May 07, 2010

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Whole Show Blow-by-Blow

Today's guest host was Erica Johnson.

It's Friday, May 7th.

The RCMP says that from now on, its officers will only use tasers against suspects who are causing them harm or who are about to cause them harm.

Currently, The entire RCMP Complaints Commission has resigned en masse.

This is The Current.

UK Election Panel (Updated)

The results are in ...almost. And now the real battle begins. Yesterday, Britons went to the polls in the most hotly contested and uncertain elections in a generation.

With most of the seats counted, the opposition Conservatives are in the lead with 304 seats, short of the 326 needed to form a majority government. The governing Labour Party has 257 seats and the Liberal Democrats, 57. Smaller parties complete the picture with 27 seats.

The Current hit the streets of London this morning to get the pulse of the people.

Now comes the business of figuring out who will form Britain's next government. To help figure out what might unfold in the days ahead we reached three people. Peter Hitchens is a columnist with The Mail on Sunday. Mary Dejevsky is the Chief Editorial Writer and a columnist with The Independent. And Charles Reiss is the former Political Editor with the Evening Standard. They were all in London.

PART TWO

Finding the Fit

University and college students are fleeing their classrooms, fanning out across the country and running headfirst into the dreaded summer job hunt. It has been a tough market over the last couple of years. Student unemployment has been at record levels.

And there's one group of students that faces an even harder time than most. These are students who, at some point in their life, have been diagnosed with autism. Many of them have trouble with social interaction. Job interviews are problematic. And fitting into the culture of a workplace can be difficult. But many of them have skills that can be extremely valuable in particular companies. And a new company in Denmark, Specialisterne is helping to place autistic workers in jobs that utilize their special skills ... high tech jobs in particular.

This morning we continued our Work in Progress series with a documentary by freelance contributor Kim Pittaway. It's called Finding the Fit.

PART THREE

Polio Eradication - Bruce Aylward

We started this segment with a group of drummers in the Kano district in northern Nigeria. They're playing at the launch of a polio vaccination campaign. Health care workers have come from all over the area to reach this village. And their goal is to vaccinate every child under age of five. The Kano district has been called the epicentre of polio in Africa.

Polio has been eradicated in North America, Europe and parts of Asia. But in pockets of Africa and Asia, there are still outbreaks ... outbreaks that leave children paralyzed or even dead. For a long time, many people in this part of Nigeria didn't get their children vaccinated ... in part because of the widespread belief that the vaccinations are part of a western plot to sterilize girls or transmit HIV. It was only when local leaders embraced the vaccinations that things started to change.

Michael Bociurkiw traveled to Nigera on behalf of UNICEF to document stories from the vaccination campaign. His stories appear on UNICEF and HUM. We heard from Sarkin Yaki Alhaji Ahmed Aliyu Wada. He's a local traditional leader in the Kano district.

But despite his blunt words, health care workers still find people who won't allow their children to be vaccinated. Josephine Kamara works for UNICEF in Nigeria. Last week, she and a local government manager spent three hours negotiating with a defiant father. We heard from her.

The fact that it only takes one unvaccinated child to undermine an entire campaign means that the goal of eradicating polio is a challenging one. In fact, some argue it would be better to focus on managing the disease instead. But the World Health Organization is pushing ahead with its goal of eradicating polio within the next three years. And it is putting forward a new strategic plan, which will be discussed later this month at the World Health Assembly in Geneva.

Bruce Aylward is the Director of the W.H.O.'s Global Polio Eradication Program. He was in Geneva.

Polio Eradication - D.A. Henderson

As we mentioned earlier, not everyone believes that polio can be eradicated. D.A. Henderson is among the skeptics. He's a distinguished scholar at the Centre for Biosecurity. He led the global campaign that eradicated smallpox. He was in Baltimore, Maryland.