Not long after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Sasha Skochilenko walked into a grocery store in St. Petersburg, Russia. She reached into the pocket of her puffy winter coat, and pulled out a sheet of sticker price tags where she’d printed information she was learning about the war. Information she wasn’t getting from Russian state media. She placed the tags on a few shelves, and left. But these small tags were about to change the trajectory of Sasha's life.

On this week's Storylines, Julia Pagel follows the fight for Sasha's freedom, as she faces up to 15 years in Russian prison for what Russia calls spreading "deliberately false information about the Russian army."

Sasha's Message

A weekly documentary show for people who love narrative podcasts. These are stories you can’t stop thinking about. That you’ll tell your friends about. And that will help you understand what’s going on in Canada, and why. Every week a journalist follows one story, meets the people at its centre, and makes it make sense. Sometimes it’s about people living out the headlines in real life. Sometimes it’s about someone you’ve never heard of, living through something you had no idea was happening. Either way, you’ll go somewhere, meet someone, get the context, and learn something new. (Plus it sounds really good. Mixed like a movie.) One story, well told, every week, from the award-winning team at the CBC Audio Doc Unit.

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In January, some New Hampshire voters thought they had gotten a robo call from Joe Biden, telling them to skip voting in the state primary.  
 The robocall voice at the other end of the phone wasn’t Biden at all. In fact it was a deepfake, created by a political consultant working for a longshot democratic challenger to Biden. The audio itself was made by a magician in Texas, using a simple website that created the deepfake using text-to- speech audio using AI.  
 The fake Biden robocall shows how easy it could become to use AI to disrupt an election but that isn't the whole story. 
 In this episode of Storylines, producer Craig Desson takes us around the world to see how election officials, politicians and academics are grappling with how AI might impact our elections as hundreds of millions go to the polls this year.  
 The situation is troubling, but there are also ways AI brings new possibilities to democracies around the world.  
 Reported and Produced by Craig Desson. Story Editing by Joan Webber. Originally aired on Sunday Magazine.  
 Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit 

Artificial intelligence at the ballot box

Claire Hafner at 47, is among the top women boxers in the world. She’s just about ready for retirement but wants to win the Canadian title before hanging up her gloves.  
 However, a question hangs over the timing of when retirement will come.  
 Claire is also among a small group of women athletes who are participating in a landmark study on the effects of trauma in mostly combat sports.  
 Every year she gets tested for signs of head trauma to see if all those hits are leading to a long-term degenerative brain condition, known as CTE or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. 
 In this documentary we follow Claire to Las Vegas where she’s undergoing a new round of tests, and if they show a sign of decline, she’s going to retire before attempting to win that last Canadian title.  
 At the end of the show we’ll hear another documentary about boxing, but this one with a surprising twist. We’re going to drop you into a chess boxing match in London,UK. You can win by a KO or by checkmate. That documentary was reported by Laura Lynch back in 2011 for Dispatches. 
 Reported and produced by Katie Nicholson. Story Editing by Acey Rowe with help from Liz Hoath. 
 Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit 

The Boxer’s Brain

CBC producer Naheed Mustafa, then a freelance writer and broadcaster, landed at the Kabul airport on a blistering hot summer day back in 2008. She’d come to report on how the country had been transformed by the U.S. led war.  
 By that point a lot had changed. In Kabul Afghans felt free to come and go as they pleased, women wore burkas but they also wore jeans, tunics and pretty headscarves. There had been an election too, but at the same time, a violent Taliban resurgence was underway. 
 Mustafa didn’t know it at the time, but that resurgence would continue until the Taliban recaptured the country.  
 It's been 10 years since Canada officially ended its mission in Afghanistan. Now, Mustafa is looking back at the documentaries she made, and listening to the voices of everyday Afghans living through a key moment in their country's history. 
 Reported by Naheed Mustafa. Produced by Julia Pagel. Original Dispatches doc produced by Donna Cressman.  
 Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit  


Return to Afghanistan

When Julia Pagel was seven months pregnant, she and her husband faced all the usual new parent decisions: making a birth plan, deciding which stroller to buy and whether to use reusable or disposable diapers.  
 However, there was one choice that was extra tricky for the two of them. What would their child's last name be? Should they just go along with standard practice of giving the baby the father’s last name?  
 The tradition of giving the dad’s name to the child didn’t sit right with Julia, but her husband had come to Canada from Serbia as a 9-year-old, and his last name meant a lot to him. So Julia set out on a mission, to see how others had managed this last name quandary. 
 The documentary was reported by Julia Pagel and story editing by Karen Levine.

The great baby last name debate

On May 1st the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion will begin commercial operations.  
 It marks the end of a 12 year saga that included protests, legal challenges and the purchase of the pipeline itself by the federal government.  
 When Ottawa stepped in to buy TMX six years ago, it had an estimated price tag of $7.4 billion dollars. Today the cost has grown to $34 billion dollars.  
 As the polarizing project nears the finish line, CBC producer Allison Dempster visits communities along the pipeline route, from Edson, Alberta to Burnaby, B.C. She meets people who worked on the project, people who campaigned against it and Indigenous leaders who one day hope to own it.  
 In the second half of the show, we join Anna Maria Tremonti on a road trip she took along the route back in 2019. She hears from Western Canadians deeply divided on the pipeline project.  
 As you’ll hear, the expansion is almost complete, but the debate over its legacy is far from over. 
 Reported by Allison Dempster. Produced by Jennifer Chevalier. 
 Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit 

Sasha's Message

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