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Front Burner is a daily news podcast that takes you deep into the stories shaping Canada and the world. Each morning, from Monday to Friday, host Jayme Poisson talks with the smartest people covering the biggest stories to help you understand what’s going on.

Front Burner

The world could face one of the most severe shocks to energy markets since the 1970s as we enter week two of the war in the Middle East.

The strait of Hormuz, the artery for 20 per cent of the world’s oil and gas, has been effectively shut down. Qatar, which makes up one fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas exports, has stopped production of LNG after Iran struck two of its sites. In the aftermath natural gas prices spiked in Asia and Europe.

Jim Krane, a fellow in Middle East Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, is here to talk through the high stakes. Jim also reported for the Associated Press in the Middle East for years.

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

Iran war sparks energy crisis

Images coming out of Tehran over the weekend were apocalyptic, with oil refinery fires burning and massive clouds of black smoke turning day into night.

Meanwhile, Iran continues to attack other countries in the region and has chosen its new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the slain former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom joins us to talk about the latest developments, as well as how other countries are getting caught up in the war.

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

Iran’s allies and foes, explained

For decades we have been hearing about the possibility of AI-driven warfare, and now it’s here.

Anthropic's AI platform Claude has been reportedly central to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. It was used during the attack that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which involved strikes on nearly 900 targets dropped within the first 12 hours, including on a girls’ elementary school that killed at least 165 people – mostly students.

Today we’re talking about AI military capabilities: how companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are working with the military, and what happens when these companies and governments start building systems that help decide who lives and who dies in a war.

Heidy Khlaaf, the Chief AI Scientist at the AI Now Institute and an expert on AI safety within defense and national security, joins the show.

Iran and AI on the battlefield

Today on the show, we wanted to bring on Robert Pape. He is a political scientist with the University of Chicago. And we’ve been following his work on his substack “The Escalation Trap” with a lot of interest since the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.

 

Pape is going to argue that the U.S. has walked into an enormous, military escalation trap. He takes a hard look at things like missile supplies, and air defense systems, and models them out. His predictions for the future of this conflict, based on present information, and history aren’t great.

Iran and the escalation trap

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney reaffirmed his support for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

Carney spoke about the need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening international peace and security. But Carney also said his government supports the goals of the attack with “regret” and that Israel and the United States acted without engaging the United Nations.

Is Canada trying to have it both ways by professing support for international law, while also backing what Canada’s former Liberal foreign affairs minister, Lloyd Axworthy, has called an act of aggression by Israel and the U.S. carried out in defiance of the U.N. charter?

Dennis Horak joins Front Burner to navigate those questions. He served as the last head of mission for Canada in Iran. He also served as Canada’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

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

Carney supports Iran war with ‘regret’

In 1953, the United States helped stage a coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, largely a response to the Iranian leader’s nationalization of the oil industry. Twenty-six years later, revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran just months after having deposed the U.S. installed King. 

Since then, the relationship between these two nations has been defined by sanctions, proxy battles, covert operations, nuclear diplomacy, political assassinations, deep mutual mistrust, and now a war.

How did we get here? 

Our guest is Nader Hashemi, Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian understanding and an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at Georgetown University.

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

U.S. vs Iran: a decades-old fight

This weekend after weeks of threats and tense negotiations, the U.S. and Israel began a war with Iran. The developments have been incredibly consequential, from the assasination of Iran’s Supreme Leader to Iran’s retaliatory attacks on neighbouring Gulf states. 

To unpack this moment, what led to it, and go through what the future of the Middle East could look like in the aftermath, we are joined by Vali Nasr, Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is also the author of Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.

War on Iran

As Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand travels with Prime Minister Mark Carney to India, a feature conversation with Anand on the reset of the Canada-India relationship, the U.S. military build-up near Iran, CUSMA negotiations, and Canada’s foreign policy doctrine in a tense geopolitical moment.

India reset, Iran regime change with Minister Anita Anand

This week OpenAI’s head of U.S. and Canada policy and partnerships Chan Park was hauled in front of a meeting with Canada’s AI minister Evan Solomon after it was revealed that Jesse Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account was suspended back in June for describing scenarios involving gun violence, and that a group of people at the company debated telling the RCMP, but didn’t.

Van Rootselaar went on to kill eight people in Tumbler Ridge, BC. The meeting has provided us with no new information. No answers about what Van Rootselaar said or wrote to ChatGPT, or what it said back. There are no substantial answers about why OpenAI didn’t alert the police.

Solomon and the federal government are saying they expect changes from the company. They are framing regulation as an option, but not an inevitable one.

Today Maggie Harrison Dupré speaks with guest host Jason Markusoff. She is a senior staff writer at Futurism where she reports on the rise of AI. They discuss how chatbots can validate, rather than discourage users’ dark or violent ideas and about why regulation isn’t a louder drumbeat.

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

ChatGPT and the Tumbler Ridge shooter

Over the last week or so the debate over Canada’s immigration policy has come to the forefront.

In Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith has promised to put a series of restrictive new immigration policies to a provincial referendum.

In Ottawa, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has brought forward a motion that would compel the federal government to review and restrict the services available to asylum seekers.

Critics have said both moves scapegoat immigrants.

This is all happening at a time when polling shows that popular support for immigration is on the decline.

Today's guest is someone who is uniquely positioned to talk about the proposed changes in immigration policy.

Jason Kenney is the former United Conservative Party Premier of Alberta.

Prior to that, Kenney spent nearly two decades in federal politics, and was a cabinet minister in Stephen Harper’s Conservative party.

He spent years working on the immigration and multiculturalism file and was widely credited for shifting the support of new Canadians from the Liberals to the Conservatives.

Note: On the same day this podcast was recorded, Jason Kenney was publicly listed as a lobbyist for a firm that deals with skills-based immigration.

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

Jason Kenney on Canadian immigration

Puerto Rican TV personality Walter Mercado wasn’t just one of the world’s most famous astrologers — for his millions of viewers, he was a spiritual guide, motivational speaker, and a bedazzled fashion icon. And for generations of queer Latino kids, his refusal to conform to gender norms was a sign that they, too, could be adored and accepted.

Today, Kareem Tabsch, co-director of the new Netflix documentary Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado, gives us an intimate look at the larger-than-life performer in the last years of his life — and explores why, even after his death, Mercado is resonating with a whole new generation.

The enduring magic of iconic astrologer Walter Mercado

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