Late Night Live - Separate Stories Podcast

There are grave fears that a decaying oil tanker off the coast of Yemen could result in one of history's most disastrous oil spills, and exacerbate the world's worst humanitarian crisis. A small window of opportunity has opened for a U.N. mission to avert the crisis, but whether it can be pulled off will come down to global political will.

PM Boris Johnson is threatening to rewrite the Northern Ireland protocol which kept open borders between Northern Ireland and Ireland. Any unilateral change to the protocol would threaten the Brexit agreement with the EU. Recent elections in Northern Ireland have shown that the majority support the protocol. So is this another political diversion?

As the war drew to a close in Europe, American scientific intelligence officers were looking for weapons - rockets, biological and chemical weapons that they would take back to America. But they were also looking for the scientists and engineers that had overseen their design and construction, so they could offer them a new life in America where they would share their knowledge and secrets in return for wiping their record of atrocities clean. It was called Operation Paperclip. Author Kelly Rimmer has fictionalised the account of one German scientist and his family in a new book.

The politics being played out in the various coal electorates has received surprisingly little attention in this election campaign. But investigative journalist Marian Wilkinson has been on the ground in the NSW Hunter region, listening to what voters are being told and promised. She says it's a different story there and in some QLD seats, compared to the messaging for city voters.

The United States is reeling after a racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York and the fallout from the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v Wade continues.

Journalist and media diversity advocate Antoinette Lattouf thinks that Australia needs to find new ways to talk about racism - not only about the structural racism that works against immigrants of colour and the First Nations population of Australia, but also how to deal with casual and overt racism on a day to day basis.

Australia is facing an extinction crisis, yet the environment has been almost completely absent from debates during the election campaign. What pledges and policies have the major parties announced when it comes to biodiversity and conservation, and what do those working in the field want the next federal government to prioritise?

Laura Tingle and Niki Savva analyse the final weeks of the campaign including the new housing policy from the Coalition and the pitch from Prime Minister Morrison that he is no longer a bulldozer. And has Anthony Albanese has done enough to recover from his early campaign jitters to give voters a convincing alternative.

As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi navigates the country's delicate relationship with China, and defends India's position of neutrality on the Russia/Ukraine war, the country's position in the world is more important than ever. Author John Zubrzycki has looked to the past to understand the politics of the present in India.

You might think surgery is a fairly modern phenomenon, but in the Stone Age cavemen performed neurosurgery and their patients lived to tell the tale! Ancients Egyptians, Greeks and Romans picked up the mantle of surgery before it was thrust into the hands of barbers. It's since come leaps and bounds, but the development of robotics has placed surgery at another crossroads.

Conservation technologist Topher White is re-purposing old mobile phones to defend the world’s rainforests from illegal logging and to monitor the sounds of important species of birds and animals.

Sarah Collard reports on her week on the campaign bus with Scott Morrison and the issues that Indigenous Australians would have liked to see on the front pages. She also profiles some of the Indigenous candidates that are running this election across the nation and the political divide.

Tania de Jong tells the incredible story of the renowned Austrian/Australian sculptor Karl Duldig, his artist/inventor wife, Slawa Horowitz-Duldig and their escape from the holocaust in a new musical called Driftwood.

Irish artists of every kind - performers, writers, sculptors, musicians, the lot - are nervously waiting to hear if they will be among the 2000 people to be allocated a Basic Income for three years. The Irish Government has announced this pilot program for artists impacted by the pandemic – billed as a New Deal, and a once in a lifetime policy intervention.  Could we, and would we, do it in Australia? Or is Ireland, where culture is so embedded in identity, a unique case.

Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward were mid-twenties climate activists when they turned their skill at organising social movements into a political campaign that led them to turn the heart of red rural America blue. Now they've written a tough-led letter to the Democratic Party and provided a roadmap for other progressive politicians to connect with rural voters.

Housing has entered the election debates, with each major party making different promises. But what do the experts say about how far these proposals might go to address the affordability crisis, in both house prices and rents, hitting hundreds of thousands of Australians? Two experts discuss the election pledges and float their own possible solutions.

In the third and final part of this series drawing on themes discussed in Satyajit Das' new book Fortune's Fool: Australia's Choices we discuss Australia's 'houses and holes' economy and the risks inherent in our dependence on our current housing system and mineral wealth.

Independents are challenging two key seats in SA: the state's most marginal seat of Boothby, and the surprise seat of Grey. Will the Senate race in SA see the return of Senator Rex Patrick, will Nick Xenophon make a come-back and could the Greens pick up a second seat?

Lynette Wallworth is a an Emmy Award winning film maker and artist. Earlier works include Collisions and Awavena that used virtual reality technology to demonstrate the clashes between Indigenous cultures and the modern world. In her latest work she comes out from behind the camera to tell her own story of the four years she spent in a cult.

Three years before the British atomic tests at Maralinga, in remote South Australia, there were two big tests at Emu Field, a red earth claypan about 200kms from Maralinga. It was 1953, and it was an experiment that took little care to protect Aboriginal people in the wider area, or Air Force personnel who were instructed to fly into the cloud. And yet we barely know anything about it.