Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

A US intervention in Iran appeared imminent this week. US and UK troops were pulled out of several bases around the Middle East, US military assets had been moved into position and the US president, Donald Trump, had reassured protesters on the streets of Iran that “help is on its way”.

But then the US president told reporters on the afternoon of January 14 that he had received information from “very good sources” that “the killing has stopped” and that planned executions of protesters would not now proceed.

So where does this leave the protest movement in Iran? In two and a half weeks of protests across the country, more than 2,500 people are reported to have been killed and more than 18,000 people arrested. The theocratic regime which has ruled the country since the 1979 revolution has been shaken to its core, but – like on several occasions in the past 25 years – appears to have survived yet another nationwide wave of protest and dissent from a population that overwhelmingly rejects its oppressive governance.

We speak to Scott Lucas, an expert in Middle East politics at University College Dublin, who addresses several key issues.

Do you think a US intervention in Iran is now off the cards?

I hate to make this a story about Donald Trump. It should focus on the important people – the Iranians who are risking their lives to pursue rights and reforms – but here goes.

The logical approach for any US administration considering intervening in a situation like this is to consider both the situation inside Iran as well as the regional dynamics. But the US president does not act logically. He’s a mess of contradictions, wanting to be a bully and a “president of peace” at the same time.

So he blusters for days that he will unleash the US military on Iran’s regime. But he’s also seduced by signals from Tehran that it is willing to enter negotiations with him.

On Wednesday, Trump officials let European and Israeli counterparts know that US strikes are imminent. But Iran’s leaders send another signal: we have stopped killing protesters and we will not execute them. So Trump goes back into his “maybe they will speak to me as the president of peace” mode. So the strikes have been suspended.

Avoiding what could have been a disastrous confrontation between the US and Iran is a relief for the region – and the wider world. But the Iranians risking their lives on the streets will feel abandoned and discouraged.

There have been several waves of protest this century. Are things any different this time?

I think of these nationwide protests, going back more than 25 years, as waves hitting the Iranian shore. There was a first wave in 1999, which began in the universities, for political and social freedoms. Ten years later, there was a far larger wave – the largest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution – after the regime manipulated the 2009 presidential election.

In 2019, the protests were over economic conditions, particularly the prices of petrol, food and essential goods. It was only three years until the next wave, the 2022 marches which lasted for months for “women, life, freedom”.

On each occasion, through the combination of deadly force, detentions, cut-off communication and decapitation of the opposition’s leadership, the regime has quelled the public displays. But both the discontent and the desire for freedoms are below the surface, waiting to propel another wave.

That in December 2025 came the catalyst of the collapsing currency, which fed an inflation threatening both households and vendors. However, the wider aspirations of many Iranians soon expanded this into a renewed challenge to the regime’s legitimacy.

Ali Khamenei is already reportedly planning his retirement. How does the Islamic Republic adapt if it wants to survive?

Personally, I don’t think the supreme leader will quit until he is too ill to carry on. So while less prominent on a daily basis, he is still head of the regime for the foreseeable future.

The other question is even easier to answer because the regime has given its response. It does not adapt: it refers to the same political playbook which it has used since the first big wave of student protests in 1999. Intimidate the opposition and the protesters. Detain them. Abuse them. Force them to “confess”. Kill them if necessary. Restrict communications.

And then call out your supporters to the streets. Use state media and your spokespeople – one of them, the main unofficial English-language talking head, is a former colleague from the University of Birmingham, Seyed Mohammad Marandi – to insist that genuine Iranians back the regime and that the protesters are puppets of the US and Israel.

Israel and the Arab states advised Trump against a US intervention. Why?

While Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the other Gulf States benefit from a weakened Iranian regime, they do not want one which collapses without an obvious successor.

Paradoxically, they also know that US military intervention could strengthen the Iranian leadership. Since 1999, the regime has relied on portrayal of its opponents as American and Israeli agents. An American attack strengthens that narrative.

But the fundamental calculation is likely that a US assault will result in instability throughout the region. Iran might retaliate against American positions or those of the Gulf States. It could threaten the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of seaborne LNG (liquefied natural gas) and 25% of oil passes. While its allies in the Middle East have been weakened, from Hezbollah to the Houthis, there still could be consequences in Lebanon, Yemen, and other countries.

Could Reza Pahlavi unify the country or provide an interim solution?

I’m sceptical about parachuting the late Shah’s son into Iran as its “leader”, whether on the throne or another seat of power. He left the country at age 18 in 1979. Since then, having declared himself Shah and leader of a government-in-exile, he has forged ties with monarchist groups, but has been rejected by others in the opposition.

Some Iranian diaspora groups and their overseas supporters are fervent proponents of Pahlavi, and some inside Iran no doubt would favour him as an option. But from talking to my personal contacts, and all the evidence you see reported in the media, and in surveys such as the one published in The Conversation on January 12, most Iranians are not looking for a return to the monarchy.

People also know from the experience of neighbouring Iraq in 2003, that imposing a leader from outside may not work out well. The US-supervised administration under Ahmad Chalabi, who – like Pahlavi – had spent more than 40 years outside the country, soon collapsed. Iraq went through an insurgency and civil war in which hundreds of thousands were killed.

That raises a wider, more important issue in which Pahlavi should be set aside. For all the scale and potential of the protests, the opposition does not have the organisation for its political, social and economic ambitions. The regime has seen to that with its decapitation strategy, imprisoning prominent activists from all spheres of Iranian society. How can protesters and the opposition be supported in developing that organisation?

The regime has imprisoned a number of popular democracy figures – could any of them be a credible leader?

I don’t think of this in terms of a “leader” but in terms of the organisation to which I just referred.

Long-time political prisoners include politicians such as Mostafa Tajzadeh, the former interior minister who has been behind bars for most of the past 16 years. Then there are human rights activists such as Nobel peace laureate Narges Mohammadi and Majid Tavakoli. There are also lawyers such as Nasrin Sotoudeh, as well as unionists, students and journalists.

Mir Hossein Mousavi was prime minister between 1981 and 1989 (when the regime abolished the role) and the man who reportedly led the first round of the 2009 presidential election, before the regime’s intervention. Mousavi has been under strict house arrest with his wife the artist, academic and activist Zahra Rahnavard, since February 2011.

Mousavi’s release would be important symbolically. Freedom for others would be a practical boost to the opposition: they could provide the makings of an organised movement which could engage the regime for the changes needed for political, economic and social space.

That is why, rather than headlining Donald Trump’s bluster about military action, I wish people would focus on releasing these prisoners as well as opening up communications within Iran, and between Iran and the outside world.

Scott Lucas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Iran protests: Trump stalls on US intervention leaving an uncertain future for a bitterly divided nation – expert Q&A – https://theconversation.com/iran-protests-trump-stalls-on-us-intervention-leaving-an-uncertain-future-for-a-bitterly-divided-nation-expert-qanda-273501

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alex Fisher, Society for Applied Philosophy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Leeds

Many women have experienced severe distress as Grok, the AI chatbot on social media site X, removed clothing from their images to show them in bikinis, in sexual positions or covered in blood and bruises. Grok, like other AI tools, has also reportedly been used to generate child sexual abuse material.

In response, the UK government has announced it will bring forward the implementation of a law, passed in June 2025, banning the creation of non-consensual AI-generated intimate images. Following bans in Malaysia and Indonesia, Grok has now been updated to no longer create sexualised images of real people in places where it is illegal, which will include the UK.

Read more:
What can technology do to stop AI-generated sexualised images?

X’s owner, Elon Musk, has claimed the UK government wants “any excuse for censorship”. The media regulator, Ofcom, is also conducting an investigation into whether X’s activities broke UK law.

Some X users have minimised the harm these “undressed” and “nudified” images cause, describing them as “fake”, “fictional”, “very realistic art at most” and “no more real than a Tom & Jerry cartoon”.

You might think that AI-generated and edited images only cause harm through deception – fake images mislead us about real events. But how can images that everyone knows aren’t real cause harm?

The sexualised content of undressed images is not real, even if they are based on genuine photos. But these images are highly realistic. This, along with the misogyny motivating their creation, is sufficient to cause significant psychological distress to victims.

How ‘undressed’ images harm

MP Jess Asato and other victims report an uncanny feeling at seeing undressed images of themselves: “While of course I know it’s AI, viscerally inside it’s very, very realistic and so it’s really difficult to see pictures of me like that,” Asato told the BBC.

Research in philosophy and psychology can help explain this experience. Think about looking down from a tall building. You know you are completely safe, but might still feel terrified of the drop. Or you watch a horror film, then feel on edge all night. Here, your emotions are “recalcitrant”: you feel strong emotions that clash with what you believe to be true.

Seeing oneself digitally undressed generates powerful recalcitrant emotions. People strongly identify with their digital appearance. And a “nudifed” image really looks like the subject’s body, given it is based on a real picture of them.

So, while knowing these images are fake, their realism manipulates the victim’s emotions. They can feel alienated, dehumanised, humiliated and violated – as if they were real intimate images shared. This effect may worsen as AI-generated videos provide ever more realistic sexual content of users.

Research shows that the nonconsensual sharing of nude or sexual images is “associated with significant psychological consequences, often comparable to those experienced by victims of sexual violence”.

Besides the psychological impact of undressed images, users also feel horrified at the very real motivations behind them. Someone felt entitled to sexualise your photo, directing Grok to strip away clothing and reduce you to a body without consent. Publicly bombarding women with these images exerts control over how they present themselves online.

Sexual deepfake videos and undressed images – whether of celebrities, politicians or members of the public – target women for humiliation. The misogynistic mindset behind these images is real and familiar, even if their content is not.

Read more:
Taylor Swift deepfakes: new technologies have long been weaponised against women. The solution involves us all

Virtual harms

The distress caused by “undressed” images resembles another prevalent form of digital misogyny: the assault and harassment of women in virtual worlds. Many women in online virtual reality environments report their avatars being assaulted by other users – a common issue in video games that is worsened as virtual reality (VR) headsets present an immersive experience of being assaulted.

Whistleblowers have claimed Meta has suppressed the lack of child safety on its VR platform, with girls as young as nine frequently harassed and propositioned by adult men. Meta denies these allegations. A company spokesperson told the Washington Post that Meta’s VR platform has safety features to protect young people, including default settings that allow teen users to communicate only with people they know.

Virtual assault is also often dismissed as “not real”, even though it can cause similar trauma to physical assault. The realistic appearance of virtual reality, strong identification with one’s avatar and the misogynistic motivations behind virtual assault enable it to cause serious psychological harm, even though there is no physical contact.

These cases show how misogyny has evolved with technology. Users can now create and participate in realistic representations of harm: undressed images, deepfake videos, virtual assault and the abuse of chatbots and sex dolls based on real people.

These forms of media cause significant distress, but are slow to be regulated as they don’t physically harm victims. Banning social media like X isn’t the solution. We need proactive regulation that anticipates and prohibits these digital harms, rather than enacting laws only once the damage is done.

Victims undressed by Grok or assaulted in virtual worlds are not being “too sensitive”. It is a mistake to dismiss the real psychological impact of this media just because the images themselves are fake.

Alex Fisher has received research funding from The Society for Applied Philosophy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Aristotelian Society, and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

– ref. How AI-generated sexual images cause real harm, even though we know they are ‘fake’ – https://theconversation.com/how-ai-generated-sexual-images-cause-real-harm-even-though-we-know-they-are-fake-273427

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Enrique Gaztanaga, Professor of Astrophysics at Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth

Wormholes are often imagined as tunnels through space or time — shortcuts across the universe. But this image rests on a misunderstanding of work by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.

In 1935, while studying the behaviour of particles in regions of extreme gravity, Einstein and Rosen introduced what they called a “bridge”: a mathematical link between two perfectly symmetrical copies of spacetime. It was not intended as a passage for travel, but as a way to maintain consistency between gravity and quantum physics. Only later did Einstein–Rosen bridges become associated with wormholes, despite having little to do with the original idea.

But in new research, my colleagues and I show that the original Einstein–Rosen bridge points to something far stranger — and more fundamental — than a wormhole.

The puzzle Einstein and Rosen were addressing was never about space travel, but about how quantum fields behave in curved spacetime. Interpreted this way, the Einstein–Rosen bridge acts as a mirror in spacetime: a connection between two microscopic arrows of time.

Quantum mechanics governs nature at the smallest scales such as particles, while Einstein’s theory of general relativity applies to gravity and spacetime. Reconciling the two remains one of physics’ deepest challenges. And excitingly, our reinterpretation may offer a path to doing this.

A misunderstood legacy

The “wormhole” interpretation emerged decades after Einstein and Rosen’s work, when physicists speculated about crossing from one side of spacetime to the other, most notably in the late-1980s research.

But those same analyses also made clear how speculative the idea was: within general relativity, such a journey is forbidden. The bridge pinches off faster than light could traverse it, rendering it non-traversable. Einstein–Rosen bridges are therefore unstable and unobservable — mathematical structures, not portals.

Nevertheless, the wormhole metaphor flourished in popular culture and speculative theoretical physics. The idea that black holes might connect distant regions of the cosmos — or even act as time machines — inspired countless papers, books and films.

Yet there is no observational evidence for macroscopic wormholes, nor any compelling theoretical reason to expect them within Einstein’s theory. While speculative extensions of physics — such as exotic forms of matter or modifications of general relativity — have been proposed to support such structures, they remain untested and highly conjectural.

Two arrows of time

Our recent work revisits the Einstein–Rosen bridge puzzle using a modern quantum interpretation of time, building on ideas developed by Sravan Kumar and João Marto.

Most fundamental laws of physics do not distinguish between past and future, or between left and right. If time or space is reversed in their equations, the laws remain valid. Taking these symmetries seriously leads to a different interpretation of the Einstein–Rosen bridge.

Rather than a tunnel through space, it can be understood as two complementary components of a quantum state. In one, time flows forward; in the other, it flows backward from its mirror-reflected position.

This symmetry is not a philosophical preference. Once infinities are excluded, quantum evolution must remain complete and reversible at the microscopic level — even in the presence of gravity.

The “bridge” expresses the fact that both time components are needed to describe a complete physical system. In ordinary situations, physicists ignore the time-reversed component by choosing a single arrow of time.

But near black holes, or in expanding and collapsing universes, both directions must be included for a consistent quantum description. It is here that Einstein–Rosen bridges naturally arise.

Solving the information paradox

At the microscopic level, the bridge allows information to pass across what appears to us as an event horizon – a point of no return. Information does not vanish; it continues evolving, but along the opposite, mirror temporal direction.

This framework offers a natural resolution to the famous black hole information paradox. In 1974, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes radiate heat and can eventually evaporate, apparently erasing all information about what fell into them — contradicting the quantum principle that evolution must preserve information.

The paradox arises only if we insist on describing horizons using a single, one-sided arrow of time extrapolated to infinity — an assumption quantum mechanics itself does not require.

If the full quantum description includes both time directions, nothing is truly lost. Information leaves our time direction and re-emerges along the reversed one. Completeness and causality are preserved, without invoking exotic new physics.

These ideas are difficult to grasp because we are macroscopic beings who experience only one direction of time. On everyday scales, disorder — or entropy — tends to increase. A highly ordered state naturally evolves into a disordered one, never the reverse. This gives us an arrow of time.

But quantum mechanics allows more subtle behaviour. Intriguingly, evidence for this hidden structure may already exist. The cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the Big Bang — shows a small but persistent asymmetry: a preference for one spatial orientation over its mirror image.

This anomaly has puzzled cosmologists for two decades. Standard models assign it extremely low probability — unless mirror quantum components are included.

Echoes of a prior universe?

This picture connects naturally to a deeper possibility. What we call the “Big Bang” may not have been the absolute beginning, but a bounce — a quantum transition between two time-reversed phases of cosmic evolution.

In such a scenario, black holes could act as bridges not just between time directions, but between different cosmological epochs. Our universe might be the interior of a black hole formed in another, parent cosmos. This could have formed as a closed region of spacetime collapsed, bounced back and began expanding as the universe we observe today.

If this picture is correct, it also offers a way for observations to decide. Relics from the pre-bounce phase — such as smaller black holes — could survive the transition and reappear in our expanding universe. Some of the unseen matter we attribute to dark matter could, in fact, be made of such relics.

In this view, the Big Bang evolved from conditions in a preceding contraction. Wormholes aren’t necessary: the bridge is temporal, not spatial — and the Big Bang becomes a gateway, not a beginning.

This reinterpretation of Einstein–Rosen bridges offers no shortcuts across galaxies, no time travel and no science-fiction wormholes or hyperspace. What it offers is far deeper. It offers a consistent quantum picture of gravity in which spacetime embodies a balance between opposite directions of time — and where our universe may have had a history before the Big Bang.

It does not overthrow Einstein’s relativity or quantum physics — it completes them. The next revolution in physics may not take us faster than light — but it could reveal that time, deep down in the microscopic world and in a bouncing universe, flows both ways.

Enrique Gaztanaga receives funding from the Spanish Plan Nacional (PGC2018-102021-B-100) and Maria de Maeztu (CEX2020-001058-M) grants. Enrique Gaztanaga is also a Professor at the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC/IEEC) in Barcelona and publishes a science blog called DarkCosmos.com.

– ref. Wormholes may not exist – we’ve found they reveal something deeper about time and the universe – https://theconversation.com/wormholes-may-not-exist-weve-found-they-reveal-something-deeper-about-time-and-the-universe-272832