Front Burner

What is the point of Hollywood? There are two obvious answers, right? To make good stuff that entertains people. And to make money for the big studios and the people who work for them.

Those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive. But Daniel Bessner believes increasingly they have been.

Bessner spent a year working on a deep dive into how Hollywood has evolved for Harper's Magazine. Bessner is also a historian, writer, and host of the podcast "American Prestige".

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Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Lubna Al Rayyes, was in the third trimester of a high risk pregnancy when the war in Gaza started. She was frightened of what that meant for her and her baby. How do you plan for your delivery, when you’re living with airstrikes and having to uproot your life? 

That’s when she connected with reporter Gabrielle Berbey, who documented Lubna’s journey…from attempting to get medical care in a warzone, to trying to make her way to Canada, where she has family. Gabrielle’s reporting is featured in the most recent episode of the critically-acclaimed podcast Reveal, from the Centre of Investigative Reporting.

If you're pregnant but not sure who the father of your baby is, you might turn to a DNA testing company for a prenatal paternity test for some certainty — a company like Viaguard Accu-Metrics, based in the Toronto area. But for years, Viaguard was selling tests that sometimes identified the wrong fathers — and the company's owner knew.

CBC investigative reporter Jorge Barrera walks us through his team's investigation into the company, and some of the expectant parents whose lives were upended by incorrect paternity test results.

Today, the government unveiled their federal budget. And they are spending big on housing.

They pledged billions of dollars for low-cost loans to increase rental construction, 30-year mortgages for first-time home buyers, and programs to spur non-profit housing.

All in all, they’re promising to build 3.87 million homes by 2031.

But will it fix the affordability crisis? We ask Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Minister Sean Fraser.

On Saturday night, Iran launched its first-ever direct attack into Israel, firing off some 300 drones and missiles. While Israel says it intercepted some 99 per cent of them, shrapnel from one drone hit a seven-year-old girl, who as of this writing is in critical condition. 

Iran’s attack follows a major escalation by Israel earlier this month, when a strike at Iran’s consulate in Syria killed 16 people, including a top commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Today, the Guardian’s Julian Borger joins us to explain how these latest events have ratcheted up a long-simmering shadow war between the two powers — and the risk that they could bring the region into a much broader, and even more dangerous, conflict.