Author: MIL OSI Publisher

Asia Pacific Report

A West Papuan leader has accused the Indonesian government of lying over its operations and “masking” the military role of some civilian aircraft.

Disputing an Indonesian government statement about reported that TPNPB fired upon an aircraft in Boven Digoel, killing both the pilot and copilot, United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny said the aircraft was “not civilian”.

Benny Wenda said the Indonesian government was “tricking the world” about its military operations in West Papua.

“The Cessna plane the TPNPB [West Papua National Liberation Army] fired upon in Boven Digoel was not a civilian plane, as the police spokesman misleadingly stated, but part of a security operation,” Wenda said.

“Indonesia is again disguising their military activity as [civilian] activity. They are also willfully breaching the no-fly zones established by the TPNPB.”

The occupied conflict areas in which the Indonesian military TNI were “not permitted to fly” had been “clearly marked out by the TPNPB”.

“This is the same pattern Indonesia used in 1977, when Indonesia used a disguised civilian plane to bomb villages across the highlands and massacre thousands, including many members of my own family,” Wenda said.

Clear strategy
He added there was a clear strategy behind this — “Indonesia wants to avoid the attention that would be drawn by a large scale military buildup, so they mask their introduction of weapons and other military equipment and personnel”.

Wenda said they were effectively “using their own people as human shields”.

Indonesian soldiers and equipment next to a civilian aircraft. Image: ULMWP

The TPNPB attacks took place on February 11, with the plane being downed and the pilot and co-pilot being killed.

A second attack took place in Mimika, near the Grasberg gold and copper mine, which has been the cause of so much West Papuan deaths over the past 40 years.

“Indonesia then immediately began operating their propaganda machine, claiming that the planes were simply engaged in civilian and medical supply distribution,” Wenda said.

“The truth is that these aircraft were involved in intelligence and security operations.

Media blackout
“Indonesia is only able to spread these lies and mislead the international community because of their six-decades long media blackout in West Papua.

“No journalists or NGOs are allowed to operate in our land. West Papua is a closed society, just like North Korea. I thank God we have civilian journalists to document their lies.”

By breaching these rules the military were inviting further attacks, Wenda said.

“We must always remember that the Indonesian military uses any armed action by West Papuans for their own gain, as a pretext for more militarisation, more displacement, and more deforestation and ecocide.”

Wenda said their aim was always to escalate the situation as a way of ethnically cleansing Papuans, forcing them to become refugees in their own land, and strengthening their colonial hold over West Papua.

“It isn’t a coincidence that in the week since this incident we have seen an escalation in Yahukimo, an Indonesia-occupied community health centre, and transformed it into a military post, displacing and traumatising local residents.”

Using hospitals and other health infrastructure for military means was a clear breach of international humanitarian law, Wenda said.

Normal for military
In West Papua such behaviour was normal for the military.

“In the same week in Puncak regency, Indonesian military personnel seized a school, preventing students from learning and putting ordinary people at risk of harm. Soldiers are posted in classrooms with guns.”

Wenda called on the Indonesian government to withdraw their troops from occupied West Papua, allow civilians to return home, cease using civilian vehicles as a cover for military action, and immediately facilitate a UN Human Rights visit to West Papua — as has been demanded by more than 110 UN Member states.

“Ultimately, Indonesia must come to the table to discuss a referendum,” Wenda said. “This is the only path to a peaceful solution in West Papua.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/20/papuan-activist-wenda-accuses-jakarta-of-lying-over-shot-down-plane/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo Coghlan, Associate Professor, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, University of New England

When a royal faces scrutiny, it can feel like a rupture with tradition. Yet across the ages, British royals have repeatedly fallen under suspicion. What makes the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor so striking is that we have to reach back to the 17th century to find anything comparable.

The royals are by no means strangers to scandal, but allegations of law-breaking are another matter entirely. Mountbatten-Windsor’s fall from grace will have huge repercussions for the British royals, and it also gives us an insight into how the handling of the royals has changed since Queen Elizabeth’s death.

When the crown fell

This is not the first time the British royals have crossed paths with the law. In 1483, Richard III became associated with the disappearance of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower. The two princes were legitimate heirs and therefore direct threats to Richard’s claim to the throne. He was never tried in court, and historians still debate the evidence.

The most dramatic confrontation between monarchy and law came with Charles I. He was accused of treason during the English Civil War. He was arrested in 1649, tried and publicly executed. This act stunned Europe and shattered the belief royals were above the law.

As a consequence, England abolished the monarchy and became a republic under Oliver Cromwell. So the last time a member of the royal family was arrested and tried, the crown itself fell.

That precedent matters because it underscores how rare royal arrests are. For more than three centuries the monarchy has avoided that spectacle. The fact Andrew’s arrest forces comparison with Charles I reveals how rare the moment is.

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Reputation as royal strategy

By the 19th century, the monarchy survived less through force and more through reputation. Under Queen Victoria (1837-1901), the crown cultivated domestic virtue and moral seriousness as a shield against instability. Respectability became a strategic defence against scandal.

However, fame and power inevitably lead to very high public interest, and scandals made their way into print culture and later mass media. Prince Albert Victor, the grandson of Queen Victoria, was accused of being Jack the Ripper. It’s a claim historians have largely rejected as conspiracy theory, yet it persists because it speaks to fears about royal cover-ups.

James II was removed from the throne in 1688 during the Glorious Revolution amid claims he undermined Protestantism laws and promoted Catholic officials. His perceived abuse of power, rather than a single prosecutable crime, cost him the throne.

In the 20th century, Edward VIII generated a different kind of unease. After his abdication in 1936, evidence emerged of his sympathy toward Nazi Germany followed by his 1937 meeting with Adolf Hitler in Germany. While there was no prosecution, it did cause serious damage to Edward’s standing and public trust.

The collapse of deference

For much of the 20th century, the monarchy operated within a culture of deference. The press refrained from reporting royals’ private lives and indiscretions were quietly managed. The arrangement insulated the royal family from sustained exposure. However, this began to change after a series of scandals in the 1990s. This eventually led Elizabeth II to call 1992 her annus horribilis.

The rise of tabloid journalism eroded old boundaries, and digital media dissolved them entirely. Silence now intensifies suspicion rather than calming it, as was the case with royal silence about the Princess of Wales’ health in early 2024, forcing them to go public with her cancer battle.

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Influence, access and optics

Even before Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, the optics were damaging.

His arrest lands in this transformed landscape. During his tenure as the United Kingdom’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment, he cultivated relationships with political leaders and wealthy business figures across the Middle East and Central Asia. Critics questioned whether he blurred the line between official trade promotion and private networking.

The 2010 “cash for access” episode involving Mountbatten-Windsor’s wife Sarah Ferguson deepened that perception. She was filmed offering introductions to Andrew in exchange for substantial payment. Although she apologised and Andrew denied involvement, the imagery of monetised proximity to the crown was corrosive.

In 2021, an undercover investigation suggested the queen’s cousin Prince Michael of Kent was prepared to use his royal status to assist a fictitious company in exchange for payment. He denied wrongdoing, but the harm was done.

A brand without insulation

Under Elizabeth II, longevity conferred authority and steadiness that often softened scandal. Under Charles II, the institution appears more exposed. Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest disrupts and exposes the royal family to reputational damage. While he was later released, the scandal still has a long way to play out.

Charles is a constitutional monarch. He can’t interfere in police investigations or prosecutorial decisions without provoking a constitutional crisis. His authority is symbolic rather than executive.

But he can excise Andrew’s inner circle, including his daughters, further from public life. He has already stripped his brother of his royal titles and told him to leave his home, Royal Lodge.

Yet even that has limits. Charles’s power now rests less on control than on credibility. In a permanently watchful society, judgement is delivered not in private but in full view.

The precedent that lingers

The last time a reigning monarch was arrested, England abolished the monarchy and became a republic. The historical echo is impossible to ignore. It reminds us that when the crown becomes entangled with criminal process, the consequences resonate beyond the individual.

Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest underscores how fragile that trust can be and how decisively it is shaped by the court that really matters, that of public opinion. While Andrew is not the king, the scandal may have been softened if his brother Charles acted more decisevly and sooner to remove him from the inner circles of the monarchy.

Royal scandals chip away at the sense of mystery that has long protected the crown. The monarchy survives not because it holds real political power, but because it represents stability, dignity and something slightly removed from everyday life.

When royals are caught up in scandal, that sense of distance collapses, and the institution can begin to feel more fragile than untouchable.

– ref. Could Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest bring down the British monarchy? – https://theconversation.com/could-andrew-mountbatten-windsors-arrest-bring-down-the-british-monarchy-276508

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/20/could-andrew-mountbatten-windsors-arrest-bring-down-the-british-monarchy-276508/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin D. Muir, Casual Academic, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University

Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago, yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her.

This is how one Letterbox’d user described writer-director Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of Brontë’s classic tale.

Reviews for the film are mixed at best. While some critics have praised the visuals, detractors return to the same argument: it is not a good adaptation.

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Good adaptations take advantage of the affordances the cinematic medium provides, so some changes are permissible. Fennell goes well beyond this, altering essential characters, relationships and themes to the point that the film feels like erotic fan-fiction with a Hollywood budget.

To synopsise, Brontë’s story is a tragedy of intergenerational trauma. It follows Heathcliff, an abused serial abuser, and Catherine, an intergenerational manipulator. The pair’s toxic relationship – and mutual revenge on everyone they knew (beyond the grave in Catherine’s case) – wreaks havoc.

Visually loud, emotionally mute

Given its tagline “the greatest love story ever told”, Fennell’s film was destined to make some changes.

The frame narrative of the novel is missing. The novel is told through housekeeper Nelly Dean, who is recounting it to Heathcliff’s tenant, Lockwood. The film, meanwhile, starts in Catherine’s childhood and ends at her death.

This also means Fennell stops short of the final act of the novel. In doing so, she omits an entire generation of important characters on whom the original Catherine and Heathcliff – two traumatised, irredeemable wrecking balls – foist their damage.

The interpersonal dynamics that underpin Brontë’s story are warped into a vacuous caricature, missing the point with virtuosic flair. And make no mistake: there is flair. The visual design is bombastic, pointedly anachronistic, and utterly at odds with the novel’s gloomy Gothic countenance.

Brontë’s perpetually grey and haunted moors are swapped for technicolour highlights, elaborate outfits and, at times, saturated tangerine sunsets. It watches like Sofia Coppola attempting Edgar Allan Poe – or a Charli XCX clip (guess who wrote the original soundtrack). This is an odd liberty for a film named after the story’s original setting – the stormy Wuthering Heights estate.

As pioneering Gothic theorists Sanda Gilbert and Susan Gubar write, the Heights in the novel are blanketed by “a general air of sour hatred” that manifests as “continual, aimless violence”.

In the Gothic, setting functions as a haunted presence that reflects the characters’ aberrant psychological states. The past haunts, even when there are no ghosts.

Fennell’s version retains the melodrama, but not the foreboding, hate and malice. And despite the explicit sexuality (none of which appears in the novel beyond euphemism), her take on the story feels oddly toothless. Neutered, even. It trades Gothic for vaudeville.

The erasure of Hindley and Heathcliff

To say the film lacks the novel’s social commentary is an understatement.

From the opening scene, the changes to the source material are clear. We see a young Catherine witnessing a hanged man with an erection – and this tone remains for the entire runtime.

Hindley – Catherine’s brother who forces Heathcliff into servitude, and is arguably the lynchpin of Heathcliff’s revenge – is also entirely absent from the film.

Literary critic Terry Eagleton notes how it is Hindley’s inherited status that enables his abuse of Heathcliff. It is Heathcliff’s lack of wealth, status and property that sees Catherine wed the wealthy Edgar Linton; and, as theorist Arnold Kettle argues, it is Heathcliff’s weaponisation of wealth and inheritance that finally serves as his vehicle for revenge.

To remove these factors is to remove the novel’s entire moral framework.

In the film, Heathcliff’s grievances shrink to Catherine choosing to marry Edgar Linton. This is as close as the film comes to the novel’s treatment of classism, racism and intergenerational trauma.

Likewise, ending on Catherine’s death erases the consequences of the deuteragonists’ manipulations – namely the suffering of their respective children and servants.

The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has its own controversy. In the novel, Heathcliff’s ambiguous racial identity, within the context of Georgian England, shapes almost every interaction he has.

Even though it’s not clear what his racial identity is (some scholars point to hints that suggest he may have escaped from slavery), his character is defined by “othering”. This is something Elordi’s Heathcliff is at no risk of believably experiencing.

The film flattens the novel’s broader account of how trauma replicates across generations, and how systemic marginalisation can both attract and beget abuse.

On abuse – perhaps Fennell’s strangest departure from the source material is reframing Heathcliff’s treatment of Isabella (Edgar Linton’s sister and later Heathcliff’s wife) as a consensual BDSM dynamic.

Brontë’s Heathcliff terrorises Isabella physically and emotionally, and implicitly sexually, until she flees with their son.

The switch from repressed, complex desire in the novel to explicit sex scenes (absent from the book), and the rewriting of abuse as kink, seems to cater to audiences raised on post-50 Shades Of Grey erotica rather than Victorian Gothic.

Literary classics for a Tiktok generation

Like 2020’s colourful Austen adaptation, Emma (well received as a film, but criticised as an adaptation), Fennell’s Wuthering Heights signals a trend towards the “tiktokification” of literary adaptations.

Hollywood has long taken liberties with books, but this recent wave feels engineered for clips, reels and virality, rather than the necessary sacrifices of adaptation.

We know it’s possible to have adaptations with both flair and substance. Consider Baz Luhrmann. The Oscar-nominated Romeo + Juliet (1996) is just as visually bombastic, yet the extent of verbatim Shakespeare retains a dedication to the source that Fennell’s film lacks.

So what does it have to offer? Virality. Even this article contributes to the internet firestorm that will ensure Wuthering Heights’ commercial success. It will ragebait critics far longer than such a limp effort deserves – and we are all its victims.

– ref. Wuthering Heights looks lush – but it’s a bad film and a worse adaptation – https://theconversation.com/wuthering-heights-looks-lush-but-its-a-bad-film-and-a-worse-adaptation-276179

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/20/wuthering-heights-looks-lush-but-its-a-bad-film-and-a-worse-adaptation-276179/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Swain, Associate Lecturer in Theatre, The University of Melbourne

This story oscillates and swells around a glass outdoor table, on the porch of a family home on Larrakia land. A table almost identical to the one on my porch back home. I point this out to my sis as the bubbling opening night crowd pours into the Merlyn Theatre, in the Malthouse on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation.

I am a proud Dabee Wiradjuri person and theatre maker. My family’s table is held by cold Ngarigo Country, in the alpine plains where I grew up. A far cry from the salty humid air of Larrakia land where this table and this story are set. I do not know Larrakia Country well, only faint memories of glowing sky, crocs and giant mystical trees from when I visited family as a child.

But this table, I do know.

I wonder who else in this auditorium knows this table? Or what is their version of this table? Where do they and their people gather?

My table back home has held more cups of tea with my family than I can possibly count, summer storm watching, rain bird listening, laughter, tears and silence. If my understanding of this table is even somewhat similar to that of Larrakia mother, writer, director Jada Alberts, then my heart is in for a ride.

Around the Black Light table, we are met by four inimitable First Nations women and actors: Trisha Morton-Thomas (Nan), Rachael Maza (Aunty), Lisa Maza (Mum) and Tahlee Fereday (Bub).

Each of these women is holding the strength of the people and places that have come before and after them. The audience is also there with a lineage that has led us all to this very moment. I wonder how many people will go home and think of all the people and places that have come together in them?

Love and magic

Four women across three generations come together in the wake of an unnamed national crisis. There are allusions to climate disaster with regular power outages, unrest in the city and storms scoring the play. There are resonances of lockdowns from a not-so-distant past, or the possibility this is a crisis in a not-so-distant future.

Following a relationship breakdown, Bub has returned home from the bustle of the city with their children in tow. Nan’s memory is declining; Mum is always working; Aunty, Nan’s main carer, is lonely.

This is the first time in a long time they have all been together – and possibly the first time they have been forced to speak the unspeakable.

Morton-Thomas as Nan has us in the palm of her hand. When she giggles, we giggle. When she cries, we weep. She so beautifully carries us between worlds, dipping in and out of lucidity, the liminal, the here, the past and into a dreamscape of a beyond. We follow her as our guide through both the surreal and domestic non-linear form this play traversed.

“This is magic and magic is love,” Nan says. Tonight, there is a whole lot of love and undeniable magic.

On the topic of magic, the Maza sisters are a force to be reckoned with. Returning to the stage together for the first time in 17 years, the synergy of these real-life sisters playing fictional sisters is truly palpable. As they began to bicker for the first time, you can feel an energy spill across the audience: a collective strapping in.

The head-to-head, sarcastic side eyes from Aunty and deathly glares from Mum have the audience cackling. The comedy lulls us into a false sense of security, momentarily forgetting the ecological and familial crisis on the horizon.

Tahlee Fereday’s Bub embodies the state of being on the precipice of crisis. Bub is lost and needs to find their way back home. Nan repeats, “Just reach out bub” – Country is waiting.

I have the immense privilege of calling Tahlee a friend and colleague. In the real world, she is a laugh a minute. Here as Bub, Tahlee is grounded, authentic and captivating. Her delivery of the final monologue flaws me in its vulnerability.

Country speaks loudly

I cried before, during and after the show.

Before, reading Albert’s writer and director’s note honouring their grandmothers and generously inviting us to listen to Nan’s words:

I hope her words remind you of your own humanity, your interconnectedness, to every living thing and the Country that holds you.

During, between the laughs, as I experienced the brave truth telling and poetic reclamation of grief, trauma, love, loss and survival in the colonial project. Country speaks loudly: no words, but we heard her.

After, remembering – just like Albert’s – my own grandmother turns 90 this year. The staunch matriarch and pillar of my family. So much of her is in me, her love, her magic (which Nan says is the same thing).

I can’t wait to call my grandma and tell her all about this play.

As I write this now, I still feel as though my heart is on the outside of my body – “good ways”.

Thank you Jada, for sharing the story of your motherhood and the mothers who came before you. Thank you Malthouse for programming this work to open the 2026 season.

I know this will be one of those plays that stays with us another 17 years from now.

Black Light is at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, until March 7.

– ref. A love letter to Country: grief, motherhood and loss in Jada Alberts’ Black Light – https://theconversation.com/a-love-letter-to-country-grief-motherhood-and-loss-in-jada-alberts-black-light-275802

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/20/a-love-letter-to-country-grief-motherhood-and-loss-in-jada-alberts-black-light-275802/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Goodall, Emeritus Professor, Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University

Anyone who engages in serious dialogue with a Large Language Model (LLM) may get the impression they are interacting with an intelligence. But many experts in the field argue the impression is just that. In philosopher Daniel Dennett’s words, such systems display “competence without comprehension”.

The hype about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) from big corporations and their celebrity spokespersons has prompted a backlash, in which scepticism turns to cynicism, often tinged with paranoia about how “stochastic parrots” may start to control our lives.

“Intelligence” itself has become an overheated topic, one that calls for less assertiveness, more cool thinking, and refreshed attempts at a starting point.

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Review: What is Intelligence: Lessons from AI about Evolution, Computing, and Minds – Blaise Agüera y Arcus (MIT Press)

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What Is Intelligence? by Google luminary Blaise Agüera y Arcus is the first book in a new series from MIT in collaboration with Antikythera, a think tank focused on “planetary-scale computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force”. A foreword from series editor Benjamin Bratton makes the bold claim that “computation is a technology to think with” and that the building blocks of our reality are themselves computational.

Research on intelligence has a chequered history, tainted by eugenics, statistical manipulation and a banal obsession with metrics. Agüera y Arcas counters this by opening up the topic as wide as it can go. A physics graduate with a background in computational neuroscience, he is something of a polymath. He draws explanatory frameworks from microbiology, philosophy, linguistics, cybernetics, neuroscience and industrial history.

His book presents almost as a sequence of foundation lectures in these areas. Its release has been accompanied by dozens of online talks and interviews, in which Agüera y Arcas presents the case that we are up for a seismic shift in how we think about intelligence – biological and artificial.

“Few mainstream authors claim that AI is ‘real’ intelligence,” he writes. “I do.”

Could the nerds be right?

The fundamental case against the “I” in AI is that intelligence is organic, derived from sensory interaction with a physical environment. Agüera y Arcas turns the tables with the premise that computation is the substrate for intelligence in all life forms.

The claim builds on an apparently crude proposition: prediction is the fundamental principle behind intelligence and “may be the whole story”.

What he means by prediction here is something much more radical than what we see with autocorrect. He explains it in biological terms as a process of pattern development. Single cells like bacteria predict sequences of events that may influence their capacity for survival. The synaptic learning rules in single neurons give rise to local sequence prediction.

Agüera y Arcas recounts how his journey into the enigmatic terrain of AI reached a turning point with his counterintuitive recognition that “the nerds were right”: in computation, bigger really was better and might actually be the key to moving from Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – the kind that can play chess – to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which can participate in a philosophical discussion.

Setting aside his contempt for the apparently simplistic dedication to scaling up, Agüera y Arcas returned to the biology lab for a reassessment of what was observable in living systems. If every form of life is an aggregation of cooperative parts, he reasoned, the evolution of cells into organs and organisms may be a matter of predictive modelling.

A central tenet of What is Intelligence? is that every form of life is an aggregation of cooperative parts. Links proliferate through patterns that enable increasingly complex functions. When Agüera y Arcas says the brain is computational, it’s not a metaphor: it is not that brains are like computers, they are computers.

Correlations between biological and mechanical forms of intelligence are his deep and abiding interest. What is Intelligence? follows What is Life?, a shorter book in which Agüera y Arcas lays the groundwork for this larger, more ambitious publication.

The two questions remain interwoven, if not fused, in his analysis, which draws on the foundational work of physicist Ewin Schrödinger, mathematicians Alan Turing, John von Neumann and Norbert Weiner, and microbiologist Lynn Margulis.

These are the originators of modern thinking about artificial intelligence, and the quest for origins runs through all Agüera y Arcas’ lines of enquiry.

It is worth noting that Antikythera, the publishing series launched with this book, is named after an ancient device found in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece, which has been called the original analog computer.

Computation was discovered as much as it was invented, Bratton says in his foreword. This might apply to the Antikythera. If it is indeed the first computer, it was literally discovered at the bottom of an ocean.

But it corroborates Bratton’s statement in another sense. As a device for tracking astronomical phenomena, the Antikythera testifies to computation as an aspect of how the universe works.

Getting specific about origins

Agüera y Arcas wants to get more specific about origins. How does pattern emerge from randomness? How does code emerge from an unorganised soup of molecules?

In approaching these questions, he takes his cue from Turing and von Neumann, whose experiments anticipated the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953. The 1936 Turing machine established a minimalist prototype for computational function with the simple components of a coded tape and a read/write head. Von Neumann brought in a focus on embodied computation, where the components of the machine or body are part of what is written.

This is where Agüera y Arcas situates his work. His breakthrough came from adopting a programming language, devised in 1993, called “Brainfuck”. With just eight command symbols, Brainfuck set the parameters for a controlled experiment, in which Agüera y Arcas and his team used 64 byte tapes coded with “junk” drawn from a soup of code and data.

In the experiment, two tapes are selected at random, joined end to end, and run to test for interaction patterns. Then it’s rinse and repeat. The tapes are returned to the soup, and two more are run.

At first, nothing much shows up amidst the randomness. But after a million or so repeats (not massive in computing terms) the magic starts to happen. Loops appear. Patterns emerge. At around the five million mark, the non-functional code or “Turing gas” transforms itself into a “computorium” of replicating code.

In lectures, Agüera y Arcas shows a screenshot of this on his laptop: a vertical line down the centre of the field of data marks the “phase transition”. The image is reproduced on the cover of his book, as an emblem of the paradigm shift he is tracking.

If the transition to replicating code is indeed an expression of what is happening in the development of life forms, the theory of natural selection may lose its claim to primacy as the explanatory model for evolution. Richard Dawkins enthusiasts, hang on to your hats.

Agüera y Arcas does not engage in a polemical critique of Dawkins, but his book brings Margulis, an early adversary of Dawkins, into the centre of the arena. The pair faced off in a public debate in Oxford in 2009, where Dawkins’ popularised concept of the “selfish gene” came under pressure from Margulis’ theory of symbiogenesis, literally genesis through combination or fusion.

The Dawkins account is based on a Darwinian view of natural selection through competitive advantage; Margulis was drawing on research into the formation of microorganisms through combinations of mitochondria and chloroplasts, once independent life forms.

It was survival of the fittest versus a vision of biological complexity generated through endosymbiosis, a relationship in which one organism lives inside another, potentially resulting in a new life form – or, as Agüera y Arcas sees it, an impetus towards “fit” understood as pattern completion, rather than “fitness” understood as advantage.

Prediction and function

Agüera y Arcas’ central concepts are prediction and function, which work together to explain intelligence as the development of functional complexity through predictive pattern completion.

He is erasing a familiar conceptual boundary here: intelligence does not prompt function, it is function.

Intelligence, he argues, is a property of systems rather than beings, and function is its primary indicator. A rock does not function, but a kidney does. This is demonstrated simply by cutting them in half. The rock becomes two rocks, but the kidney is no longer a kidney.

So does a kidney have intelligence? Or an amoeba? Or a leaf? These questions are opened up, along with the question of whether Large Language Models have intelligence, which may a better way to frame it than asking whether they are intelligent.

Agüera y Arcas is not alone in taking an affirmative position. Influential biologist Michael Levin runs a research laboratory at Tufts University, where he and his team study the functional correlations between natural organisms and synthetic or chimeric life forms in search of “intelligence behaviour in unfamiliar guises”.

Their declared goal is to develop modes of communication with truly diverse intelligences, including cells, tissues, organs, synthetic living constructs, robots and software-based AIs.

Such an approach steers a course between the stochastic parrots view and biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance,” which proposes that organic form is a manifestation of memory, resonating through generations as genetic heritage. Agüera y Arcas avoids both Sheldrake’s intuitive and telepathic orientations, and the hard-headed constraints of mechanistic determinism.

The thesis presented in What is Intelligence? is unfamiliar rather than intrinsically difficult. Much of the explanation is easy enough for the general reader to follow, though Agüera y Arcas has a tendency to veer into more the technical and abstract terrain of programming, as if addressing an insider audience. The extensive glossary does not include standard programming terms, such as logic gates, gradients, weights and backpropagation.

At over 600 pages, What is Intelligence? is a marathon read and it is encumbered by tangential excursions. I’m not sure why Agüera y Arcas needs to go into the history of industrialisation, or anthropological studies of the Pirahā people of the Amazon. This is a book for dipping into rather than swallowing whole.

But its ideas are important. They may well be part of a major transformation in our thinking about where human intelligence sits in the rapidly evolving environment of AI.

– ref. Is AI really ‘intelligent’? This philosopher says yes – https://theconversation.com/is-ai-really-intelligent-this-philosopher-says-yes-271721

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/20/is-ai-really-intelligent-this-philosopher-says-yes-271721/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Simpson, Associate Professor in Criminology, Macquarie University

Australian policing has been in the spotlight in the past few weeks.

There were concerning scenes in New South Wales during protests against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit, while Queensland Police’s commitment to curtailing domestic and family violence was queried when a specialist unit was scrapped.

These issues might appear to be separate, but they both highlight a masculinity problem within Australian policing.

It may be time for an Australian version of the United Kingdom’s 2023 Baroness Casey Review, which exposed worrying behaviour and cultural issues inside the UK’s Metropolitan Police Service.

Violence and a lack of support

In Sydney, the policing of protesters against the visit of Herzog led to serious questions about the use of force.

Protesters were pepper sprayed and forcibly penned in by police, leaving a 69-year-old woman with four broken vertebrae.

Despite NSW Premier Chris Minns defending the actions of police in Sydney, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission announced last week its plans to investigate the violent clashes.

Meanwhile in Queensland, a tribunal revealed this month that the Queensland Police Service (QPS) had refused to discipline an officer accused of serious domestic violence against his heavily pregnant partner, citing “no tangible benefit” to doing so.

Less than a month earlier, the QPS scrapped its specialist domestic and family violence command unit.

This comes at a time when domestic and family violence incidents reported to police in Queensland increased by more than 220% between 2012 and 2024, with many victims left waiting hours or days for help.

Each of these events is of significant concern in its own right.

But put together, they present a far more troubling picture and raise the question of whether Australian policing has a problem with gender.

Not simply in how it responds to violence against women but in how an increasingly masculine institutional culture shapes what policing looks like, what it prioritises and ultimately who is protected.

Worrying cultures

Following the 2020 murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children by her former partner, and the 2021 Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce’s “Hear Her Voice” report, the Queensland government established a Commission of Inquiry into policing responses to domestic and family violence.

Its report found a culture of “sexism, misogyny and racism” across the service, with “negative attitudes towards women” that “inhibits the policing of domestic and family violence”.

In NSW, a 2023 Law Enforcement Conduct Commission review of police responses to domestic and family violence found such incidents account for 40% of all police work. That is around 500 incidents every day.

Yet, the review found basic failures in recording, training and victim support. It also found 60 officers were involved in domestic and family violence incidents. Some were investigated more than once.

In more than three quarters of cases, those officers were investigated by colleagues from their own command. In most, there was no record of whether their firearms had been removed.

In Victoria, 683 Victoria Police staff were investigated for alleged sex crimes and family violence offences between 2019 and 2024 – the majority of whom were uniformed officers. Chief Commissioner Shane Patton called the figure “alarming”.

This follows the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission’s 2015 Independent Review which found an “entrenched culture of everyday sexism” and a “high tolerance for sexual harassment” across the force.

These reports all identify cultures of misogyny, sexism and basic operational failures in responding to violence against women.

But what none of them quite names is what sits behind all of it: men, and a deeply entrenched culture of masculinity.

As Amanda Keddie – a Deakin University professor who has researched gender equality in police forces – argues, the hierarchical and masculinised cultures within policing have been “taken for granted and unquestioned”.

They remain unnamed in report after report, even as they shape every failing those reports describe.

The UK’s problems were exposed

The UK’s Baroness Casey Review gets closer to naming it.

Commissioned after the 2021 abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan Police officer, Casey found a rampant “boys’ club culture” that privileged white male officers while sidelining women, Black and gay colleagues.

She found “some of the worst cultures, behaviours and practices” were in the Met’s specialist firearms units, where “normal rules do not seem to apply”.

At the same time, services for violence against women and girls were hollowed out, with rape kits stored in broken freezers held shut with bungee cords.

Casey called it “symbolic of an organisation that has lost its way”.

The Met had been shaped by men, for men.

What can be done?

Australia is not the UK. But the patterns are unmistakable.

A culture of masculinity isn’t an abstract concept.

It is visible in the tactical, coercive and militarised policing of protesters in Sydney.

It is visible in the decision to scrap a specialist domestic violence command in Queensland while demand surges.

And it is visible every time an officer who perpetrates violence against women is investigated by his own colleagues.

As Keddie writes:

gender inequality will not be addressed without transforming the hierarchical and masculinised cultures of policing organisations.

The Casey Review offers a blueprint: specialist units for violence against women, independent oversight of police-perpetrated abuse and mandatory standards on vetting and misconduct.

In Australia, this means working to systemically change police cultures that were built by, and for, a narrow demographic which does not reflect the diversity of the communities they are meant to serve.

It means resourcing specialist domestic violence commands rather than dismantling them, holding officers who perpetrate violence to account, and recruiting and promoting in ways that genuinely reshape who polices and how.

– ref. Australia’s masculine policing culture is failing women and children – https://theconversation.com/australias-masculine-policing-culture-is-failing-women-and-children-276176

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/20/australias-masculine-policing-culture-is-failing-women-and-children-276176/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

The stunning arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor by UK police on suspicion of misconduct in public office must have chilled many powerful American men to the bone. They may now wonder: could something like this now happen in the US?

The former prince’s arrest is related to his association with dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and allegations he shared confidential material. Andrew has consistently denied wrongdoing and has been released under investigation.

To see UK police making arrests over allegations relating to Epstein contrasts strongly with the US where, so far, little has happened to further investigate those linked to the disgraced financier.

So, will we now see stronger Epstein-related investigative efforts and possibly even arrests in the US? And why haven’t we seen anything like that, so far?

Will this actually prompt stronger action in the US now?

It’s possible. The whole situation is fairly unpredictable, and there has been mounting pressure on people named in the Epstein files to resign or step aside, particularly in higher education.

In Congress, US lawmakers are pushing hard for accountability.

It’s important to remember the collapse of the rule of law in the US is far from inevitable.

The Epstein story still has a long way to play out yet, if only because of the weight of the documentary evidence that needs to be sorted through.

It’s also possible the arrest and potential prosecution of Mountbatten-Windsor (and others outside the UK) may end up revealing more from the Epstein story than has come out of the Department of Justice (DOJ) releases, which have been selective.

If the Mountbatten-Windsor case goes to trial – which is still far from certain – and as the scandal reverberates across Europe, that may end up circumventing efforts we have seen so far from the DOJ to slow-walk the release of Epstein-related documents and information.

Why haven’t big arrests like this happened in the US so far?

The most obvious reason is the stranglehold the Trump administration has on the DOJ.

The performance of the attorney-general, Pam Bondi, in the recent judiciary committee hearing is a fair indication of that.

To have the attorney-general – instead of being accountable and answering legitimate questions about the Epstein files – waxing lyrical about US President Donald Trump being the greatest president in American history tells you a lot about the political capture of that department.

Another extremely unsubtle sign of that capture is the large banner featuring Trump’s face that has just been slung across the Justice Department building.

All this tells you the DOJ is not an independent government department anymore. It has been captured and weaponised by the Trump administration.

It’s the same story at the FBI; instead of taking strong action over revelations appearing the Epstein files, the agency appears to be focused on investigating Trump’s claims about 2020 election “fraud” in Georgia.

That shouldn’t exactly be a surprise, given FBI Director Kash Patel wrote a series of children’s books depicting Trump as an unjustly wronged “king”.

The unfortunate truth is there’s no satisfactory answer as to why no significant arrests have been made in the US in relation to the Epstein files.

It’s partly the Trump administration’s capture of these agencies and departments.

But it’s also that the Epstein scandal implicates so many of the powerful in the US. These are enormous networks that span political divides, including some of the richest people in the world. And, of course, they’re very good at protecting themselves.

It’s also a marker of Trump’s capture of his political base. Viewed from the outside, it defies logic. You’d think a movement that coalesced around conspiracy theories there was a powerful cabal of paedophiles at work in the US would be loudly calling for arrests after the Epstein revelations.

The fact they’re not shows how ingrained their loyalty is, and the depth of the personality cult that has developed around Trump.

This base is far from a majority of the American people, but it is one that has – for now at least – largely captured the major levers of power in the US.

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So following Andrew’s arrest, will anything happen in the US? It’s possible, but don’t hold your breath.

The other major news is it now looks increasingly likely Trump is about to start a war in Iran.

It’s common for people to say he does things like that to distract from the Epstein story.

But I see his efforts in Iran (and Venezuela, and elsewhere) as part of a concerted effort to radically reshape American society and the United States’ role in the world. It’s about the reassertion of American power – which Trump understands to mean his own power.

The president unilaterally declaring a war on Iran without the ascent of Congress would defy the law. This is all part of a broader pattern of the Trump administration’s attacks on rule of law and the institutions charged with implementing it.

Overall, Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest throws into stark relief the state of the US compared to other democracies like the UK.

What’s happened in the UK shows the collapse of the rule of law is not inevitable. Institutions can hold, even if they they are slow and deeply flawed.

Perhaps we will one day see institutions in the US working as they are supposed to, too.

– ref. Andrew’s arrest: will anything like this now happen in the US? Why hasn’t it so far? – https://theconversation.com/andrews-arrest-will-anything-like-this-now-happen-in-the-us-why-hasnt-it-so-far-276512

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/20/andrews-arrest-will-anything-like-this-now-happen-in-the-us-why-hasnt-it-so-far-276512/