In the midst of bluffs, empty threats and broken promises, Trump has struggled to find any leverage over the Iranian regime he has declared war on, so why is he so confident he can make a better deal than Obama did back in 2015?

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Until now, Australia has been relying on oil that passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the war began. But the last tankers to leave the Persian Gulf before the conflict are set to arrive in Australia this week. 

It’s not just the domestic situation that is making hair stand on end. The entire global energy market also seems to be losing its mind. 

To try and make sense of it all, Matt has enlisted the help of ABC Senior Business Correspondent Carrington Clarke. Carrington also hosts two of the ABC's newest podcasts, ABC Business Daily and Fuelcast. 

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When the Strait of Hormuz closed, global gas prices doubled seemingly overnight. As one of the world’s biggest gas exporters, the spike should have meant a big payday for Australia.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t played out like that because Australia has a habit of locking in energy deals that look increasingly out of step with reality. Case in point: our long-term gas agreements with Japan.

In an extremely volatile market, Australia continues to ship gas offshore at low, fixed rates, while Japan on-sells it at a profit. As domestic prices rise and supply tightens, the consequences of this not-so-great deal are landing at home. So how did one of the world’s largest gas exporters end up with so little flexibility?

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Matt spent a week camping entirely out of internet reception, so Kara does her best to get him up to speed on all the latest of the US-Iran war negotiations. Trump’s been doing most of his negotiation on Truth Social, and so every day is a new… more deranged revelation. Plus your questions about Iran, the price of petrol, and why there aren’t more oil pipelines answered!

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Over the past few years, industrial scam compounds have surged throughout Myanmar, buoyed by the resources of powerful criminal networks, and hidden by the chaos of civil war. Occasional raids have uncovered that these compounds are staffed with hundreds of thousands of trafficked workers, kept there by force. 

China has financially and militarily supported its neighbour Myanmar for years. But now, as Chinese citizens fall prey to scam kidnappers, China has forced a response. Will it be enough to stop the spread of these compounds?

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Sisonke Msimang from the new ABC podcast Boycott! joins Matt to share her father’s journey as a revolutionary in the fight against apartheid. 

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Turn on the tv and you’ll see no shortage of concerned journalists standing at fuel bowsers, shaking their heads at the rising prices. For plenty of young people, the idea that we might have to seriously limit our fuel consumption is unprecedented… But for anyone who lived through the 1970s, it’s all too familiar. So why did Donald Trump start this war?

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In 1987 the USS Stark became the first U.S. ship sunk by missile fire since World War II. The missiles were fired by Iraq, America’s ally at the time, who claim they did it by mistake.

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While governments scramble to find a way around the Strait of Hormuz, a pipeline sits half-finished in the desert that would have solved the problem. So why was it never completed?

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As we’ve been looking into Iran over this month, we’ve had a lot of trouble finding out what is really happening on the ground. That’s due to the concerted and deliberate internet shutdowns carried out by the Iranian regime. And this isn’t the first time the internet has been shut down for Iranian users. It’s happened many times before. 

Today, Matt speaks with Deakin University PhD candidate Amin Naeeni, who has not only spent years researching Iran’s system of digital control — but has also experienced it firsthand.

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Water is the lifeblood of all civilisations. In Iran, the water is drying up. That disappearance is becoming impossible to ignore, and after decades of mismanagement, the country’s water system is approaching a breaking point. Rivers that once crossed the Iranian plateau are drying to threads; aquifers are collapsing; lakes have retreated into salt flats. 

The roots of the crisis stretch from the modernisation projects of the Shah to the Islamic Republic’s own industrial ambitions: dams, steel plants, and the cultivation of water-thirsty crops, all of which aren’t ideal pursuits for a country that is largely arid. The result is a slow-moving environmental emergency now pressing into politics, daily life, and the stability of the regime itself.

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