



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…

The Howard Effect: Australia’s Sliding Doors Moment
It was the second of March 1996. After 13 years of Labor in power, Paul Keating’s government had been defeated in a landslide, closing the door on the Hawke-Keating era and opening another on a new political age. John Howard’s victory marked the beginning of a prime ministership that would run for…

Trump’s Iran war: regime change or regime chaos?
The United States has entered a new war in the Middle East – alongside Israel – launching strikes inside Iran. Iranian authorities say civilians have been targeted, including in a strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab – killing more than a hundred children. Israel says it’s targeting the regi…