Front Burner

After a weekend of speculation, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer appeared on the steps of 10 Downing Street on Monday and announced that he would be stepping down.

He’s now the sixth British Prime Minister to resign in the last 10 years, continuing a pattern many thought would end after he won a majority government with the Labour Party in a landslide just two years ago.

Zoë Grünewald is a freelance journalist based in London, England. She’s also a regular panelist on the politics podcast ‘Oh God, What Now?’. She’s here to talk about the conditions that have made it so hard for the country to hold onto a Prime Minister, and what that means for people in the U.K.

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

It was a busy end to the season in the House of Commons. CBC Chief Political Correspondent Rosemary Barton is here to talk about what happened, what it tells us about Carney’s majority government, and what we can expect in the months to come.

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

Toronto police announced this week that nearly 30 recent shootings across the Greater Toronto Area are linked by a multi-layered gun-for-hire network. They say teens have been recruited through encrypted messaging apps to carry out attacks, from targets linked to local tow truck and waste management disputes, to synagogues, Jewish schools and even the US consulate.

In almost all the cases, they filmed the acts for proof of payment. Now police say they want to know who’s hiring them and how far this network spans.

Abby O’Brien is a reporter at the Toronto Star who has been following Toronto organized crime networks and the recent news. She walked us through what we know so far.

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

Andrew Tate – the controversial British-American influencer, and self-described misogynist – has millions of followers around the world.

He often tells young men that they’re victims of a feminized society and that they need to reclaim their “natural masculine imperative for power”.

Tate became even more famous after he and his brother were subject to a police raid on their Romanian property in 2022, due to suspected human trafficking. In the years after, they’ve also been investigated for rape and sexual assault. The brothers deny all wrongdoing.

Heidi Blake is an investigative reporter who recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker that meticulously peels back the industry that Andrew Tate built up: from an online porn empire, to a so-called educational network for men to learn how to recruit women into “sexual slavery”. She walks us through her findings.

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

Reporter Francis Farrell of the Kyiv Independent recently took a harrowing journey alongside a group of Ukrainian soldiers into what they describe as the kill zone.

They travelled by foot down a long road swarmed by drones, littered with shell casings and bombed out vehicles. He captured the trip in a documentary that paints a stark and dystopian picture of a war that is at once both futuristic and primitive.

He joins us to talk about that trip, and about the broader conflict as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meets with other leaders at the G7, hoping to revive stalled peace talks.

You can watch Francis’s documentary here.

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