May 9, 2008

Satire

It's Friday, May 9th.

A Tim Hortons employee got her job back yesterday after being fired the day before for giving a timbit to a baby.

Currently, the donut chain's new p.r. campaign, "day olds for day olds" now faces a backlash from nutrition experts.

This is The Current.

Burma and Aid - Update

After cyclone Nargis hit Burma on May 2, 2008, the military junta that rules the Country - also known as Myanmar - was criticized internationally for its woefully inadequate response to a massive humanitarian disaster. On May 9, 2008, the World Food Programme said two of its aid deliveries were impounded in the country, and the agency halted its airlifts.

Aid experts said the rising death toll could reach 100,000, while the United Nations estimated as many as 1.5 million facing the threat of starvation and disease. The raw numbers speak to the scale of the disaster. But what many found perhaps more distressing was that the military junta in that Country wouldn't allow United Nations relief into the country, with a UN plane only being allowed to land on May 8, 2008 -- but many more were still being held back.

The BBC had one of the few reporters on the ground in Burma who has been travelling through some of the hardest hit areas of the Country. He gave the BBC a ground-level of view of the situation there, while withholding his name and exact location to protect his safety.

And joining us from Rangoon was Tim Costello, Chief Executive of World Vision Australia. He visited the aid group's projects and monitored the distribution of emergency relief supplies.

Burma and Aid - Panel

Following the cyclone, a million people were reportedly in dire need of aid in Burma.

The aid is there and legions of committed aid workers were standing by, waiting for the government to stop dragging its heels and finally let them in, and the international community began to rapidly lose patience. So much so that France urged the UN to invoke the "responsibility to protect" clause to force the delivery of aid without waiting for the junta's approval. That clause gives the international community the legal right and ethical duty to step in when a state is unwilling or unable to protect its people from genocide or other gross and widespread human rights violations.

But while no one doubted the severity of the crisis in Burma, some say the responsibility to protect clause - or R2P - should not apply in this case.

To debate the merits of invoking the clause in Burma, we were joined by two guests: from Winnipeg by Lloyd Axworthy, a former Canadian foreign minister and president of the University of Winnipeg who set up the commission that drafted the clause; and from from his home in Waterloo, Ontario by Ramesh Thakur, who is with the Centre for International Governance Innovation and the University of Waterloo and who was one of the original commissioners of the clause.



Listen to Part One:


Craigslist Crime- Filmmaker

Looking for a used guitar? A baby stroller? Maybe a part-time employee?
All around the world, people are finding these things, and a whole lot more, on Craigslist.

Craigslist started out in 1995 as a small email listing service for events in the San Francisco area. Today it has a serious case of gigantism, ballooning into a site that gets over 10 billion page views and posts more than 30 million classified ads each and every month.

But when there are that many users making so many transactions, you're sure to find scads of scams and shysters.

Just in the month of April 2008, a Michigan woman pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hitman on Craigslist, an Oregon man was charged with selling a baby on the site, and more than one person has come home to a ransacked house after an ad on Craigslist said their property was free for the taking.

People look for just about anything imaginable on Craigslist, but filmmaker Michael Ferris Gibson looked for inspiration there. In 2003, he made a film called 24 hours on Craigslist. Michael Ferris Gibson joined us from San Francisco to tell us more about it.


Craigslist Crime - Critic

If some people are turning Craigslist into art, there are other people in cyberspace closely monitoring Craigslist and looking out for consumers. People like Trench Reynolds. He calls himself a crime blogger, and he runs a blog called Craig's Crime List. Trench Reynolds joined us from his home in Charlotte, North Carolina.


Craigslist Crime - RCMP

Craigslist is just one of many popular online sites that's vulnerable to fraud. Despite their best efforts to rid the internet of scams, those patrolling the Web know they will never actually stop the criminals from plying their trade online, especially when there are so many people online apparently just waiting to be duped or scammed.

RCMP Corporal Louis Robertson is with the Canadian anti-fraud call centre, known as PhoneBusters, and he is in charge of the criminal intelligence analysis unit. We reached him in North Bay, Ontario.

Listen to Part Two:

Collapse of West Coast Salmon Fishery

You can add Fraser River steak -- those thick slabs of sockeye salmon -- to the list of endangered meals.

Also endangered are those images of the fish leaping through rapids and shallow streams teeming with spawning salmon, all an integral part of British Columbian lore. And the flesh of salmon is an integral part of the diet of the people living along the Fraser River.

But all along the Pacific coast of North America, from California to B.C., salmon stocks seem to be in crisis.

In April 2008, the U.S. government closed almost the entire West Coast ocean salmon fishery.

First Nations in B.C. are being asked to divvy up their share of the catch.

And some high end B.C. restaurants are even taking wild sockeye off their menus.
Mel Kotyk, the acting area director for the Lower Fraser Area for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' Pacific Region, outlined the measures his department took for sockeye salmon fishing in the Fraser River in 2008.

As part of the Current's series, Diet For a Hungry Planet, we looked at what this seeming collapse in salmon stocks means for consumers and most significantly, first nations groups along the Fraser River. But first, we looked at why the numbers dropped so drastically.

Scott Hinch is the Principal Investigator at Pacific Salmon Ecology and Conservation Laboratory at the University of British Columbia, and he studied salmon for 16 years.


Salmon Fishery Collapse - Impact on Natives

For scientists, declining salmon stocks are frustrating -- for most of us who eat fish, it's disappointing or inconvenient.

But the ramifications go much deeper for First Nations peoples.

DFO has asked 94 native bands in the Fraser River watershed to draw up a plan to share a very limited catch of sockeye: rationing, in other words, something that's a staple, that's central to their way of life.

For more on that, we were joined by Ernie Crey, a fisheries adviser to the Sto:Lo Tribal Council, and a former DFO advisor from his home near Chilliwack, B.C.


Salmon Fishery Collapse - Ethical Eating

With many stocks of wild salmon clearly in trouble, and farmed fish raising a lot of red flags over sustainable fishing, what's a health conscious eater to do?

For more perspective on this, we were joined from Montreal by Taras Grescoe, the author of Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood.

Last Word - Salmon Dance

We closed this episode of the show with a final word on salmon, since these are tough times to be a salmon lover and an even tougher time to be a salmon. So with stocks falling in the Pacific, we thought we'd leave you with a happier homage to one of our favourite fish: the Chemical Brothers with Salmon Dance.


Listen to Part Three: