If You're Listening

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln have spent more than 250 consecutive days at sea without a single port call, a new US Navy record. Leaked photos show broken toilets and meals of mystery mush, the result of being trapped on the wrong side of Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But the real story is much bigger. 

The Navy's next-generation carriers were built around untested electromagnetic catapults that took over a deca...

Earlier this year, we took a deep dive into the seedy underbelly of the scam centres of Cambodia and Myanmar. And there was one story that our producer, Pat Sunderland, uncovered that we couldn't really fit in. It's the story of a beloved mayor whose fall from grace changed the political landscape of the Philippines.

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The Secret Service was created to hunt counterfeit money, and only started guarding presidents after three assassinations forced Congress's hand in 1901. More than a century later, agents still split their careers between protecting the President and investigating fake twenties. The agency is understaffed by over 20 percent, and burnt-out staff are hitting mandated overtime pay caps by the thousands. 

It's already led to scanda...

New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan has spent more than a decade covering Donald Trump, and he says nothing compares to this term. His new book, Regime Change, co-written with Maggie Haberman, argues Trump's second presidency is being run unlike any other in living memory: driven by gut instinct over briefings, staffed by loyalists chosen for devotion rather than experience, and designed to move faster than Congress, the courts o...

Last month Ukrainian drones struck an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea, the first direct link between the wars in Ukraine and Iran, and proof of a secret arms pipeline between Moscow and Tehran. The strike came amid an extraordinary shift inside MAGA world. 

Pro-Trump influencer Laura Loomer, who once called Zelenskyy an authoritarian and said Ukraine needed to be "denazified", has spent months touring Kyiv and doing friendly in...

Last month, a new AI model from OpenAI made headlines when it hacked into another AI company's servers during testing. Nobody asked the AI to hack anything. It just decided that was the fastest way to get the answers it needed.

Now the ABC's national AI reporter Cam Wilson has uncovered the first case of an autonomous AI hack here in Australia. Cam joins Matt to explain what happened, and who's responsible when an AI agent breaks th...

Nigel Farage has some…strange revenue streams. The leader of Reform UK has been paid about £700,000 to front ads for a gold bullion company. His fixer, Posh George, once advertised money laundering on the dark web and served time in a US prison. His biggest Brexit donor Arron Banks claimed his fortune came from South African diamond mines that, when reporters checked, weren't actually operating. Now Farage's newest back...

In 1995, 80-year-old British comedian Norman Wisdom stepped off the plane in Albania for the first time, to a crowd of cheering fans. Over four days he was swarmed in the streets, men came up to kiss him, and he met the president. Today, producer Adair Sheppard tells Matt the story how Wisdom became one of the most famous people in Albania without knowing it.

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Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump found what they call an untouched private island while swimming off a friend's superyacht near Albania. But it wasn't quite as private as they thought… turns out it’s actually a regular day-trip spot for locals. Despite that, the pair now want to build a luxury resort there along a protected coastal lagoon that's a key nesting site for migrating flamingoes, and Albania's government has fa...

There's a Polymarket account called Magamyman that's terrible at picking elections, but it's made $800,000 betting on exactly when the US would strike Iran, cashing in within minutes of the bombs actually falling… and it’s not alone. Donald Trump's own teleprompter operator is under investigation for betting on his boss's speeches, and a US soldier allegedly bet on capturing Nicolas Maduro days before doing it him...

We've been looking into the remarkable amount of money Donald Trump is making in his second term, so today Matt is sitting down with a man who asked the president about it directly. ABC's Americas editor John Lyons takes Matt behind the scenes of the exchange that made headlines, revealing what it takes to ask the most powerful man in the world a question.

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In 2020, Secret Service agents rushed Donald Trump to the White House bunker as protests raged outside. Trump was down on his luck…the media nicknamed him “Bunker Boy” and he had a measly $92 million in the bank. 

Fast forward to his second term, and financial disclosures show he made more than $2.2 billion in a single year. The man who once dismissed crypto as a scam found his fortune transformed by meme coi...

President Trump promised he'd negotiate a better nuclear deal with Iran than the one struck under Barack Obama, which he's described as "the worst deal ever negotiated." But after another Trump-brokered ceasefire appears to have broken down, that looks increasingly unlikely.

So what did it take to get the 2015 deal over the line? Matt sits down with former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, one of its lead negotiators, to talk about ...

Presidents have always left their mark on the White House. Harry Truman rebuilt it from the inside out. John F. Kennedy restored its elegance. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels… then Ronald Reagan removed them. By that standard, Donald Trump's plan to build a grand ballroom isn't all that unusual. In fact, it's something he's talked about for years. The real story isn't the renovation; it's the reaction.

After years of fuel...

In last Thursday's episode, we talked about one of the most sophisticated intelligence operations in recent history, when Israel planted bombs in thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah.

But it wasn't the first time something like this has happened. Today, Matt and Kara trace the long history of people accidentally spying on themselves: from the CIA's best-selling encryption machines, bought by governments around th...

Israel's campaign against Hezbollah began with one of the boldest intelligence operations in recent memory. The pager attacks devastated the group's leadership, and Benjamin Netanyahu declared Hezbollah had been crushed. But eliminating a leader is one thing, defeating an ideology is another.

In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is woven into daily life. After decades of conflict and a weak central government, it provides schools, healthc...

Last Thursday's episode touched on the relatively short-lived, Israel-backed microstate of Free Lebanon. For Matt, that's all the excuse he needs to tell the story of his favourite ever micronation: the Principality of Sealand. Especially because, when he mentioned Sealand in an episode last year, so many of you wrote in to say you shared his enthusiasm.

So here we finally are. Today, Matt is telling producer Adair the story of the ...

Donald Trump wants a historic deal with Iran. The problem is that some of the biggest obstacles aren't in Tehran or Washington. They're on the border between Israel and Lebanon. 

In this two-part special, we trace the conflict that keeps dragging the region back into crisis. From Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the creation of a security zone in the south, to the rise of Hezbollah and years of cross-border fighting, this front...