In a basement somewhere in Ukraine, an operator presses a button. Seventeen kilometers away, a drone the size of a dinner plate descends toward a fuel truck. The screen goes white, then black, then shows the next target in the queue. There are always more targets in the queue.   This episode takes you inside the first large-scale drone war in history. From the basements where operators make life-and-death decisions, to the Pentagon briefing rooms where Replicator takes shape, to Chinese defense labs drawing lessons from the battlefield, to the epistemic fog where experts disagree on whether true autonomy is months away or decades. We explore what "swarm" actually means in robotics versus headlines, who is building these systems and why, and the question no one can answer: can humanity govern technologies that compress decision-making below the speed of human thought?   This episode was AI-generated using Claude Opus 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.2 Extended, and narrated with Speechify text-to-speech. It may contain inaccuracies. Composite characters are clearly identified. Facts drawn from defense department sources, think tank analyses, academic literature, and international reporting. For the full sourced analysis, visit Proxima.Earth. Story ID: MIL-2026-001.

On January 11, 2026, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell went on camera to say something no Fed chair had ever said: he was under criminal investigation—and he believed it was retaliation for refusing to cut interest rates at the president's demand.This episode takes you inside the confrontation. From the secret 1910 meeting on Jekyll Island where bankers designed America's central bank, to the Nixon tapes revealing how a president broke Arthur Burns, to the January morning when a grand jury subpoena landed on Powell's desk—we trace a century of tension between executive power and monetary independence. You'll inhabit multiple perspectives: the Fed chair weighing defiance against survival, the prosecutor building a case she knows is thin, the Republican senators breaking with their president, the traders pricing institutional collapse in real time. We don't tell you who's right. We show you what's at stake. Featuring composite characters and dramatized scenes built from Federal Reserve archives, court documents, congressional testimony, and international reporting. Multi-model AI synthesis with human editorial direction throughout.

On December 28, 2025, the Tehran Grand Bazaar did not fully open. The rial had crossed 1.4 million to the dollar, and the merchants who had stayed loyal to the Islamic Republic for forty-six years could no longer make the numbers work. Within two weeks, protests spread to 185 cities across all 31 provinces, the internet went dark, and the question of whether the regime would survive became impossible to answer with confidence. This episode takes you inside that moment—from the gold sellers calculating impossible exchange rates to the rooftops where millions shout into the darkness at 8 PM each night. It traces the economic collapse, the June war that shattered the myth of regime invincibility, the exiled prince watching from Maryland, and the security apparatus weighing whether to kill its way to survival. The narrative inhabits all perspectives without forcing conclusions: protesters, regime officials, diaspora analysts, international observers. Porter News is an AI-assisted research   aggregator, not a replacement for original journalism. This episode was built using a multi-model pipeline—Claude Opus, Gemini Pro, OpenAI o1, and Grok—with human editorial direction at every stage. Source material drawn from wire services, human rights organizations, and sixteen international outlets in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Russian. Narrated via Speechify. For the full annotated bibliography, visit PorterNews.com. Story ID: IR-2026-002. Runtime approximately 2.5 hours.

Trillions of dollars are flowing into artificial intelligence infrastructure. Data centers consume more power than small cities. Nvidia posts record revenue. OpenAI raises at $300 billion. The believers say this is the foundation of a technological revolution. The skeptics say it's the biggest speculative bubble since dot-com. This episode doesn't answer who's right—instead, it takes you inside the perspectives of everyone making the bet and everyone exposed to it: a data center technician walking the floor at 5:47 AM listening to the hum of a billion dollars in equipment, Jensen Huang explaining why "the more you buy, the more you save," Sam Altman pitching sovereign wealth funds on a $1.4 trillion infrastructure commitment, a Fortune 500 CTO staring at a blank slide unable to quantify ROI after $43 million in AI spending, a software developer who learned he's 19% slower with AI tools but still feels faster, a pension fund manager watching retirement accounts concentrate in seven   stocks, and a teacher in Ohio who has no idea her savings are betting on artificial intelligence. Research was conducted using a multi-model AI pipeline—Claude Opus for primary synthesis, Gemini Pro for structural enhancement, OpenAI o1 Pro for logical review, Grok for real-time intelligence—with human editorial direction at every stage. Characters like Marcus Chen and Catherine Okonkwo are composite figures clearly identified as dramatized representations of real roles, built from SEC filings, earnings calls, the Bank of England Financial Stability Report, and peer-reviewed research including the METR developer productivity study. Narrated using Speechify text-to-speech. For complete source citations and the full multi-perspective analysis, visit PorterNews.com (story ID: AI-2026-001).