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The Current Transcript for September 14, 2018

Host: Michelle Shephard

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

Today we're going to take iPhone 10 to the next [beep] level. I'm excited to show you what is by far the most advanced [beep] iPhone we have ever created.

[Applause]

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: At Apple's annual event in California this week, Tim Cook unveiled a swanky new iPhone. And, no, the CEO wasn't actually swearing like an actor on HBO. We dropped in those sensor beeps to make a point about salty language and smartphone makers. Because for years those of us who occasionally feel moved to use some grownup language in our text messages have been foiled again and again by auto correct. That's the software from awful Apple and other tech makers that decides what we really meant to say was 'holy forking shirt'. First up today we're hearing arguments for and against the prudish predilections of predictive text. Then we're going back 10 years in time.

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VOICE 1: What in the world is happening on Wall Street?

VOICE 2: Two years no yields went from 190 to 166 in the blink of an eye.

VOICE 3: I have never live looked at the Dow Jones Industrial board and seen a 600 point loss.

MS: The markets may have recovered since the financial meltdown of 2008 but that crash a decade ago still has lingering effects for everyday Americans who have struggled for years to sell their homes, move on and think about retirement to the bigger effect it had on people's trust in the markets in government in the system itself. We're going to revisit the crash and hear from those who still live with its echoes today. Today in half an hour. After that as a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a member of the punk rock activist group Pussy Riot Peter Verzilov knows what it's like to feel the crackdown of the Russian state.

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30 or 40 clothed FSB agents with the guns open, just popping out of nowhere, pointing guns at us screaming like 'get down on the floor. This is FSB.'.

MS: The stakes are even higher now for the Russian Canadian dual citizen who's suspected of being the latest victim of a poison attack. More on this case in an hour. I'm Michelle Shephard and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

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Apple tech explains why the iPhone won't let you ducking swear

Guests: Samira Mohyeddin, Ken Kocienda, Emma Byrne

MS: To help you understand this first segment, we take you to my desk at the current and a visit from producer Samira Mohyeddin.

SAMIRA MOHYEDDIN: Michelle you have to see this, let me bring it up. So this is a text my sister sent. So she was trying to water the plants that are in the restaurant and instead of using the ladder she stood on the table and fell off the table as she was trying to water. She's busted her leg and she's in the hospital. Look what she wrote.

MS: "A broken foot. Ducking hate myself so much I wish I could punch myself in the face. Ducking-" Can I keep reading? "I [beep] hate this".

SAMIRA MOHYEDDIN: No but this happens to her all the time because she doesn't understand that she can put the word in to her phone and it won't come out as ducking. So every time she says this she's like "oh duck this happened" or "oh I ducking this ducking that" and it really just comes out as ducking.

MS: I mean seriously if you're lying there with your foot in a cast like that and you'd ducking hate yourself it's sort of a different text isn't it.

SAMIRA MOHYEDDIN: In the ducking hospital.

MS: Ducking hate myself. I like your response. Quack quack! Oh baby.

MS: Auto correct strikes again and unless you're one never to utter a dirty word it's likely happened to you. There you are tapping out an impassioned text when thanks to some goody two shoes software your forceful four letter word is corrected. And you're suddenly texting about waterfowl. Apple's auto correct avoid certain curse words by default and critics of the practice say that inhibits expression but it doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon. This week Apple announced its latest suite of smartphones and all the exciting things they do. But allowing you to swear with ease via SMS was not a new feature. Ken Kocienda was a principal engineer of iPhone software at Apple for more than 15 years. He's the author of the book Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs he's in San Jose California. Hi Ken.

KEN KOCIENDA: Hi.

MS: Good morning. So, what the [beep] Ken? Why does why does iPhone want to clean up our language?

KEN KOCIENDA: Well this is part of a product decision that we made years ago for the original iPhone. And I was the person responsible for making the software a keyboard and compiling the dictionary and working with the team here to make this decision to get in the way of your swearing. I'm sorry.

MS: It's so fascinating to hear about those early days that you were there with a prototype. Can you take us into those labs? What were you thinking when you were designing the auto correct software?

KEN KOCIENDA: Let me just take you back for a second because the iPhone keyboard was always going to be in software. If you think about smartphones before the iPhone and the BlackBerry with its hardware keyboard those little plastic Chiclet keys, while the iPhone was never going to have a keyboard like that. You couldn't feel the keys. So the software had to step in to help you get what you wanted to type. And so we came across this problem that you're bringing up here of swearing. Look let me tell you about it from the other angle. Picture yourself. You're on vacation. You've rented a house by the lake and you want to tell grandma about it. You want to tell her about the beautiful ducks on the pond. You don't want the software to come in and replace that word and have the message take a whole other direction. And so I'm sorry. Now you can put a voice to all of this. All of this is swearing intervention. But it was the best choice that we could make at the time.

MS: I covered terrorism for the last 15 years and whenever I try and type 'it is', I now get 'ISIS'. And she has become 'Shabaab'. What is the technology? How does it work?

KEN KOCIENDA: The idea of auto correct is that it looks at the patterns of the keys that you type, to type the word that you're going for. Now in your case covering terrorism with these new terms you type these words. And so the software learns, well these are pretty important words for you. You type them a lot.

MS: So it's our listeners will know - and you just referred to the story of when you're texting grandma and the iPhone wants to change [beep] to duck - How did you settle on that? Why not luck or a truck?

KEN KOCIENDA: Well it has to do with the proximity of the keys to each other. And this gets to the idea is that auto correction isn't spelling correction I mean we're pretty familiar with how the computer can help us with our without faulty spelling. But on the iPhone it was a matter you can't feel the keys. And so it's likely you're going to make these little mistakes to the right or to the left, or above or below. And so 'D' the letter 'D' for duck and the letter 'F' for, well, that other word they are right next to each other on the keyboard. So that's why those two words kind of get this magnetic attraction to each other.

MS: Has there ever been any talk of tweaking the anti-profanity part of this software?

KEN KOCIENDA: Well we've gone back and forth. Let me even tell you a different angle on this; is from the very beginning we realized that this problem extends into different areas, for example hate speech. So we actually had to go and research all of the nastiest most horrible things that people say to each other and about each other and put them in the dictionary is kind of kind of an interesting time to just do to plumb those depths. But the notion there was we wanted to recognize those words and I marked them so that the software would never offer them would never sort of step in. Oh I see you're trying to type this as the horrible word to call somebody a name. No the software would never intervene to help you in that case.

MS: Now from a different perspective we spoke with tech culture critic and freelance writer for Slate. Rachel Withers she had this to say about auto correct.

SOUNDCLIP

As an Australian, I'm particularly fond of swearing. It's important to express ourselves. So I've always found that the order correct from [beep] to 'duck’ is like incredibly frustrating. To me somebody who can't really use my phone as a communication device. That's the most important thing in life. And these features and they take features away. By now we all know when we see 'ducking' what somebody is trying to say. But fixing the ability to sweat we get a lot of mainstream support.

MS: That Slate freelance tech writer and cultural critic Rachel Withers on iPhones and auto correct. What do you make of this idea that you're limiting an incredibly powerful communication tool with that feature? And I'll be honest with you, Ken, I hate the word moist more than I hate the word [beep].

KEN KOCIENDA: Yes it's a difficult issue. You know. Part of the challenge for making products like the iPhone is that you don't know who's going to be buying them. And these days of course kids have smartphones.

MS: I think you hit on an important point there, and this is an age where we have access to so much that is really quite salacious content at our finger tips. Doesn't it seem a bit quaint and puritanical that this part hasn't been changed with the newest phone right?

KEN KOCIENDA: It's a question of continuing this discovery of where these products fit into our culture. like to think back about what the Gutenberg and the people the printers immediately following on in the explosion, the availability of printed material in right around 1500 My goodness all of a sudden now there are books everywhere and everybody can buy them. And I wonder if parents back then were saying 'well my son is always and my daughter they've always got their heads down and books why aren't they out in the fields ploughing'. And I wonder you know was there that same apprehension about what the new technology is doing. And where at that point now. We had nothing like iPhone's when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s. It would have seemed magical to be on a city street and get a map pointing directly to where I am and then I can text my friends telling them exactly where I am and where we're going to meet. And so I hope that we're going to continue deciding what role and what features and where this swearing decision is going to come down.

MS: Can you imagine a time when auto correct lets us say [beep] to our heart's content. And I will note the irony here that I'm quite certain CBC will be bleeping me out saying [beep]. I'm just enjoying saying it although.

KEN KOCIENDA: In a jokey kind of way you notice that I'm not saying it. I am going to be bleep free for this conversation. I am editing myself. But the software will software always evolves. I would speak to that purely from a technological point of view not even from the societal and cultural point of view that I was alluding to earlier.

MS: Well Ken I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much for today.

KEN KOCIENDA: Thank you.

MS: Ken Kacienda was a principal engineer of iPhone software at Apple for over 15 years. He's the author of the book Creative selection. Inside Apple's design process during the golden age of Steve Jobs. And we reached him in San Jose California.

SOUNDCLIP

Get a job at [quack] McDonald's cause that's where you [quack] belong. But before you depart this room full of wiz, I want you to take a good look at the person next to you, go on. Cause sometime in the not so distant future, you're going to pull up to red line and you'll beat up all the [quack] [unintelligible] that person is going to be pulling up right alongside you in a brand new Porsche.

MS: That is a scene from The Wolf of Wall Street which according to Wikipedia drops the F bomb more than any other major film. According to my next guest. There might be some therapeutic value in that fact. Emma Byrne doesn't think Apple is doing the public a favor by auto correcting away bad language. She is a scientist who often writes about artificial intelligence. Her new book is called Swearing is Good for you: The Amazing Science of Bad Language. And we reached her in London England. Hi Emma.

EMMA BYRNE: Hi Michelle.

MS: So what do you think about Apple auto correcting swear words on the iPhone?

EMMA BYRNE: Well first of all I'm ducking grateful for auto correct that's my typing is shit. But unfortunately swearwords, we need those real swear words because they're not like any other form of language. There's a great study out of the University of Kiel here in the U.K. that shows that swearing can help withstand pain. For example so thinking about you producer and her sister who hit her food on the table. I recently came off my bike as well and to be honest ducking just doesn't cut it. And the research shows that if you can use a real swear word you can withstand pain for about half as long again, and your [unintelligible] is significantly less intense than if you're using a non-swearword or even ministate, something that's meant to sound like a swearword like 'sugar' or 'fudge'. They just don't kill pain in the way to the real thing does.

MS: Do you think the swearing imprint is as powerful as face to face cursing?

EMMA BYRNE: It's interesting that text messages aren't quite the same as psychologically aren't quite the same as even when we send an e-mail. There is fascinating research about the level of our sense of intimacy or disclosure depending on whether or not something is synchronous or asynchronous, and how long we expect that to be between what he said and we're expecting that replies come back. And when you look at even people at certain moments, I'm working on conversational interfaces so [unintelligible] , and there were great studies showing that even if you know you're talking to an automated agent that that sense of emotional disclosure - if you're getting answers in real time - is the same as if you're talking to a human. So there is that sense of immediacy and there is that emotional release if it feels like a real time or near real time conversation. But when you write things that aren't part of an exchange that you don't have that same emotional sense from it. And I think that's partly to do with the fact that we do an awful lot of mental modeling of who is hearing us when we swear. We have to use a lot of what's called a theory of mind to understand how that swearing is likely to be received and calibrated accordingly depending on the audience. And it's interesting that we talk about Granny where is when I've gone around the country talking about swearing actually latex over about 60 some of the foulest people I've met. I'm so looking forward to being a granny because you just seed to have license to say what you like about [unintelligible].

MS: I might be in trouble by that time considering where I'm at today. But in saying that do you think that technology actually has changed the way people swear, then?

EMMA BYRNE: Definitely it certainly changed our standing of how people swear. So used to be the case that we were fairly certain that women swear less than men. Because when researchers, particularly male the researchers asked women how much they swore, they tended to downplay it. Whereas men would either be honest or sometimes even exaggerate the swearing [unintelligible]. So it is coded as masculine, is seen as being part of that manly prowess. But when you look at how people swear on social media when people are presenting a front but not necessarily speaking with a particular audience in mind, that women are just as prolific as swearers. There's research going back as far as money space which tells you what it dates to make sure that particularly younger women are just as prolific in swearing as a male counterpart. So social media are certainly possibly allowed women to swear more but it certainly has given us a clearer picture of how we swear.

MS: But there must be a double standard in terms of how that swearing is received, since there seems to be most forms of communication with between women and men. Do you find that the perception is different when you have women swearing versus men?

EMMA BYRNE: Well Brady [unintelligible] a follow up study, the last one that I know of which started in the early 2000s, and was actually done at the United States. And somebody sent thousands of questionnaires out with bits of swearings, small sentences and would randomize words were not. They said that the swearing was offset by a man by a woman and then asked people to rate the severity of that swearing. And consistently didn't matter who the respondents was, whether they themselves were male or female. Any swearing that purported to come from a woman was rated as being more offensive and demonstrating a low moral character. And I'm suggesting that this person had less power and less control but only when it came from a woman. That men didn't have that sort of reputational impacts. The other thing was that women were considered much more undatable if they swear. To be fair, that's a reason why I've used it. There is always a sort of a pragmatic reason why people choose to swear, and quite often studies showed that women who swear in the workplace in order to erect some social barriers.

MS: It must be hard in these studies and in your line of work to define what swearing is. Obviously there are some words that definition, but how do you how do you define what is swearing?

EMMA BYRNE: That was a real tricky thing when writing the book but also now with conversational interfaces, what we can and cannot say to customers. But also what we want to respond to from customers when they are using emotive terms and the differences can point to that between swearing and hate speech. But the common sense seems to be that swearing is something that is taboo. It talks about a subject that normally we would want to deal with in private but have some degree of privacy. And also that we tend to use it figuratively, so when you tell someone to go in and have sexual relations with themselves you're not literally inviting them so go find a room and make yourself comfortable you know you're making a point you know using it literally. But also swearing, surprisingly when it's used it is often used in things like surprise or elation or sympathy. As it is to be abusive, swearing is not necessarily 100 percent sort of the same as abusive language. But one of the things we can't do is just go to the dictionary and look up Flatwoods because what constitutes swearing what constitutes offence changes generationally. So things that will be offensive to my parents or my grandparents that might have been about religion don't really bother my generation has much. Whereas things that didn't bother them. A toll which was people's race or sexuality, I personally find unsayable. So just looking them up is really not enough.

MS: Emma thanks so much for joining us today.

EMMA BYRNE: Thanks for having me.

MS: Emma Byrne is a scientist and the author of Swearing is Good for you: The Amazing Science of Bad Language. She was in London England.

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MS: The CBC News is next. Then ten years on after the financial crisis the effects still haunt the U.S. and beyond. We'll revisit the crisis on a grim anniversary and hear from homeowners whose lives have never been the same is Michelle Shephard and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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The financial crisis happened 10 years ago — that's how long it took this man to sell his house

Guests: Lin White, Ryan Dezember

Back To Top »

MS: Hello I'm Michelle Shephard and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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MS: Still to come. Another critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin is in critical condition. Pyotr Verzilov is a Russian Canadian dual citizen. He's also associated with the notorious punk rock activist group Pussy Riot. He's in hospital and is suspected to be the victim of a poison attack. In a half an hour, I'll speak with one of the world's most outspoken critics of the Russian leader and a friend of Pyotr Verzilov, Bill Browder. But first echoes from the crash.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWSCASTER: The Dow traders are standing and watching in amazement..

NEWSCASTER 2: 676 points...

NEWSCASTER 3: The worst day on Wall Street since...

NEWSCASTER 4: Lehman Brothers is going bankrupt and financial markets from Asia to Europe are doing their utmost to prevent Monday from turning from dark to black.

NEWSCASTER 5: Wall Street's worst day since 9/11...

NEWSCASTER 6: New numbers show an increasing number of Wisconsin homeowners are in danger of losing their houses.

NEWSCASTER 7: ...Are Stacking up. When a family moves out Hagues clean out crew is called in by the bank.

NEWSCASTER 8: Ninety nine percent of it is trash but there's still that one percent of stuff that you see, like why would you throw that away?

[Music]

MS: It's been 10 years since the 2008 financial crisis and the dreadful feeling those relentless headlines provoked, a sense that what was happening on Wall Street might take all of us down with it. The collapse of Lehman Brothers one of the biggest U.S. investment banks was 10 years ago tomorrow. The bank was allowed to fail. Markets melted down in its wake and the economy tanked. Critically homes were suddenly worth less, often far less than the mortgages on them. And when interest rates rose people couldn't make the payments. More than 9 million families lost their homes in the following years and a decade later many of those people are still trying to rebuild their lives. Lin and Milo Whyte lost their home in Phoenix Arizona during the crisis. We reached Lin White In Salt Lake City Utah. Hi Lin.

LIN WHITE: Hi, how are you?

MS: good thank you for joining us. Lin take me back to when you first bought your house before the crash. What was that experience like?

LIN WHITE: Oh it was a great experience. We moved to Arizona and we searched the area for you know where the a lot of the best schools would be for our children. They were excited for the new adventure. And we chose a home that would be a good home for us, our family and it was a good feeling. Milo had a very good job. I worked for the school district and it was it was all good.

MS: And then when was it that you first realized that things were taking a turn for the worse?

LIN WHITE: Maybe near 2008. Things started to change like people were getting laid off from their jobs. And it just seemed crazy you know we got an appraisal on our home that said it was like just under five hundred thousand dollars and we were happy that we bought when we did because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to afford to pay that much for our home and the banks were just giving out loans for homes that were that much money.

MS: What was it that you actually bought it for?

LIN WHITE: I believe that we paid 332.

MS: And can you describe what for us what kind of house it was?

LIN WHITE: I would say middle class home for the area. It was about 2700 square feet and we had three of our four kids were living with us. Our oldest daughter was married at the time, and it was a good neighborhood close to the schools.

MS: And you said that you realize that the situation was getting dire as people were losing their jobs and the housing market was going crazy. What was happening for you and Mylo and your family?

LIN WHITE: We felt pretty secure and Milo still had his job. I still had mine. And then not long after Milo got let go. And that was unbelievable for us. You know there was no way that we were going to be able to pay all of our bills or home our car payment. There was no way we were going to be able to make ends meet without that job. And he was able to find another job. But it was not in Arizona as hard as we tried. He searched everywhere and nobody was hiring and we heard of more and more layoffs. So he did find a job. It was in Salt Lake City. So we thought 'okay we're just going to have to relocate. Let's put the house on the market' and he moved to Salt Lake and I stayed there with the kids.

MS: And when you put your house on the market at that time what did you still owe on your mortgage?

LIN WHITE: It was probably still about what we bought it for.

MS: What happened at that stage once my wife had moved away and- was it getting more and more difficult? Just walk me through to the point when as I understand you came home and there was a notice on your door.

LIN WHITE: Yes there was a lot of people were walking away from their homes because they were so underwater or they just quit making their payments they were losing jobs. It was [unintelligible] it was a crisis. So we stopped making the payments so that we could do a short sale on our home. And someone made us a good offer on the home and we were set up to meet at the bank should take care of this. And that evening that being called in this gentleman had lost his job. It started going into foreclosure and when I came home there was a notice from the door. I remember I just you know because we had tried so hard. And I just ripped it off the house and I went in and I just cried.

MS: Lin I'd like to play some audio that you shared with us. This is your daughter Makele. She was in grade 9 when the crash happened. And a few years ago she told the story of the foreclosure from her perspective to a local Phoenix radio station KGZZ. Let's take a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

My dad wrote the song for me when I was 16. But each time you played it I refused to listen. It's curious to think that the economy was the thing that caused my family to lose so much control. We lost three jobs in one house. I made six movies and attended three high schools, all in just two years. And still after all my family had been through the hardest thing of all was losing the time we had together. And our connection to each other. Every day I remind myself the only I am capable of removing the sadness that life brings and I need to find happiness rather than waiting around for it.

[Music]

MS: Lin What goes through your mind when you're listening to this today? You've heard it before but as we're nearing with a 10 year anniversary what are your thoughts as you listen to how it impacted your youngest daughter?

LIN WHITE: You know Makele said it right that thing that we miss the most was the time that we spent together. after we lost our home in Arizona. Milo was working in Oregon because the company in Utah had gone under. So he found a job in Oregon and we went to Oregon. We were doing our best to stay afloat financially and to help our daughter. She was struggling in so many ways. She had slipped into depression. She really wanted to go back to Arizona. And before the end of that year Makele and I loaded up the car with her things and I went back with her to Tucson just long enough to get her settled into a new high school and we moved her in with her two brothers who were going to college there. That was that was really hard. You know she was still in high school. We were just at the beginning of our bankruptcy. Our kids were doing the best that they could. They were all going to school and they were all working jobs to help pay their rent. Makele even though she was in high school, the bankruptcy judge would not allow us to help her in any way financially because she wasn't living under our roof.

MS: What about you and your husband, how has maybe the goalpost changed for you in terms of your retirement and where you see yourself going from here?

LIN WHITE: Well I can tell you that we will not be homeowners again coming out of the bankruptcy. There's been so much damage that occurred over the last five year process. Getting that behind us that our credit has a very long way to go before we can even purchase a new car, let alone a new home. And at our age, you know we just we've come to the realization that at this point in our lives we will never be able to be homeowners again. As far as our journey forward you know in the end our family is still intact. We did not let that destroy us. Our children are all happy and healthy and they have worked so hard to get their selves through college to get their degrees. So hopefully they will have a better future ahead with strong and stable jobs no matter what the economy is like. But as far as Milo and I, well, I hope we continue keeping our good health so that we can still work into our older age and we can still travel this crazy life ahead together.

MS: Well Lin I wish you the best of luck and thank you so much for telling your story this morning.

LIN WHITE: Thank you.

MS: Lin White lost her Phoenix Arizona home ten years ago during the financial crash of 2008. We reached her in Salt Lake City Utah. It may be a decade later but for many the real estate crash of 2008 isn't over. More than two million homes are still worth less than their mortgages. And while many people lost their homes some couldn't or wouldn't walk away. Our next guest bought a small house on Alabama's Gulf Coast in 2005. After the crash, he spent the next decade trying to get rid of it right. Ryan Dezember also happens to be a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and he wrote about his odyssey through the American housing crisis i an essay for that paper he's in New York City. Hi Ryan.

RYAN DEZEMBER: Hi.

MS: So tell us a little bit about your personal experience in buying your home. I read your piece and the way you described it sounded like the stereotypical American dream.

RYAN DEZEMBER: Yes I mean that's what I was doing I think I didn't think about doing that. You know you go to college, you get a degree, you get your job, you get married, you buy a house and you start a family. That's sort of like what my parents and their parents and everyone around me had always done. And it sort of was just ingrained is something we do.

MS: And then what was the first clue that you had that trouble was brewing?

RYAN DEZEMBER: Well I had sort of a unique vantage point where in retrospect maybe I should've seen it coming. I was writing about the boom on Alabama's beaches. I was a newspaper reporter down there and the real estate market was just crazy. I mean you know realtors were like the rock stars in town the towns celebrities. People were making money hand over fist flipping condos and houses that hadn't even been built yet. So I saw a lot of this happening. And yet I didn't really like connect it to my own situation. I bought a pretty modest house, what we'd call a starter house. It was you know in terms of like what I was paying a month it was on par with what I'd pay for an apartment. I didn't at the time connect with the potential for collapse along the beach in the million dollar condos along the Gulf of Mexico to sort of my what I assumed was a pretty well established you know subdivision, and the sort of place that someone like me and my wife would live in.

MS: But then it got really personal in terms of your own [unintelligible]. And I know you wrote about that actually smelling. Describe that, what happened there?

RYAN DEZEMBER: So you know the marriage fell apart and we decided well let's sell the house and we'll move on. And quickly learned that things had changed that we probably bought close to the peak that values were falling, that the foreclosures were mounting. Sort of the first sign that I had was sort of unusual. I started smelling just hot garbage and it was the house next door. And so I went over there to see you know my neighbors or see if I could take their garbage to the curb. And they were gone. No 'for sale' sign, no trace of them. They were gone. They hadn't even bothered to take out the trash. It was like I remember seeing an old half eaten pizza just sitting on the counter through the window and was like 'well that's weird. Where did they go?'

MS: You see your neighbors literally leaving their pizza boxes and fleeing. I'm sure the next door neighbor wasn't the only one who left. You describe many in the area leaving. Were you ever tempted just to do the same just to walk away?

RYAN DEZEMBER: Not really actually you know for a while I lived there so it wasn't a huge burden. It was weird to live in a neighborhood that was slowly emptying. I think over the time that I own the house roughly one in every three homes in the subdivision I lived in were foreclosed. I certainly would have sold it and walked away. But you know I'd sign the papers saying that I pay the money back. No one to tricked me. I knew what I was doing when I bought the house and I certainly felt an obligation to repay it. If I ever strayed from that, there's laws in Alabama and many other states that allow lenders to go after a borrower for the difference between what they can sell the property for and what you know what they owe. And as the crash sort of overwhelm the system my value kept falling lower and lower to the point where in some years after the crash - when most people think of the crash happening - I would have been on the hook for 60-70 thousand dollars.

MS: And how many years did you stay in the house, and as you were there, what were you seeing around you happened to your neighbors and others who were still there?

RYAN DEZEMBER: So that part of Alabama was particularly hard hit. In addition to being sort of a frenzied market, you know it went up the higher you go the farther you can fall. The economy was really down there based on two things. It was based on building homes and condos and construction and of course of that halted as soon as the housing crisis happened. And then the other main component of the economy is tourism and it just so happened that the BP oil spill a lot of the oil from that disaster washed up there. And it sort of shut down the tourism season one year. You know when people lose a reason to get up in the morning a lot of bad things happen when the rate rents go to cut rate. Opioids became a huge thing in my neighborhood and all over. I mean I saw people- I would go out to get the paper in the morning and neighbors would already be you know drinking beer. One neighbor overdosed in the middle of the day was wheeled out you know in a body bag as the school bus was dropping off the kids for the afternoon. I had to interrupt an interview with a source, I worked in a home office, and I had to interrupt the interview to go break up a fight. Two guys were fighting using the decorative stones in my garden and chasing each other around over a dispute about some soured pill sale. And so that was sort of depressing to see just you know sort of the neighborhood which I had bought and thought of like is a good place to sort of settle down and start a family. Probably not stay there forever but get things started and to see it just sort of disintegrate into a really bad situation.

MS: And I understand you left for work. You went out of state for work and then rented your house after that.

RYAN DEZEMBER: So I you know as it happened one of the jobs you could keep through the crash was writing about the crash. So I eventually - the paper that I worked for - the Mobile Register was suffering financially like a lot of newspapers in that time. And so I just sort of moved on with my career I took a job at The Wall Street Journal, agreed to move to Texas to read about oil companies. And I wasn't gonna be able to sell the house. It was way underwater which means I owed a lot more on my mortgage than I could sell it for. So I had to become a landlord. I moved away.

MS: And all this time you are sending these monthly payments to the bank in Alabama and you're watching what's happened with other people in terms of how they're moving on from the crash. Describe how you felt about that. Was there any point where you felt a little bit angry about the path you chose?

RYAN DEZEMBER: I think what really sort of got me was when I started reading stories say you know a few years ago seven years after the peak of the housing crash or something like that. And you know you start reading. All of these buyers are coming to market. There are people who were foreclosed on who walked away from homes who had you know this marred credit. You know after a certain number of years that sort of goes away and they're able to qualify for a mortgage again. So I'm reading about this new cohort of buyers who are suddenly able to buy homes again. And I'm sitting there thinking 'Well so the people that walked away can buy a house and here I am still trying to pay for the one I own next to the people who walked away.' How did sort of doing the right thing punish you more in certain ways? I mean I wouldn't say that I suffered more than people who lost their homes, of course it wasn't like that. It was just money. But I think that was sort of one of the baffling things that came out of this where you still have millions of people who maybe can't refinance their homes, take advantage of interest rates, that can't move their families to better schools or into bigger houses or maybe they didn't take a job somewhere else because they couldn't sell their house. And you still get people stuck like that and they're basically punished for sort of sticking to it and doing what they were supposed to do which is to pay the note off.

MS: Right. And I mean some people didn't have a choice.

RYAN DEZEMBER: Yeah I wouldn't compare it to suffering with people who suddenly were living in a van in a church parking lot. They were swindled or whatever but it was sort of this sort of you know untold perspective of the housing crash where you know we see you know whatever millions of people were foreclosed. It doesn't stop there. There's all the other people who were tied into it who have sort of more quietly and certainly less traumatically suffered the consequences.

MS: And you eventually did manage to sell your house last year, was it?

RYAN DEZEMBER: Last year. Yes.

MS: And what was that like.

RYAN DEZEMBER: It was interesting I had become so accustomed to just sending off these checks and losing some amount of money. So a good month I would lose a couple of hundred dollars in a bad month when there were repairs or the tenants didn't pay. Could you know the losses could have a comma in them? So it was great to relieve that financial burden but also it sort of sad. I remember going down to Alabama I took a week off work and drove down there to fix up the house. And I knew I was going to sell it for less than I had paid. I knew I was going to cement a pretty phenomenal loss given the price of the house. But I was you know in the backyard just given the house one last look and I'd bought the house with like such hope and good feeling and to have it turned into this sort of this weight and this burden. It was sort of sad. It was unusual to have you know a sentimental feelings about something that caused so much pain.

MS: Yes absolutely especially in your scenario. But it is funny how a home such a tangible thing can become so emotional. In terms of the hard cold cash, how much did you end up losing in the end do you think?

RYAN DEZEMBER: You know I never figured it out down to the penny. But based on you know the difference between what I sold the house for and what I had paid for it which was 20 some thousand dollars. And then I sort of did a back of the envelope based on my profit and loss each month from renting. And I got to about sixty thousand dollars and sort of stopped trying to think about it, on a house that I only paid one hundred thirty seven thousand dollars for. That's pretty tremendous.

MS: Do you think that this crash has generally changed the idea of homeownership in America?

RYAN DEZEMBER: I think it has. I think when I talk to people my age or younger. It's the first sort of group of Americans that at least in recent modern times that consider homeownership to be a risky proposition, that look at it not as such a sure thing they know that prices can go down and go down a lot. Home homeownership is powerful. There's a powerful draw. And it's you know [unintelligible]. It's the way that most Americans you know build their nest eggs. Americans by nature are not great savers and a mortgage and a house is sort of the way that a lot of people in previous generations did save. They did it sort of unconsciously by sending monthly payments and building their equity in their home, and the home equity slowly rose. And that's sort of a powerful thing. And it's you know ingrained in many Americans that sort of home ownership is one of these sort of critical components of the American dream.

MS: In terms from the bankers and the financial system perspective from your reporting what insights has that given you and how they're approaching the housing market now?

RYAN DEZEMBER: One of the big sort of changes that the financial crisis or the housing crisis has brought is we've seen the emergence of an institutional landlord. Big Wall Street firms buying houses by the thousands, tens of thousands, and renting them. And these are nice houses. These are houses in good school districts houses you know fit for a family. You know they're the sort of places that people would buy traditionally. And Wall Street bet tens of billions of dollars that the financial crisis was so scarring that there will be people that will choose to rent even though they have the money to buy. And I think that is sort of symbolizes the big shift from the housing crash.

MS: In so many ways the story that you've told, the journey of your house, has mirrored the themes of American society in the last 10 years; the crash, the rise in unemployment. You talked about the opioid use. What do you take away personally from this journey through the housing crisis? Has it affected your faith in people? Or what are some of your takeaway lessons?

RYAN DEZEMBER: I don't know that it's really shaken my faith in the American way or anything like that. But the question that has come is 'is homeownership necessary for the American dream?' And then sort of a follow on as if we're not going to be owning homes and building equity, how will a vast majority of Americans save for their later years?

MS: Ryan thanks so much for joining us today and I hope you continue to report on these issues as well.

RYAN DEZEMBER: Thank you very much.

MS: Ryan Dezember is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. We reached him in New York City.

[Music: Theme].

MS: Coming up the latest critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin to become the victim of a suspected poison attack as a dual Russian citizen. The case of Pyotr Verzilov artist, activist and Pussy Riot member in our next half hour. I'm Michelle Shepherd. And you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

Allegedly poisoned Russian activist's life could depend on Canada's response: Browder

Guests: Bill Browder, Amy Knight

MS: I'm Michelle Shephard and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. While Hurricane Florence pounds the Carolinas Puerto Ricans are still cleaning up, one year after the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria. Even though U.S. President Donald Trump might be calling into question the death toll there is no doubt about the loss of life, of homes, of livelihoods. CBC reporter Ioanna Roumeliotis visited Naguabo recently. I mean especially on the East Coast of the island. It's an area where most of the power is back but blackouts are still a regular occurrence and some people are living under tarps waiting for help to rebuild. Experts say one of the biggest obstacles to getting back to life as usual may be mental health issues. Dr. John Velazquez was the only doctor in the region for days after the hurricane hit one year ago. Now his hospital has opened a special unit just to deal with the mental health issues of the people in the region.

SOUNDCLIP

Increasing depression. They say "Doctor, I don't Want to live like this. This is terrible for me. I need to move. I don't know where I'm going. My family wants to go to the stable for do that, I don't know English. I don't have education". Most of the people are very poor people. People with low education. So they feel comfort. They feel that somebody help them to prevent suicide. That's the most [unintelligible] event for that kind of people.

MS: On Monday the CBC's Ioanna Roumeliotis will join Anna Maria Tremonti to talk about the emotional health of the people of Puerto Rico, one year after Hurricane Maria. And now to Russia.

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We are going to have [unintelligible] now, I'm afraid, as you can see.

MS: That interruption in the World Cup final in Moscow this summer was caused by four protesters dressed up as police who stormed onto the field and started high fiving players. Police officers they were not. The four were members of the notorious Russian punk activist group Pussy Riot protesting against police brutality in Russia. And one of them was Pyotr Verzilov a Russian Canadian dual citizen. Video emerged online after police arrested him for the World Cup stunt. We've translated it here.

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OFFICER: What's wrong with your kids?

PROTESTOR: There is nothing wrong with us.

OFFICER: Where did you get the uniform?

PROTESTOR: We rented them.

OFFICER: You rented them? Sometimes I regret that it isn't still 1937, just sometimes. You took a dump on Russia, yes?

PROTESTOR: We did not take a dump on Russia. We have no goal. On the contrary were for Russia.

MS: Today, Pyotr Verzilov is in critical condition in hospital. He mysteriously fell ill on Tuesday after attending the trial of a fellow Pussy Riot member and relatives say they believe he was poisoned. His partner Pussy Riot member, Veronika Nikulshina, told the website Medusa that he’s losing his sight, speech and ability to walk. Many are placing the blame on the Russian government. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Russia has been accused of poisoning people who said things it didn't like yesterday. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to the situation.

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We are certainly very engaged with this situation. It is of concern obviously particularly given that given the actions of a recent months by the Russians in the UK. So we arecertainly taking this very seriously and working with the individual. But it is too early to draw any conclusions about what has happened or how it has happened. We just know that there was a Canadian who is in the hospital that we need to make sure we're getting support to.

MS: Earlier this month the UK charged two Russian nationals for the attempted murder of a former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. British prosecutors said the pair poisoned Skripals with a Russian nerve agent Novichok in March in the English city of Salisbury. Yesterday the two accused men did an interview with Russian state TV channel Russia Today. Here's what they said about why they were in Salisbury that day.

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VOICE 1: Our friends had been suggesting for a long time that we visit this wonderful town.

VOICE 2: Salisbury? A wonderful town?

VOICE 3: Yes. There's the famous Salisbury Cathedral famous not only in Europe but in the whole world. It's famous for its 123 metre spire, is famous for its clock the one of the first ever created in the world. It's still working.

MS: Bill Browder is watching all of this unfold with a particular interest he knows Pyotr Verzilov and he knows what it's like to take on Vladimir Putin. The hedge fund manager was once one of the biggest foreign investors in Russia but after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was found dead in a Moscow prison Mr. Browder hit back. The result was the Magnitsky Act which imposes sanctions on top of Russian officials accused of corruption and human rights abuses. Mr. Browder's Campaigning has turned the act into law in Canada, the U.S. and four other countries. But it's also put him in the crosshairs of Moscow. Bill Browder joins us from London. Hi Bill.

BIL BROWDER: Hi there.

MS: First off what's the latest you're hearing about Pyotr Verzilov and his condition?

BIL BROWDER: Well he's in intensive care. He has been sedated. He apparently lost his ability to see and talk and walk on Tuesday night. His family is 100 percent convinced that he's been poisoned. Various experts that are speculating on the situation suggested that those symptoms would be consistent with neurotoxins. And most importantly in a situation in a situation like this, if it was happening in another country, we would say well let's wait to find out who did it and what happened etc. But given that Russia has such a long history of poisoning and killing its enemies, I think that the first assumption we should make here is that this was a state sponsored attack on another enemy using poison to try to silence him.

MS: And you know him personally and the other members of Pussy Riot, is that right?

BIL BROWDER: I indeed know them well. I know Pyotr and Nadya and Masha who were the were the two brave activists that that ended up going to jail for doing a demonstration in a church a few years back. And I took them all to Washington to Congress to lobby to have more names added to the Magnitsky list of people of police and other officials were involved in brutality and human rights abuses. And they've been on the same side as the bearer of the barricades as I have and we've worked together and I just received a note from Nadya his wife asking for help and specifically asking for help from the Canadian government. This is a situation where they are completely outmanned and outgunned by the Russian authorities. And in this situation because Pyotr is a Canadian citizen they could use the help that some Prime Minister Trudeau has offered, but it shouldn't just be words, it should be real concrete actions and support from the Canadian government including medical support, toxicology support and other such things.

MS: In addition to the medical support, what else do you think that the Canadian government could or should do in this case?

BIL BROWDER: Well the main thing that the Canadian government should and could do is is demonstrate very clearly to the Russian government that this is a Canadian citizen and whatever his fate is will have real and meaningful effects on the Canadian Russian relationship. He's in critical condition. Things could go either way. The efforts that the Russian authorities and the medical authorities put into his life and his well-being could be determined by the the the behavior of the Canadian government. And so the Canadian government for one of its citizens should do everything possible including communicating to the Russian government that this is something of grave interest to the Canadian government and Canadian public.

MS: Do you know, or have you heard from his family, whether or not they're restricting visitors to him or if anybody has actually seen him in hospital?

BIL BROWDER: Well we know that they have seen him in hospital but at the initial stages of this whole ordeal they were denying his mother access to him and various other people. I believe that that's been resolved. But this is not the first time that somebody I know has been in a situation like this. There's another very brave activist named Vladimir Kara-Murza who is an opposition activist who is the protege of a man named Boris Nemtsov, a politician named Boris Nemtsov who had been assassinated. And Vladimir who is a close friend of mine and had been to Canada with me lobbying for the Magnitsky Act collapsed in Moscow in 2015 in a similar set of circumstances. And he collapsed and went into critical condition. He went into a coma. He was in a coma for a number of weeks. He had been poisoned and thankfully - and his doctors said he had a five percent chance of survival - and miraculously thankfully he pulled out and he's now still with us. But I can remember all of the crazy protocols of the hospital not allowing his family to do toxicology tests. I can remember all the public statements coming out claiming that he had overdosed on allergy medicines and all sorts of other nonsense. And now that he's back with us and fully part of the movement he has refuted all that stuff and it's clear that that the Russian government will do all sorts of terrible things to these types of people and then lie about it afterwards.

MS: These cases must make you worry about your own safety being such an outspoken critic.

BIL BROWDER: Well I mean I've been threatened with death. I've been threatened with kidnapping. They've tried, the Russian government has tried seven times to have me put on the Interpol most wanted list. One of the last time was right after Canada passed the Magnitsky Act, the Russians then announced like literally a day later that they were putting me on the Interpol most wanted list and it created all sorts of troubles until Interpol finally withdrew that from their list. But yes I'm in danger. It doesn't change my behavior. I'm continuing to speak out to get justice for my murdered lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and to get justice for other victims of Russia. But yes I mean when you're fighting evil, evil fights back.

MS: Bill what did you make of the TV appearance of the two suspects? We heard a little clip of that.

BIL BROWDER: Well basically what I what I make of it is that it's sort of brazen behavior on Vladimir Putin's part rubbing in our face, in the West's face, this absurd response to a clear documentary law enforcement evidence that these two individuals were responsible for a horrific chemical weapons attack, which left one dead and three badly injured in the United Kingdom. And this nonsense of these guys claiming to have come over and gone to Salisbury for two different days and staying in a dive hotel in east London where they found traces of Novichok. It's just it's laughable the way in which they went about it. But the purpose of this was in a certain way for Putin to say I don't care how much evidence you have I'm going to say whatever I want to say. We're going to come up with a totally implausible story and there's nothing you can do about it. And that's sort of his message to us which is essentially a challenge I think to the UK and other governments to say well actually no that's not right, that there will be consequences and if we can't get these guys we're going to go after you Vladimir Putin and all of your cronies including the oligarchs by going after their money in the West.

MS: Bill, really appreciate you coming on today. Thanks so much.

BIL BROWDER: Thank you.

MS: Bill Browder is CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and the author of Red Notice. We reached him in London England. As Bill Browder mentioned Vladimir Kara-Murza knows firsthand what it's like to be targeted for his politics. The Russian dissident survived being poisoned twice. He spoke to Anna Maria Tremonti this past February.

SOUNDCLIP

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Tell me about the first time you were poisoned. What happened?

KARA-MUZA: I was at a work meeting. I was in Moscow in May of 2015 and suddenly I began to feel very very sick for no apparent reason. And within the space of you know under an hour I went from. Feeling completely normal like I am now to basically being incapacitated. You know my heart started racing. I suddenly had difficulty breathing, began to vomit sweat and basically within a couple of days all of my major body organs shut down in a cascade one after another. Multiple organ failure the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the heart, everything. I was in a coma, on artificial Life Support you know hooked up to cables and machines. I was in a coma for about a month. Then it took me more than a year to more or less recover. I mean I had to learn to walk again. And then in February of 2017, so exactly one year ago, this happened all over again in exactly the same way the same symptoms same diagnosis.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The same feeling.

KARA-MUZA: Absolutely. I woke up in the middle of the night not being able to breathe. And this is I have to tell you this is really frightening as well as painful.

MS: Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza telling Anna Maria last February about surviving being poisoned twice. Amy Knight is a U.S. based historian who has been researching Russia and the Soviet Union for years. Her latest book is called Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder. She joins us from Glen Spey New York. Hi Amy.

AMY KNIGHT: Hi.

KARA-MUZA: We're still waiting for more details on the suspected poisoning of Verzilov but what is your read of the situation?

AMY KNIGHT: Well I would I would tend to agree with Bill Browder that normally we wouldn't, in a western democracy, we wouldn't jump to any conclusions about poisoning if something occurred to an outspoken critic of the government. But given that this is Russia, I think Pyotr Verzilov, there's a very good likelihood that he was poisoned.

MS: And we just heard a clip there of Kara-Murza discard describing what it's like to be poisoned. You've been writing about Russia for years and I asked this of Bill as well. Do you think you've ever been targeted? It must be very unnerving in your line of work.

AMY KNIGHT: Well you know it's interesting because my last book that you mentioned I basically chronicle the various political murders that have taken place over the years since Mr. Putin came to power. And I raised a lot of questions about Kremlin involvement. People have asked me and I've been quite outspoken in my writings in [unintelligible] in criticizing Putin and the Kremlin. So I have been asked if I ever thought I felt threatened and my response has always been I'm just a small fish compared to some of these you know more prominent Putin critics. But recently I have looked back on an incident the last time that I was in Moscow in 2008. I got really really sick the last day I was there and it took me a long time to get better. I have always thought well with food poisoning in the hotel but now I look back and I wonder because I've been doing all sorts of interviews with people that maybe weren't viewed favorably upon by the Kremlin. I've often wondered if perhaps that wasn't just simple food poisoning.

MS: Can you give us a bit of a sense of the larger picture of poisonings. How long has this been a tool of the security services in Russia? How long has been poisoned been used as a tool for the security services in Russia?

AMY KNIGHT: Oh my goodness. Well it dates way back to the Stalin period and this has been well documented by people who actually were participants in these efforts. There was a poison lab set up by the OGPU the first Soviet secret police and it operated through out of the Stalin era and the Soviet era. And probably it operates now and in these laboratories these special poisons like Novichok, the poison used against the Skripals in the UK and Polonium 210, that was used against Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. These are poisons and that are developed by the Russian state.

MS: It's such a unique tool that's been used by the Russians. Why do you think that they use poison as opposed to other methods to try to silence their opponents?

AMY KNIGHT: Well as we know the Kremlin has an array of different possible weapons against critics that's at its disposal. And they, as I point out in my book, sometimes hired killers shoot critics and dissidents. This has happened before. But poison is also a very effective means of sending messages and eliminating Kremlin critics because it can be done and then whoever perpetrated this poisoning can quickly escape and it takes a while sometimes for them for the authorities to track down these people. Now that's basically what happened in both of the U.K. most famous poisonings that I've just mentioned. So now in this case with the Skripals of course the two men have been tracked down thanks to the thanks to the work of British authorities. But whether or not they'll be actually charged and directly implicated is another question.

MS: I asked Bill this question as well but the appearance on TV, to a Western audience it seems so clearly to be almost satire. What did you make of that and why bother? What's the message that they're sending in doing that?

AMY KNIGHT: Well I I definitely agree that it was very puzzling that these two gentlemen appeared on ART. And in fact Margarita Simonyan who was the woman who interviewed them, she later had had a brief spoke out about it. And I think it was quite clear that it was very confusing even for her. Now why these gentlemen turned up, I guess the Russian government is planning on somehow exonerating them and they realize that because they had been shown on CTV that that and their names had been revealed, obviously the Russian government had to respond in some way. But I think it's a pretty pathetic effort and I think the Kremlin is really getting itself embroiled in a complete fiasco.

MS: Now I don't know if it's a coincidence that the most recent cases have been in the UK but it does seem that we hear about more cases there. Do you think critics of the Russian government are safer say in the U.S. than they are in the UK?

AMY KNIGHT: Well it's interesting that you ask that question because yesterday the New York Times had a story that chronicled the FBI concerns about Russian defectors that are living in the U.S. And apparently an unnamed Russian, I should say informants to that to the or the FBI, was living under an assumed name in Florida and the FBI had reason to believe that his life was threatened by Russian hitmen. So I think that thus far the United States has not been the scene of the kind of murders and attempted murders that we've seen in the U.K., but clearly American authorities in particular the FBI consider this a possible threat against the numerous Russians that are living in the United States now and are being protected by U.S. authorities.

MS: And what could the U.S. or the international community in general do in response to these threats? What could they do? What should they do in your opinion?

AMY KNIGHT: Well there's sort of a two track way of approaching this. First of all they can have sent clear messages to the Russian government via their diplomats that this can't go on any further and that there will be more repercussions. And then Western governments can do what they've been doing which is to publicly denounce these Russian actions. Then of course there's economic sanctions. And I think at some point the Kremlin is going to get the message that despite how satisfying it may be for President Putin to lash out against his enemies, it really isn't serving the Kremlin well to have this done.

MS: What will you be watching for now in the Verzilov case?

AMY KNIGHT: Of course I'll be along with everyone else very concerned that he starts to improve. It sounds to me, and of course I'm only going on what I've read and heard, that there was some sort of a of a nerve agent that was involved. I'm hoping that the authorities and the hospital will allow outside observers. And I would expect that at some point since he is a Canadian citizen, as well as a Russian citizen, that the Canadian government would be allowed some sort of input into this. So we can only now hope and pray that this courageous young man gets better.

MS: Thanks for joining me today Amy.

AMY KNIGHT: Thank you for having me.

MS: Amy Knight is the author of Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder. We reached her in Glen Spey New York. And that's our program for today. Stay tuned for Radio One for Q. Musician Steven Page formerly of the Barenaked Ladies is on the show with his new solo album. And remember you can always take The Current with you on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Finally today after a conversation with the suspected poisoning of Pyotr Verzilov, let's end things off with some music from Pussy Riot. This is the group with their song Make America Great Again. I'm Michelle Shephard and thank you for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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[Song: Make America Great Again]

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Friday September 14, 2018 Full Transcript

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