable return to school.

Of course, we can't do that. But we can have Barbara take us back to a month earlier in the summer, or a summer eighty-eight years ago, to be exact. "August 7th, 1921", is the title of a short story that has everything to do with America's great national summer pastime.

But it was written by Canadian author Steven Hayward of Toronto. It's a fictional account of "Bat Day" -- where spectators were offered a complimentary bat upon entry to Yankee Stadium.

Here's Barbara, reading "August 7th, 1921".