Late Night Live - Separate stories podcast

US President Donald Trump was elected on a law and order platform, but consumer and public affairs watch organisation, Public Citizen, Trump’s administration has withdrawn or halted enforcement actions against 165  corporations, and at least a quarter of them are in the tech sector.  Guest: Rick Claypool, Research Director, Public Citizen, author,  “Corporate Clemency - How the Second Trump Administration Is Halting Enforcement Against Corporate Lawbreakers” (Public Citizen, March 2025)  And “Deleting tech enforcement - Trump 2.0 Is Dropping Lawsuits and Investigations Against the $1 Billion-Spending Technology Sector” Producer: Catherine Zengerer

Founded in 1947, the CIA was established under the mission 'know thine enemy'. Now, under US President Donald Trump, the agency is being gutted. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Tim Weiner, argues that Trump has instigated what he calls an “ideological purge” at the CIA. Analysts and officers with decades of experience are being pushed out (or told to leave) under the new leadership, of CIA Director John RatcliffeGUEST: Tim Weiner, author The Mission: The CIA in the 21st CenturyPRODUCER: Ali Benton

The Australian War Memorial has decided not to award a prestigious literary prize to journalist Chris Masters for a book about alleged war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, insisting the rules prevent established authors from being considered. GUEST: Peter Stanley, Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial from 1980 to 2007. PRODUCER: Catherine Zengerer

Patagonia is an outdoor clothing retailer than has grown into a global giant with a hundred stores around the world and an enormous online business, posting sales of more than a billion dollars a year. For decades, it has also been a beacon for social change and corporate activism. But in 2022 its founder, Yvon Chouinard, determined to get off the Forbes Billionaire list, gave his whole business away. He set up the Patagonia Purpose Trust, with 100 percent control given to the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature. but while Chairbound spent a lifetime trying to protect the environment, he also did lots of damage along the way. Guest: David Gelles, climate reporter for the New York Times and author of “Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away” published by Text publishingProducer: Catherine Zengerer

Many emotions drive politics and culture: ambition, greed, altruism, anger. But what about humiliation? An Australian anthropologist makes the case that humiliation and its counterpart, dignity, are overlooked motivators of politics, both locally and globally.Guest: Professor Ghassan Hage, Professorial Fellow in Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of MelbourneProducer: Alex Tighe

Every time someone buys a web domain ending in .ai, the tiny island nation of Anguilla gets a fee. In the same way that .au is for Australia and .uk is for the United Kingdom, the .ai country code is Anguilla's... which means that the launch of ChatGPT and the booming interest in artificial intelligence has been a windfall for Anguilla. AI start-ups have been snapping up .ai domain names over the last few years, and the fees for .ai domains now account for almost a quarter of Anguilla's government revenue.

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, according to a report by a United Nations Commision of Inquiry. The Commission, established by the UN Human Rights Council, concluded that Israeli authorities "intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible" and have committed the crime against humanity of extermination. One of the key authors of that report, Australian human rights lawyer Chris Sidoti, joins Late Night Live just hours after its release.Guest: Chris Sidoti, lawyer and member of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian TerritoryProducer: Catherine Zengerer

Keir Starmer has sacked Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US over his association with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the far right takes to the streets of the UK, with a cameo from tech billionaire Elon Musk, and Donald Trump's state visit to the UKGUEST: Ian Dunt, columnist with i-news; co-host of the Origin Story podcast  PRODUCER: Ali Benton

The QWERTY keyboard wasn't designed to be fast or logical. It was created in the 1870s to stop typewriter keys from jamming - and to suit telegraph operators working in morse code. Since then, more efficient layouts like Dvorak have been invented, but none have stuck. So how did QWERTY become "locked in" to our machines, our workplaces, and even our muscle memory?Guest: Gianfranco Di Giovanni, Content Director for ABC Radio Perth and consumer technology journalistProducer: Rebecca Metcalf

US correspondent Bruce Shapiro looks at the fall-out from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, including the targeted campaign against Kirk's critics, what President Trump meant when he said he would "go after the radical left",  the continued lack of interest in gun control and the implications for the trans community in the USA. Guest: Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor with The Nation magazine and Director of the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma. Producer: Catherine Zengerer

As Australia's first climate risk report is released, Anna Henderson looks at the challenge in uniting the Coalition around net zero targets, as Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie threatens to quit the shadow cabinet if the Coalition does not abandon its target. Plus how Sussan Ley is navigating the issues raised in the Islamophobia Envoy, Aftab Malik's, report. Guest: Anna Henderson, SBS World News Chief Political Correspondent | National Press Club DirectorProducer: Catherine Zengerer

Author Chris Sweeney tells the remarkable story of Roxie Laybourne, the Smithsonian ornithologist who became the nation's leading expert in feather forensics. Laybourne investigated thousands of aeroplane bird-strikes, but was also called as an expert witness at trials for murder, poaching and even a Klu Klux Klan hate crime. Guest: Chris Sweeney, author of The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem and the Magnificent Life of Roxie LaybourneProducer: Jack Schmidt

In a new documentary for Al Jazeera, Jewish-Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein return to his ancestral home, Germany, to investigate how the country’s impulse never to repeat the horrendous anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust has resulted in the suppression of any criticism of Israel and its actions in Gaza.Guest: Antony Loewenstein, Independent journalist, author and film-makerProducer: Catherine Zengerer

Collective memory is storytelling on a massive scale. Every nation, every community, has a master narrative—the ‘official’ story about who they are, who they aren’t, what has happened to them, and why it all matters. If you control the memory, you control the narrative; if you control the narrative, you control the power.GUEST:  Dr Richard Latham Lechowick, Research Associate with the Global History Lab at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of CambridgePRODUCER: Ali Benton

The San Gabriel Valley on the outskirts of LA is the largest 'ethnoburb' of the Chinese diaspora in the United States. Long beset by poverty, issues with affordable housing, environmental and public safety concerns, it’s now seeing the rise of Chinese far-right MAGA groups backing Donald Trump, whose rhetoric on making the streets safe has a growing appeal. Guest: Promise Li, writer and tenant organiser in Los Angeles' ChinatownProducer: Catherine Zengerer