John Bolton thinks bombing Iran is the answer

John Bolton has spent years arguing that bombing Iran isn’t just justified but necessary.  For decades he has argued that American military force can solve the problem of hostile regimes in the Middle East. He backed the Invasion of Iraq, championed some of the most disastrous American interventio…

Inside the Powerful Elite Forces Running Iran

This week Iran announced a new Supreme Leader. Mojtaba Khamenei is the son of the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But who’s really running the country now? We look into the heavily armed elite forces pulling the strings – the Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. Today, Iranian journalist and …

Craig Foster and the rescue mission to save Iran's soccer stars

On Sunday night, after Iran’s final game of the Women’s Asian Cup on the Gold Coast, protesters surrounded the team bus, banging on the windows and shouting “let them go”. Later, five members of the Iranian squad broke away from their minders. By Tuesday, the federal government had confirmed they …

Big Tobacco, Big Coal, Big Banks: The Lobbyists Charming our Leaders

Independent MP Monique Ryan can remember a time in Australian politics when small breaches could cost a career.  Now she says we’ve been gradually conditioned to tolerate corruption and the loss of transparency in parliament. Over recent years, there has been a marked increase in the number of lo…

Killer Robots and AI on the Battlefield: the Pentagon vs Anthropic

Who should hold the power to decide how AI is used on our battlefields? That’s the question being debated after a face-off between the Pentagon and one of the world’s biggest AI companies. Anthropic ultimately lost its contract with the US military after refusing to let its Claude program be used …

Giving birth to a stranger’s baby: the cost of IVF mistakes

It’s been revealed this week that Monash IVF has paid millions of dollars in secret settlements, after two nightmare mixups saw women implanted with the wrong embryos – one of them giving birth to a stranger’s baby. At least three families have now received compensation for the bungle, which was c…

“Deputy Sheriff” Albo’s Wartime Transformation

When the United States launched strikes on Iran, Australia was quick to back the move.  Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says it’s about defending global security. But critics say that argument sounds familiar. More than two decades ago, another Australian prime minister used almost identical argum…

“The Law of the Jungle”: How Trump’s war is causing chaos

An effort by Congress to rein in President Trump’s war in Iran has failed. Democrats and a few Republicans tried to use the War Powers Resolution to force Trump to get approval from Congress to keep fighting – but it didn’t pass. Now the war is dragging in more countries, fuelling a global crisis…

The Howard Effect: Who Belongs

When the High Court handed down its Mabo decision, it cracked open the legal fiction at the heart of the nation. Terra Nullius was gone. For John Howard, then in opposition, it provided  an opportunity. He framed the moment not as correction, but as a threat. A story was spun to suburban and regio…

The Howard Effect: In the Shadows of the Australian Dream

It’s just over two years into his first term and John Howard is taking the country to another election. In that short time he has seized the mantle of economic credibility away from Labor and rewritten the argument about who could be trusted to manage the economy.  The memory of Labor's reforms wh…