MIL-OSI Export

COMMENTARY: By Prince Taofeek Ajibade

US President Donald Trump probably thinks he can starve a country that feeds itself.

Washington is selling the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as a chokehold. However, it is worth asking whether the hand actually reaches the throat.

Iran shares land borders with seven countries — Türkiye, Iraq, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Nearly 5900 kilometres of border, criss-crossed by road and rail.

No naval force on earth blockades a land route.

Petrochemicals, minerals, manufactured goods are moved overland. Machinery, spare parts, consumer goods, all come back the same way. The Strait of Hormuz does not sit across any of that.

Then there is the food issue, which is where blockades historically do their cruellest work.

It will not work here. Iran is approximately 96 percent self-sufficient in essential foodstuffs.

Iran doesn’t depend on imported food
Fertile western plains, mountain valleys, Caspian lowlands, including wheat, rice, fruit, livestock. The Gulf states that cheered this blockade loudest — the UAE and Qatar — depend almost entirely on food imports. Iran doesn’t.

You cannot starve a country that feeds itself.

What about the blockade?

Yes, that will hurt. Hard currency earnings from oil tanker traffic will fall. That is real and Washington knows it.

But “hurt” and “collapse” are different destinations, and the distance between them is precisely what the architects of this policy appear not to have calculated.

Central Asia and the Caucasus remain open. Regional markets will absorb what the sea lanes cannot carry.

The economic pressure is genuine. The total isolation that the blockade promises is not.

Iran has survived four decades of sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It did not survive them by accident. It survived them because its geography is not a weakness waiting to be exploited.

It is the strategy.

Prince Taofeek Ajibade is an educator and digital creator from Ibadan, Nigeria.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/17/iran-hasnt-survived-decades-of-hostile-sanctions-assassinations-and-sabotage-by-accident-its-by-strategy/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

The federal government has secured access to 250,000 tonnes of extra urea from Indonesia for Australian farmers.

The deal between Incitec Pivot Fertilisers and PT Pupuk Indonesia was facilitated by the governments of the two countries.

It will provide about 20% of the remaining fertiliser needed for the current season, which runs from November last year to October this year.

There has been considerable panic among many farmers about the disruption of urea supplies. Without adequate fertiliser crop yields would be down, with some farmers not planting crops at all because of the uncertainty.

Indonesia is Australia’s fourth largest export market for agriculture, fisheries and forestry exports, worth more than $4.7 billion in 2025.

Agriculture minister Julie Collins said: “While this is a commercial deal, the Australian and Indonesian governments have been working to support this positive outcome.

“This guarantees supply of fertiliser to Australian farmers at this critical time.”

Scott Bowman, President, Incitec Pivot Limited said:“This additional volume for the period May to December, at prevailing market prices, is another critical plank in servicing the needs of Australian farmers”.

Anthony Albanese has been in Brunei and Malaysia this week seeking agreements on fuel supplies and security.

The government on Thursday announced it had secured about 100 million litres of extra diesel, with two shipments coming from Brunei and South Korea.

This is the first of the expected shipments under the government’s new Strategic Reserve powers. Under these powers Export Finance Australia has partnered with Viva Energy to make this purchase possible.

Reserve Bank Deputy Governor warns of bad times ahead

Meanwhile, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank, Andrew Hauser, speaking during a panel discussion in New York, was blunt about the hard times to come, making it clear the bank would need the support of the government in the tough decisions ahead.

“Supply shocks are a hard sell to the public,” Hauser said.

“Inflation is going to be higher, activity is going to be lower, we’re going to be poorer.

“There’s not much upside news in that story.”

Selling to people the message inflation must be tackled was harder when there was already high inflation before the Iran war, he said.

“People are already a bit resentful about that, so you need to be clear and direct with people to restate the importance of stabilising inflation.”

The Reserve Bank’s next meets on May 4-5, ahead of the May 12 budget. It will facing conflicting pressures in considering interest rates, with rising inflation pushing towards another rate rise but the prospect of a slowing economy making that risky.

“You need to be very clear what we [the Reserve Bank] can’t do, because people are maybe thinking monetary policy can solve everything, and you need rock solid support from governments at a time when you’re going to be making hard decisions,” Hauser said.

Hauser’s deliberate signal to government is notable because he has previously been reluctant to make any comment at all on fiscal policy.

– ref. Albanese and Indonesian governments land fertiliser supply deal for farmers – https://theconversation.com/albanese-and-indonesian-governments-land-fertiliser-supply-deal-for-farmers-280585

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/17/albanese-and-indonesian-governments-land-fertiliser-supply-deal-for-farmers-280585/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steve Prabu, Adjunct Lecturer, School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Curtin University; University of Oxford

Black holes are among the most extreme objects in the universe. They can fling material outwards at speeds close to that of light, in powerful beams of plasma known as jets. These jets are thought to be among the most energetic phenomena in the cosmos.

Our new work, published today in Nature Astronomy, challenges this intuition. We find that something as seemingly ordinary as the “wind” from a star can rival – and even shape – the behaviour of these powerful jets.

A cosmic waltz

The Cygnus X-1 system is a cosmic waltz between a black hole and a massive star.

The black hole is the first ever discovered. It weighs about 21 times the mass of our Sun, compressed into a region roughly 100 kilometres across. It’s in what’s known as a binary system with a much larger companion star that’s almost 40 times as massive as the Sun. The black hole and the star whirl around each other in their orbit once every 5.6 days.

For about 20,000 years, the black hole has been feeding on material from this star. It does so by capturing the star’s powerful stellar wind, using its intense gravitational pull.

Some of this material disappears into the black hole, crossing the point of no return (known as the event horizon) in a one-way journey. The swirling magnetic fields dragged in with the gas lead to the launching of jets, moving at nearly the speed of light.

The jets carry energy away from close to the black hole out to a distance a trillion times greater, 16 light years away.

Their action over the past 20,000 years has inflated a giant bubble of hot gas in the surrounding interstellar space. But despite their importance, measuring the instantaneous power of these jets has remained a major challenge until now.

The power couple

Stellar winds are streams of particles blown off the surface of a star by the outward pressure of the light. When the solar wind from our Sun is particularly intense, it causes auroras when the particles slam into Earth’s magnetic field.

The companion star in Cygnus X-1 is so massive and so bright that it loses 100 million times as much mass in its wind as the Sun does, and accelerates it to speeds three times as high.

In our study, we made very high resolution images of the jets by combining telescopes separated by thousands of kilometres. This is the same technique used by the Event Horizon Telescope to make the first image of a black hole.

We found that the wind from the companion star in Cygnus X-1 is strong enough to bend the jets launched by the black hole. This shows just how powerful the winds of massive stars can be.

As the black hole orbits the star, the stellar wind continuously pushes against the jets, blowing them away from the star. This causes them to change direction, just like wind on Earth can blow around the water in a fountain.

From our point of view, the jets appear to “dance” in step with the orbital motion of the system. By modelling this cosmic dance, we were able to measure the instantaneous power of the jets for the first time, and find it to be equivalent to 10,000 suns.

The calorie deficit of a black hole diet

Understanding how black holes use their energy tells us about how galaxies evolve.

When matter falls towards a black hole, part of it contributes to the growth of the black hole itself. But a significant fraction can be redirected into jets, which inject energy back into their surroundings. For the most massive black holes at the centres of galaxies, the jets can shape their host galaxies and influence even larger cosmic structures.

We can measure how fast a black hole is feeding from the X-rays produced by the material falling inwards. However, until now, we have not had a direct way to measure how much energy goes into these jets at any given moment.

Our measurement of the jet power in Cygnus X-1 provides a new way to “balance the energy budget” of black holes. By comparing how fast a black hole is feeding and how much energy is carried away by the jets, we can fine-tune computer simulations of the universe. This tells us about how black holes influence the universe on the largest scales.

This cosmic dance of a black hole and a massive star reveals more than just a bent jet. It shows how even the most energetic phenomena, such as jets, are shaped by their surroundings. By watching the dancing jets in Cygnus X-1, we have improved our understanding of how black holes influence the evolution of the cosmos itself.

– ref. Black hole jets ‘dance’ in the wind from a massive companion star – https://theconversation.com/black-hole-jets-dance-in-the-wind-from-a-massive-companion-star-280138

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/black-hole-jets-dance-in-the-wind-from-a-massive-companion-star-280138/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

The war in Iran has become the third major economic crisis in the last 20 years, with fuel prices jumping and inflation once again starting to pick up. Australians are feeling worsening economic pain.

While the government has offered some relief on fuel prices, and ensured the immediate supply of Australia’s fuel shipments, there remains massive uncertainty about the future.

Amid the crisis the government is preparing for the May 12 budget, and is forecasting ambitious reform.

To discuss how the Australian economy is faring and its prospects, we’re joined by independent economist Chris Richardson.

On what the Reserve Bank might do, given rising inflation, at its May 4-5 meeting, Richardson says that will depend how bad it sees the crisis getting,

This refinery fire [at a Corio refinery] we’ve just had might actually be the thing that stops the Reserve Bank from raising rates.

If it’s really quite worried that it’s losing the trust of families and businesses, it will raise rates. If it started to be really quite worried that the pain in Australia’s economy could be notable, then – not immediately, but a little down the track – they could even be cutting rates.

While Richardson and other forecasters are predicting an economic slowdown and not a recession, he says risks are high.

It is a much bigger risk than it’s been for some time, and again we hit recession off the back of two potential things. One is actually running out of fuel and some industries are incredibly dependent on that. [Two] is through fear, if you like. The key measures of consumer confidence, how families are feeling, they are at truly terrible levels. Families are really, really worried about this and if they take those worries and decide to cut back on their spending, you could see that show up as a notable slowdown in the Australian economy.

Now, for what it’s worth, most forecasters, including myself, only have a fairly modest slowdown in the world [and] the Australian economies off the back of this so far.

On whether the government should be looking to tax gas exports more, given the increased price for Australia’s LNG, Richardson says reforms to the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT) are needed but he’s opposed to an export tax.

[The PRRT] is something we’ve needed to change for decades. […] We just don’t earn enough by way of tax and we won’t by way of tax on this key national resource. So it has to change. I would much, much prefer that they fix the tax that we have.

The more likely thing, if it happens, is some sort of an export tax. I’d prefer my solution because you don’t add to prices on world markets at a tricky time. You simply change which shares of the pie go to the big companies that get out our gas and sell it to the world and the share that goes to taxpayers. I really don’t love the idea of the export tax. Think of Donald Trump’s tariffs.

On what more the government could be doing, Richardson says it should be bringing more fuel into Australia and should be looking at rationing.

So the major thing that the government can do for Australia right now is to get fuel to Australia in the first place. It is the, if you think back to COVID, it’s the essential equivalent of getting us vaccinated. The more fuel we get into Australia, then the greater the chance that we get through this with pretty modest damage.

The other thing the government can do and may have to do is be a bit more active around rationing one way or another. And again, it’s been very wary of that. The politics of that are tricky.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Economist Chris Richardson on next steps in fuel crisis – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-economist-chris-richardson-on-next-steps-in-fuel-crisis-280706

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/politics-with-michelle-grattan-economist-chris-richardson-on-next-steps-in-fuel-crisis-280706/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

An effective opposition is good at policy. Last term and so far this term, the Coalition has been very poor at policy formulation.

Remember Peter Dutton’s defence policy? If you don’t, it’s probably because it was just a commitment to spend a lot more. No flesh on that bone. On the controversial nuclear policy, Liberals will admit they erred in not having costings much earlier.

Now the opposition is at high risk of making a hash of producing an immigration policy, an issue it’s putting at the centre of its (still to come) suite of offerings to voters.

“We are a serious party that needs to provide serious policy alternatives,” home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam said on Wednesday when trying to defend Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s Tuesday announcement of a get-tough-on-values sliver of the policy.

Taylor’s speech has been widely seen as a bid to attract voters back from One Nation, especially with the Farrer byelection looming. Clearly, as a first instalment of the Coalition’s immigration blueprint, it has been driven primarily by politics.

So what should be the approach to crafting and presenting a sound policy on immigration which, despite Labor’s 2023 Review of the Migration System report, requires reform?

Such a policy should be multi-tiered, and all of it should be released together because in immigration, as the old saying goes, everything is connected to everything else.

The first tier is the desirable overall intake. The latest net overseas migration (NOM) number was 311,000 in the year to the end of September, which the government is committed to reducing. The opposition wants a lower, as yet unspecified, number.

What would be the best level is contested among experts and stakeholders, with debate about the implications for economic growth and pressures on infrastructure, housing and services.

In deciding the appropriate level of temporary migration, the importance of our education export industry and the implications of cuts for the higher education sector, as well as the needs of agriculture, must be considered.

Having decided on numbers, the next tier should look at how to get the best out of our skilled intake.

Former treasury secretary Martin Parkinson, who led the government’s review, recently highlighted the economic waste we are allowing by failing to properly use the skills of people coming at present. Parkinson said almost half of all permanent migrants were working below their skill level.

He argued for an independent skills and qualifications commissioner to oversee an end-to-end recognition system, from visas to occupational licences to employment.

Another issue that should be addressed is the composition of the skilled intake, to tilt further towards people qualified in occupations we require. There is also the question of shortages in unskilled and semiskilled labour for the care economy.

The third tier goes to Taylor’s concerns regarding “values”. At one level this is about specifics: making sure the security checks are rigorous enough, and dealing more toughly with lawbreakers who are on visas.

But at another level, coming to grips with the “values” debate is wrestling with a puff of smoke.

How does one judge whether someone really believes in democracy and free speech, let alone “a fair go for all” – some of the commitments set out in the Australian Values Statement that immigrants sign, which the opposition now wants to make legally binding. What would breaches look like? Anyway, what precisely are some of these values in practice? For instance, the political class is currently debating the concept of “free speech” in the context of anti-hate laws.

As for Taylor’s point that people from liberal democracies are more likely to share or accept our values than those from “places ruled by fundamentalists, extremists and dictators”: this is a sweeping generalisation. Exceptions spring readily to mind. One of the Bondi gunmen came from India, the world’s largest democracy. We have admirable migrants from Russia.

Taylor is preoccupied with the cohort who arrived from Palestine after the start of the Middle East conflict, and wants them all reassessed. But does ASIO have current concerns that these people pose a threat? If not, calling for comprehensive reassessment is just stirring.

The issue of values merges into the fourth tier of a comprehensive immigration policy: better tending our multicultural garden. This means improving migrants’ integration into the wider community, while recognising they will continue to value their heritages and maintain their links to their individual communities.

Assistant Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Minister Julian Hill, in a February speech, highlighted the important balance that must be sought.

Hill said people’s right to express their cultural identities was not absolute. “Obligations for everyone include: one, a shared and unifying commitment to Australia first and foremost; two, acceptance of the basic structures and principles of Australian society including the constitution, tolerance, parliamentary democracy, equality and English as the national language; and three, accepting the right of others to express their views and values.”

Hill, from Labor left and with a message for the left generally, said, “One challenge for the progressive Left with our instinctive values-based focus on rights, is to remember that there are limits to cultural expression, and to champion the obligations that come with being Australian”.

“Successful multiculturalism means cherishing communal identities, building bridges between diverse groups and celebrating things we all have in common,” Hill said.

Labor has fallen down in reinforcing Australian multiculturalism, the Liberals are divided about multiculturalism itself, while One Nation rejects it.

As they finalise the rest of their immigration policy, the Liberals need to resolve the internal ambiguities they have on macro questions, including the value of migration in general and whether the opposition is committed to sticking by and improving multiculturalism, as well as myriad details such as how to make better use of the skills of migrants.

As things stand, the Liberals sound like they are primarily about exploiting the inflammatory politics of migration rather than doing the grunt work to produce a policy that attacks the obvious problems in the present system.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Migration debate deserves better policy approach and less politicking from Liberals – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-migration-debate-deserves-better-policy-approach-and-less-politicking-from-liberals-280586

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/grattan-on-friday-migration-debate-deserves-better-policy-approach-and-less-politicking-from-liberals-280586/

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

I don’t mind admitting that I hope the US and Israel suffer a crushing, devastating defeat in Iran.

I hope this war collapses the entire US empire. My only loyalty is to humanity, and being on Team Human in today’s world means being against the US empire and against Israel.

I hope the empire falls. I hope the apartheid state of Israel is dismantled.

I hope humanity is able to pry the steering wheel from the fingers of the ghouls who currently rule our world, so that we can create a healthy planet and a harmonious future together.

[embedded content]
I hope the US loses and other notes              Video: Caitlin Johnstone

YouTube has banned the channel that’s been creating viral AI Lego music videos criticising the US war on Iran. The Google-owned platform claims the Lego videos somehow constituted “violent content”, but we all know it was to facilitate the US propaganda effort by shutting down effective propaganda for the other side.

Silicon Valley is a crucial arm of US imperial control.

It chooses to advance the interests of the empire at every significant juncture. It’s a branch of imperial soft power in the same way the military is a branch of imperial hard power.

🎶 Iran-linked accounts are circulating a new LEGO-style propaganda video portraying U.S. and Israeli leaders as corrupt elites tied to the “Epstein files,” part of a broader online campaign aimed at undermining support for the war.

The animation depicts President Donald Trump… pic.twitter.com/PdjcJGrjuy

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) April 9, 2026

❖

The US and Israel have so normalised the assassination of national leaders that the mainstream press now discuss it as a standard military tactic. The other day The Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen arguing that the US should “carry out a final barrage of leadership strikes, eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations”.

“Iran’s leaders must be made to understand that their lives literally depend on reaching a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking. If they refuse to do so, they will be killed,” Thiessen writes.

At some point one of America’s enemies is going to assassinate a US official and my replies are going to be full of shrieking, outraged Americans acting like I’m the bad guy when I say Washington had it coming.

❖

Even if the US wasn’t directly responsible for the Strait of Hormuz situation, it would still be the last country on earth with any business whining about it. They’re openly imposing a fuel blockade on Cuba while complaining that nobody should be allowed to block shipping lanes, for Christ’s sake.

❖

The Democratic National Committee voted to reject a resolution denouncing the influence of AIPAC in US politics. Eighty percent of Democrats have a negative view of Israel today. The DNC’s main function is to keep the Democratic Party and its representation on the ballot from reflecting the will of the public.

❖

pic.twitter.com/K0kNiJYbKs

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 14, 2026

Dear Trump supporters, send me all of your money. I have a plan to make America great again. I will end all the wars and drain the swamp. Don’t worry if it looks like I’m not doing any of those things, I’m playing 4d chess, trust the plan. Send me your life savings right now.

❖

It’s important not to let them pin this all on Trump, in the same way it’s important not to let them pin Israel’s crimes on Netanyahu. Everything we are seeing with this disastrous Iran war is the product of the entire power structure which gave rise to it, not one guy’s dopey decisions.

The warmongers in the DC swamp have been pushing war with Iran for decades. Trump is just the guy who was chosen by Zionist oligarchs and bloodthirsty empire managers to carry out the deed. He happens to be the face on the operation, but if it wasn’t him it would have been someone else.

American warmongering insanity didn’t start with Trump, and it isn’t going to end with him either. Don’t direct your rage merely at the fleeting puppets who come and go from the imperial stage as the US murder machine trudges onward. Direct it at the empire itself.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/caitlin-johnstone-i-hope-the-us-loses-and-the-empire-collapses/