December 30, 2009

Forty RCMP officers have been dispatched to Toronto Pearson airport in response to an attempt by Al Qaeda to blow up an airliner over the United States.

Currently, Al-Qaeda is reportedly already preparing to bring wrongful tasering lawsuits against the RCMP.

This is the Current.

Growing Interest in Yemen

Reporter

President Barack Obama served notice that the U.S. would target terror more vigorously, with Yemen in its crosshairs.

The reason - the Yemen-based branch of al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. Yemen's government, meanwhile, said Abdulmutallab lived in the country for a year from 2004 to 2005 and again from August to December of this year. And Yemen itself is increasingly seen as a failed state in the making and an al-Qaeda hotspot.

For more on the latest developments in Yemen, Kevin Sylvester was joined by Hakim Almasmari. He is the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post Newspaper and he was in Yemen's capital, Sana'a, for the show.

Analysis

Yemen may have been flying under most people's radar until last week, but Christopher Boucek warned months ago that the U.S. must turn its attention to Yemen, because the country was becoming perilously unstable -- just the sort of place that's attractive to a group like al-Qaeda. Mr. Boucek is an associate in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he joined us for the show from South Haven, Michigan.

Breeding Pigs

When Barbara Schaeffer lost her job as a policy advisor in Ottawa, she decided to become a pig farmer. This was in the midst of great uncertainty and hardship for the Canadian hog industry, but she's not just any pig farmer. She runs a small operation in an age of industrial-scale farming with a heritage breed of pig that has little commercial value.

Our Ottawa producer Neil Morrison became intrigued by the quest to preserve heritage breeds of livestock that were developed over the centuries and then abandoned for something else ... something leaner or fatter or easier or quicker to raise. He visited Barbara Schaeffer and the large black pigs she stubbornly, lovingly, raises, and he prepared this documentary called The Philosophy of Pig. It first aired on The Current back in October.

Maps

In 1492, Christopher Columbus stumbled into the Western Hemisphere on his way to the Orient. So riddle us this...why are the continents in our hemisphere called North and South America and not North and South Columbia?

Well to answer that and other questions about how Europe figured out there was another huge land mass across the briny sea, Kevin Sylvester was joined by Toby Lester. He is the author of The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth and the Epic Story of The Map that Gave America Its Name. Toby Lester joined us from Boston.

Last Word

In the last part of our show, we heard about how maps influence the way we imagine the world. Surely, anyone who knows anyone between the ages 2 and 10, will be familiar with the following little jingle. Love her or loathe her, cartoon heroine Dora the Explorer influences the way KIDS imagine the world. We'll leave you with a song beloved by toddlers, reviled by many adults, and perhaps even playing on a television in another part of your home as we speak. Apologizing in advance ... it's The Map Song.