The Current from CBC Radio (Highlights)

With the legalization of recreational marijuana months away, Indigenous leaders are split over whether this new law should be embraced as an economic opportunity or be concerned over the potential health implications it could have on communities.

Can politics maintain a civil tone when disenfranchised people feel their lives are on the line? And is it fair to ask people who feel that way to be patient?

Switzerland has banned boiling lobsters alive, is it time to show these creatures we care about their feelings - even if many scientists argue they don't have any?

A bill to ban keeping whales and dolphins in captivity has been under consideration since December 2015, leaving animal rights activists frustrated by the long delays. But one Senator cites expert testimony that suggests animals in amusement parks are not suffering.

Harry Leslie Smith says he's seen humanity at its best - and worst. The Second World War veteran has lived through poverty and the Great Depression and warns a younger generation to heed his message: Don't let my past be your future.

When Dr. Claire Karekezi returns to her native Rwanda next month after training in Canada. She will be one of only five neurosurgeons - and the only woman - serving a population of 12 million people.

The bill omits convictions from bathhouse raids, which critics of the bill say targeted gay men even if the charges themselves were not specific to sexual identity.

In 2014, Burlington, Ont. was hit with a so-called "weather bomb" leaving many with flooded basements. But it also kicked off city-wide efforts to adapt to the new reality of disruptive weather events.

Before anesthesia, there were stories of people preferring death to surgery; of hopping off operating tables and running. But are we truly fully unaware? Or does a part of us retain some memory of what happens when we're under?

Barred owls are being culled in large numbers in the Pacific Northwest, in an effort to save their close cousins, the endangered spotted owl. Is it fair to kill one species to save another? conservationists disagree, but it's a question that will become more pertinent as climate change forces animals to migrate.

Dr. Catherine Cook has served Indigenous communities for more than three decades. Her work has recently been honoured with the Dr. Thomas Dignan Indigenous Health Award.

Images of young children in cages have shocked the world this week, as a zero-tolerance immigration policy saw families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Current's Julie Crysler was in McAllen, Texas, meeting people on both sides of the immigration debate.

Singer and technologist Taryn Southern has just done something no musician has ever done before: released an album composed with artificial intelligence. Critics argue it's not really music if a human isn't composing it.

Forensic ornithologist Pepper Trail has been investigating the apparent rise in a black-market trade for chuparosas: love charms made with the bodies of dead hummingbirds that appear to be growing in popularity in Hispanic-American communities.

Both Canada and the U.S. have a long history of removing children from the care of their parents, and one historian says the rhetoric in use today is the same as during the time of slavery.