Front Burner

Since the U.S. election last month, Bluesky – which describes itself as ‘social media as it should be’ – has gained a lot of traction. They now have more than 24 million users, and traffic on the site is up 500% in the United States in the last month.

Many users have fled there from X (formerly Twitter) which has seen a sharp decline since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022. The frequency of bots, partisan advertisements and harassment are often cited as reasons for leaving the social media platform.

Ed Zitron is a tech journalist who hosts the podcast Better Offline, and writes the newsletter Where's Your Ed At.

He talks to host Jayme Poisson about the rise of Bluesky, what differentiates it from X, and what this all means for the future of social media.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

 On Sunday, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, where he’s been granted political asylum. This comes after rebels seized Damascus, Syria’s capital city, on that same day.

Assad’s fall from power marks the end of 50 years of brutal rule by his family. His father, Hafez al-Assad, a longtime military officer, was known for his iron fist.

Joshua Landis is the head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and a leading expert on Syria.

He explains the significance of Bashar al-Assad’s fall, and looks back on the Assad family’s half a century in power.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in New York City last week. In some communities online, like reddit and tik tok, Thompson’s killing has been met with encouragement and his killer has been lauded as a vigilante, a kind of folk hero. 

Part of the reason for that, is the deep dissatisfaction and anger with the state of healthcare in America. The murder has exposed a raw nerve and put renewed focus on troubling practices within the trillion dollar health insurance industry.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Kendrick Lamar’s hit diss track ‘Not Like Us’ accused Drake of being a ‘colonizer’ and a ‘pedophile.’ Now, seven months after the song’s release, Drake has filed a legal petition against Universal Music Group (UMG) for orchestrating a plot to artificially boost the popularity of the song via algorithm manipulation, online bots, and payola, in a bid to undermine him.

Is Drake taking on the music business, in the tradition of Prince and Michael Jackson, or is he a sore loser, seeking litigious retribution for the fact that he lost the most high profile rap beef of all time? 

Brian Zisook is a co-founder of the music streaming platform Audiomack, and long time writer and executive in the hip hop world. He joins the show to discuss the facts of Drake’s case, the tradition of hip hop lawsuits that have come before, and the industry practices that created the conditions for this moment. 

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

CBC chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton is back to talk about Prime Minister Trudeau’s trip to Mar-a-Lago for a dinner meeting with U.S. president-elect Trump. She’ll touch on how far it’ll go to quell tensions over Trump’s tariff threat, and whether Canada can present a united front against it.

Plus, the politics behind the upcoming two month GST holiday, and whether we’re getting any closer to a federal election call.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In a sudden offensive, Turkish-backed rebel forces in Syria have managed to take several villages and towns, including the second largest city in the country, Aleppo, all with minimal resistance from government forces. 

Now as they continue to push further south, Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad is left with a diminished army and his main allies are embroiled in conflicts of their own. 

Kareem Shaheen is the Middle East editor at New Lines Magazine. He spoke to host Jayme Poisson about what the fall of Aleppo and renewed fighting in Syria means for the Syrian people and the region.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

At the beginning of this year, immigration minister Marc Miller said the government was looking to rein in the number of international study permits it would be granting, in a bid to take pressure off the strained housing market. But that's been bad news for the post-secondary institutions for which a significant part of their operating budgets come from tuition fees from international students. Colleges in southern Ontario have been particularly hard hit, with many announcing cuts and consolidations — and there could be more to come.

But it's only part of the problem. Alex Usher, the president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, explains the crisis Canadian universities and colleges are now dealing with: the result of years of cuts and a refusal to spend more on our post-secondary institutions.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

More than 10,000 arrests, a mountain of drugs stopped at the border, and more than a hundred assassination attempts thwarted. Those are just some of the results of a massive police data hacking operation in Europe to disrupt organized crime. And at the center of it all – Vancouver tech company Sky Global – that promised communication couldn’t be hacked by their encrypted phones.

Frédéric Zalac, and Radio-Canada’s investigative program Enquête teamed up with journalists from a dozen European media organizations for the year-long investigation.

The documentary aired on The Fifth Estate as “Cracked: Crimes Behind Encryption.” You can watch it on YouTube.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

People don’t think Graham Isador is losing his sight. They think he’s an asshole.

Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds.

Written and hosted by master storyteller Graham Isador, the show’s mini episodes are an intimate and irreverent look at accessibility and its personal impacts.

Get lost in someone else’s life. From a mysterious childhood spent on the run, to a courageous escape from domestic violence, each season of Personally invites you to explore the human experience in all its complexity, one story — or season — at a time. This is what it sounds like to be human.

More episodes of Personally are available at: lnk.to/pJDdjXaz

In 1996, after two hung jury trials, brothers Lyle and Eric Menendez were convicted of killing their parents in one of the most high profile trials in American history. The brothers argued they had killed their parents following years of sexual, psychological and physical abuse at the hands of their father, but it was ultimately decided that they had killed their parents in a premeditated fashion, in pursuit of their parents' million dollar estate. They were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The case was a phenomenon, and one of the first to be broadcast on television via wall-to-wall coverage inside the courtroom. 35 years later, following a Netflix series and a pair of documentaries dedicated to the Menendez brothers' story, and the entry of new evidence, the brothers have put in a new bid for freedom.

Robert Rand has been covering the Menendez brothers since the day after the murders, and has published reporting, books and documentaries dedicated to the story. He joins the show to discuss whether the brothers may soon be free men, how their story went on to help create the "True Crime" genre, and why had the murders taken place today things may have happened differently. 

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts