Front Burner

B.C.’s ‘staggering’ money laundering problem

Host David Ridgen joins victims' family members as they investigate cold cases, tracking down leads, speaking to suspects and searching for answers. In Season 7 of Someone Knows Something, Ridgen and investigative journalist Amanda Robb dig into the 1998 murder of her uncle, a New York doctor killed for performing abortions. They uncover a network of anti-abortion movements linked to violence in North America and Europe. Twenty years later, with debates about reproductive rights heating up in the U.S., could more violence be on the horizon? More episodes are available at hyperurl.co/sks

Toronto police are more likely to use force against people of colour, especially Black residents, according to race-based data released this week.

The internal data on use of force and strip searches from 2020 also showed Indigenous people were, proportionally, more likely than any other racial group to be strip-searched after being arrested.

Some academics, journalists and activists have been saying for decades that systemic racism is a problem in policing.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a researcher and sociologist at the University of Toronto, talks to Frontburner about the need for more transparency from police forces across the country on race-based data, and ultimately, more accountability for systemic racism in policing.

Earlier this week, Blake Lemoine, an engineer who works for Google’s Responsible AI department, went public with his belief that Google’s LaMDA chatbot is sentient.

LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is an artificial intelligence program that mimics speech and tries to predict which words are most related to the prompts it is given.

While some experts believe that conscious AI is something that will be possible in the future, many in the field think that Lemoine is mistaken — and that the conversation he has stirred up about sentience takes away from the immediate and pressing ethical questions surrounding Google’s control over this technology and the ease at which people can be fooled by it.

Today on Front Burner, cognitive scientist and author of Rebooting AI, Gary Marcus, discusses LaMDA, the trouble with testing for consciousness in AI and what we should really be thinking about when it comes to AI’s ever-expanding role in our day-to-day lives.

On June 5, after six days of deliberation, a jury found former Hedley frontman Jacob Hoggard guilty of sexually assaulting an Ottawa woman.

The jury also acquitted Hoggard of sexually assaulting a fan who was 16 years old during a separate encounter, and of a sexual interference charge related to accusations he touched her when she was still 15.

What happened in the jury room is a secret, but consent and the credibility of the accusers were key points in the proceedings. Today, a summary of what happened at the trial, and a conversation with lawyer Megan Stephens about the tensions that continue to exist between criminal justice and accusations of sexual assault.

WARNING: This episode contains graphic allegations and details of sexual assault.

Golf's new breakaway tour, LIV Golf, is throwing the world of golf into chaos. LIV held its first tournament this week and is gunning to eclipse the PGA — golf's premier association and gatekeeper for almost a century.

LIV's mantra is "golf but louder." The organization is flashy, more visible on social media, and is promising to be a new way for players and fans to experience the traditionally stuffy sport.

The tournament has lured in some big names, including Phil Mickleson, Sergio Garcia and Dustin Johnson, with the promise of way more prize money. But it's also drawing a lot of controversy because it's financed by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

Today on Front Burner, we're talking to The Athletic's Brendan Quinn about LIV Golf and what it means for golf and the PGA.

If you've been to an airport in Canada recently, there's a good chance you've dealt with more than your average level of chaos. Some of the issues include hours-long security lineups, delayed or cancelled flights, passengers stuck on the tarmac and major congestion at border security.

Many say most of the blame falls on two short-staffed government security entities, but some have also pointed fingers at COVID-19 testing rules, airlines and even out-of-practice travellers.

Today on Front Burner, we will try to get a better understanding of the mess in Canada's airports right now with the help of two guests.

Rosa Saba is a business reporter with the Toronto Star who has been following this story over the past couple of months, and John Gradek is a faculty lecturer and program coordinator for the aviation management program at McGill University.

In the early 1990s, as AIDS tightens its grip on major cities around the world, the relative safety of Montreal’s nightlife becomes a magnet for gay men. But when they start turning up dead in hotel rooms, beaten lifeless in city parks, and violently murdered in their own homes, the queer community has more to fear than the disease. While the city’s police force dithers over the presence of a serial killer, a group of queer activists starts making connections, and rises up to start a movement that would end up changing thousands of lives. Hosted by Francis Plourde. More episodes are available at smarturl.it/thevillagecbc

Shortness of breath, fatigue and brain fog. Those are just some of the symptoms that many COVID long-haulers are still facing, even months after they first caught the virus.

According to studies on the condition, one-third of people who’ve had COVID-19 could develop long-term problems related to the virus.

Today, Dr. Priya Duggal, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, talks about the research she’s doing into the impacts of long COVID, who’s most likely to get it and why some people don’t take it seriously.

On Sept. 22, 2015 in Ontario's Renfrew County, Nathalie Warmerdam, Anastasia Kuzik, and Carol Culleton were all killed by the same man — Basil Borutski. All three women knew Borutski or were intimately involved with him for a period. Their murders became one of the worst cases of intimate-partner violence in Canada's history.

Even though Borutski sits behind bars — with likely no chance of getting out — a coroner's inquest into the murders is finally taking place. A panel of experts, community members and advocates are examining what went wrong and trying to come up with ways to keep it from happening again.

Renfrew County is a microcosm of a problem often faced by women experiencing intimate partner violence in rural communities. CBC News found one in four cases of intimate partner homicide was in a rural, remote or northern area of the country.

Today on Front Burner, we talk to CBC Ottawa reporter Guy Quinneville from inside the hearings and Pam Cross, a lawyer and key witness in the inquest, about the bigger problem of domestic violence in rural communities.