If You're Listening

While Israel tries to defeat Hamas, they also have to worry about a much more dangerous paramilitary group on their northern border: Hezbollah. The express purpose of Hezbollah, which formed 40 years ago, is also to eradicate Israel. It would be a nightmare for Israel if Hezbollah swings in and backs Hamas up. So where did Hezbollah form, why do they hate Israel, and what hand did Israel have in t...

The Israeli Government has one of the most well-resourced intelligence communities in the world, specifically tasked with preventing attacks from Hamas. So how did it fail to detect an operation that involved months of planning, meetings in multiple countries, and thousands of militants? This is part two in our series on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Subscribe to If You're Listening on the  ABC Listen...

Last week, Hamas burst out of the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, killing at least 1,400 people, the vast majority of them Israeli civilians. But Hamas' origins go back decades, to its founder Ahmed Yassin. How did a disabled refugee from Gaza become one of the most influential men in Palestine? And how did he take Hamas from obscurity to wresting control of the Gaza Strip? Subscribe to If You're...

In 2021, a doctor from Florida met with a group of men to plan the overthrow of the Haitian President. The plot triggered a series of events which led to the President's death, the almost total collapse of the government, and the rise of mob rule in Haiti. So why is Kenya now being sent in to save the day? Subscribe to If You're Listening on the  ABC Listen app . Find more If You're Listening on Y...

In September last year, Elon Musk refused to let the Ukrainian military use his Starlink satellites to attack Russia. Musk jumped on Twitter and posted “Starlink is meant for peaceful use only”.  So how did we get into a situation where Elon Musk gets to personally decide whether a Ukrainian military operation succeeds or fails? And was he justified in refusing to help?  Subscribe to If You're Lis...

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was murdered in Vancouver in June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just come out saying the Indian Government assassinated him. India is, of course, denying it. So who was Niijar? Why would anyone — much less the Indian Government — want to kill him? And is there more to this story than meets the eye? Subscribe to If You're Listening on the  ABC Listen app . Find mo...

When world leaders received their invitations to the 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi, everyone got a bit of a surprise. It referred to Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister of Bharat, not India. The debate over the naming of India stretches back nearly 80 years, and tells an important story about the country's history. And Modi's new push for a change in the constitution is just the latest in a series...

The US, Russia, China and India are all sending missions to the moon — and all to its totally unexplored south pole. Why? Well, in order to make the next giant leap, we need to build a petrol station on the moon. How a discovery made a century ago will allow us to use the moon as a stepping stone to explore the solar system. Subscribe to If You're Listening on the  ABC Listen app . Find more If Yo...

For a century society has bullied and shamed people into trying to lose weight, without much result. Now, a seemingly accidental discovery by Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk may be the first weight loss drug that actually works. People are hailing semaglutide, marketed under the names Ozempic or Wegovy, as a miracle weight loss drug — but it comes at a cost. One clear winner is the Dani...

China's economy is struggling. Similar things are happening across Asia but in China it's happening extremely fast. And a big part of the reason why is the disastrous One Child Policy and years of dodgy population data. How can you make plans for a country when you don't know how many people you have? Now the population is going backward, the property sector is faltering, and China is in a world o...

While everyone has their eyes on the war in Ukraine, West Africa is threatening to break out into war. There's been a seemingly unstoppable wave of coups washing along the edge of the Sahara, gaining strength each time. After the recent military coup in Niger, locals were seen chanting "down with France" and "long live Putin". What are France and Russia doing in West Africa? And could they end up...

Microchips are in your car, your microwave — there might even be one in your kettle. They run everything. And the best microchips are made by TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. TSMC chips have put Western tech companies and militaries streets ahead of China, and China is not happy about it. TSMC is so important, that the world could go to war over it. Find more If You're Listeni...

Inflation in Argentina is at 100 per cent. The government is printing money fast and locals are spending in US dollars because the peso is so unreliable. The economy is like a rollercoaster. It might be tempting to think, "they're different over there", but here's the thing: they're kind of not. Argentina — one of the wealthiest countries in the world — was once uncomfortably similar to Australia....

Donald Trump has been charged with trying and failing to delete CCTV evidence of farcical, and allegedly criminal behaviour. It's just the latest charge in the case against the former president over his… interesting decision to take classified documents with him when he left the White House. Could it land him in jail? We tell the story of how Trump got into this predicament, and his plan to get ou...

A bromance is a powerful thing. Lennon and McCartney. Holmes and Watson. Gilbert and Sullivan. Han and Chewy. But occasionally a bromance can nearly get you killed. A month ago the entire world watched transfixed as a former chef named Yevgeny Prigozhin marched with his private army on Moscow. At the core of this mutiny is a bromance between Prigozhin and a guy you've probably never heard of — Gen...

If You're Listening is back, and better than ever. Same espionage, same corruptions, same scandals, but more often. Not only will we be in your feed every Thursday, we'll also cover a different story each week. And if you prefer to watch rather than listen, we're also making videos for iView and YouTube. Episode one drops Thursday, 27th July.

After ten months of war, a few likely outcomes of the war in Ukraine are emerging. A win for Vladimir Putin. A win for Volodymyr Zelenskyy. A bitter frozen conflict.  Neither Putin or Zelenskyy will sign a peace agreement and admit defeat.  But what if Putin’s regime ends? Guests: Dr Paul Dibb - Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at ANU; Former Director of the Australian Joint Intelligence Or...

Protest is not allowed inside Russia. There was little resistance from the Russian people to the invasion of Ukraine, and those who didn’t like it simply left.  But Vladimir Putin has made a decree that has caused discord across Russia. Has he finally pushed his people too far? Guests: Zoya Sheftalovich - Contributing editor for POLITICO Dr Christina Ezrahi - Historian; author of Swans of the Krem...

On 26 September, a series of underwater explosions destroyed a cluster of natural gas pipelines on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. The pipes were designed to deliver gas directly from Russia to Germany, and the explosions exacerbated the already dire energy crisis in Europe. Everyone agrees it was sabotage, but nobody can agree on who did it.  Today: the mystery of the Baltic Sea bubbles, and the st...

What does war look like on the ground, for the soldiers who go off to fight? What’s it like to be sent into the muddy confusion of a battlefield, asked to lay down your life for your country? In this episode: two soldiers. A Ukrainian in his 50s and a Russian in his 20s. One of them is still on the battlefield. The other fought for a week, and is now serving a 15 year prison sentence. These two st...

Vladimir Putin's plan for a three day takeover of Ukraine relied on a quick strike to take out Volodymyr Zelenskyy - to kill him, to capture him, or to make him flee.  Putin assumed that Zelenskyy was weak, but on the very first day of the invasion, two events showed that Putin was wrong, and led to the transformation of a man into a symbol of defiance against Russian tyranny. Guests: Simon Shuste...

For 20 years the Russian President Vladimir Putin was happy to lurk in the shadows, trying and occasionally succeeding to manipulate the rest of the world into doing what he wanted them to do. But this year he chucked that out the window. His invasion of Ukraine has turned global security and the global economy upside down. In this episode we ask, why did he do it? Guests: Philip Short - Former BB...

In the seventh season of If You're Listening, we tell the story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Will Putin fulfil his dream of expanding the Russian empire, or has he made the biggest mistake of his life? Episode 1 drops Wednesday November 9!

Australia is now in a race to build enough renewable energy to replace our coal fired power stations before they close.  We’re in this situation because of a series of ignored warnings and missed opportunities over the last five decades. Now, experts are telling us that the transition to a decarbonised economy presents a big opportunity for Australia. The question is - can we grasp it? Guests: Dr...

Over the last five years, politicians in Australia and around the world have regularly tried to blame renewable energy whenever something goes wrong with our electricity supply. But lately whenever something catastrophic has happened to our energy supply, it’s been old technology at fault. This is the story of a series of disasters that show how the system we’ve always relied on to deliver electri...