On Sunday morning Iran fired missiles and drones at Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait. Euronews covered it under a headline that knows exactly where history begins: "Iran attacks Gulf states to impose its Hormuz battle lines." * Read it again. "Iran attacks" — full stop, no antecedent, no because. And then a bonus gift: "to impose its Hormuz battle lines," a motive, helpfully supplied by the headline desk. Iran gets the action and the intention in nine words. What it doesn't get is a "following." * Now look at the story's web address — the part of an article nobody polishes, because nobody thinks you'll read it. It ends: "...following-us-strikes." Following. US. Strikes. The URL is minted from the story's first draft, and the first draft knew what Sunday morning was following. Somewhere on the way to the published headline, the American half of the causal chain fell off the sentence. * To be fair: the article itself is honest. Its opening line says Iran attacked "in response to US airstrikes the night before" — which were themselves a response to Iran hitting a ship in the strait. It's responses all the way down; in this war, everybody is somebody's "following." Which is exactly why the spot where a headline starts the clock isn't a space-saving decision. It's the editorial. * It fits, by the way. CNN, one day earlier, kept its clause: "US strikes Iran after ship attack in Strait of Hormuz." Six extra words, and suddenly the reader knows the missiles didn't fall out of a clear blue sky. Euronews had those words. They're still fossilized in its own link. The headline traded them for "battle lines." * And most people never click. They read the headline in a push alert, in a feed, over a shoulder on the Luas — and this one tells them the war restarted Sunday morning, in Tehran, unprovoked. The full sentence is one click deep. The first draft of the full sentence is still sitting in the address bar.