Tag: news

A date palm silhouetted at dusk on the Iranian coast, oil tankers idle on the Strait of Hormuz behind it.

The Place of Dates

Through the Strait of Hormuz — named either for the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda or the Persian phrase for ‘Place of Dates’ — flows 20% of the world’s oil. Or rather, it did. Iran has now reduced traffic by 97%. Urban Wronski traces the etymology, the date palm’s lessons in patience, and what empires learn the expensive way.

Silhouetted figures seated at a circular table in a bare, harshly lit room, backs turned to a door standing slightly ajar, light bleeding through the crack.

No Exit

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play about three people locked in a room with an unlocked door nobody would walk through. He called it No Exit. He was writing about Operation Epic Fury seventy years before it happened. A forensic anatomy of a war built from mutual imprisonment, strategic miscalculation, and the fatal habit of assuming the other side thinks like us.

Dark editorial illustration of shadowy figures in ornate portrait frames on a gallery wall, a burning city visible through a window behind them, suggesting the architects and beneficiaries of a catastrophic war.

Netanyahu, MBS, Putin and the Useful Idiot 

Russia feeds Tehran American targeting intelligence. Netanyahu needs the war to continue. MBS counts his oil revenues. One hundred and seventy-five children were at school in Minab when the missile struck. The mathematics of this catastrophe have been visible from the start. That nobody in Washington appears to have done the sums is the most damning fact of all.

Aerial view of a destroyed girls' school in southern Iran, rubble strewn across a courtyard, small backpacks visible among the debris, emergency workers standing back at dusk as smoke rises from the ruins.

Double Tap? Double Depravity

As US and Israeli forces use double-tap airstrikes to kill survivors and first responders in Iran, Australia’s silence makes us complicit. Pine Gap is in the kill chain. Anthony Albanese had three hours to decide. He chose wrong.

Chess king in checkmate on dissolving board symbolising Trump Iran war strategic collapse with no endgame

Trump’s Iran Blunder

Robert Reich knows Trump has no endgame for his Iran war. What he doesn’t see from inside the American story: the munitions arithmetic is catastrophic, the legal basis non-existent, and Canberra has made us part of it without asking a single question in Parliament.

Construction workers at a union rally — the CFMEU has faced decades of political and media campaigns despite winning better wages and safety conditions for Australian builders.

The Perennial Persecution of the CFMEU: Demonisation as a Defence of Power

For thirty years, Australia’s most powerful construction union has served as a moral punching bag for the nation’s political and media establishment. Every few years another “reckoning” arrives: a Royal Commission, a regulator’s dawn raid, a media exposé discovering organised crime in high-vis. Each time, … Continue reading The Perennial Persecution of the CFMEU: Demonisation as a Defence of Power

Satirical illustration of a large cartoon dog in the Oval Office, its wagging tail scattering military documents, while a small figure holds its leash and an aircraft carrier is visible through the window against a blood-red sky.

America’s Wag-the-Dog Moment

A flailing administration, a nuclear pretext recycled from the WMD workshop of 2003, and an Israel that appears to be setting the tempo of a potential world war. Before the missiles fly, Urban Wronski asks the question Washington’s press won’t: is this about Iran — or about saving Trump from himself?