Mercedes-Benz net profit nearly halves amid China, US woes


By AFP
February 12, 2026


Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang says the AI chip titan is working with Mercedes to put self-driving capabilities into some of its electric cars - Copyright AFP Patrick T. Fallon

Louis VAN BOXEL-WOOLF

German carmaker Mercedes-Benz reported Thursday its lowest annual profit since the Covid pandemic, as it counted the cost of US tariffs and cutthroat competition in China.

Net profit for 2025 was 5.3 billion euros ($6.3 billion), Mercedes said, down almost 49 percent from 2024 but better than had been expected in a poll of analysts by financial data firm FactSet.

“Amid a dynamic market environment, our financial results remained within our guidance,” chief executive Ola Kaellenius said, adding that he saw hope in over 40 new model launches planned for the next three years.

“We are moving forward with a clear game plan and a very competitive product portfolio,” he said.

The firm expects a similarly difficult 2026, however, with revenue projected to be around last year’s level of 132.2 billion euros.

Its core profit should be “significantly above” the 2025 figure thanks to an absence of one-off restructuring charges.

But at its core car business, Mercedes sees a profit margin this year of three to five percent — potentially weaker than the five percent it achieved last year.

Mercedes-Benz shares opened down 4.5 percent in Frankfurt but later recovered a bit, trading down 2.6 percent at midday, making it one of the worst performers in Germany’s blue-chip DAX index.



– ‘Once-in-a-hundred years transformation’ –



A storied company that traces its history back to Carl Benz inventing the first motor car in 1885, Mercedes last year took a hit from US President Donald Trump putting tariffs on foreign carmakers.

Speaking on the earnings call, chief financial officer Harald Wilhelm said the duties introduced partway through last year had cost the company about 1 billion euros.

“It’s really a lot of money,” he said. “It’s going to go up in 2026 because we’ll have a full-year impact — It’s going to be a significant number.”

The duties came as the company was facing a triple whammy of cratering sales in China, stagnant demand in Europe and the costs of investing into electric cars despite patchy demand.

“The auto industry and our company, we’re in a once-in-a-hundred years transformation,” Kaellenius said on the call.

“It’s happening in an environment that is more dynamic than we have experienced in many, many years.”

China, the world’s biggest car market, has become a battleground for German carmakers amid a brutal price war and fierce competition from local players like BYD and Geely.

Mercedes-Benz’s sales by volume in China plunged 19 percent last year to their lowest level since 2016, helping drag overall worldwide sales down by 10 percent.

Wilhelm said that Mercedes-Benz expected to lose further sales in China despite new launches, and that difficulties in the market could further weigh on results.

“China is always, I think, unforeseeable in terms of the intensity of the competitive environment,” he said. “It could be an element which could bring us even further down.”

Ubisoft targets new decade of ‘Rainbow 6’ with China expansion

By AFP
February 13, 2026


Investors were happy with Ubisoft. — © AFP/File Dimitar DILKOFF

Tom BARFIELD

Troubled French games giant Ubisoft will strive to project confidence this weekend with a massive esports event for its shooter “Rainbow Six Siege”, while hoping a reorganisation and expansion to China can keep the money rolling in.

“We’re stepping things up a lot for 2026 with China coming aboard,” said Francois-Xavier Deniele, head of marketing and esports for the franchise.

“The balance is going to change, we know that when they arrive in a game, they’re extremely competitive”.

Chinese internet giant TenCent has climbed aboard as an investor in “Rainbow Six” and Ubisoft’s other top-selling titles “Assassin’s Creed” and “Far Cry”.

The mega-franchises are stabled together in one of a string of new “creative houses”, supposed to offer the group’s development teams more financial and creative freedom after several years of financial woes, job cuts and a tumbling share price.

China is “a very, very mature market, a lot more mature even than (the West) for this kind of game,” Deniele said.

But TenCent’s billion-euro investment in exchange for a 26-percent stake in Vantage, finalised last November, suggests it believes in Ubisoft titles’ ability to hold their own.

With a $3-million prize pool, this weekend’s Ubisoft-organised invitational event in Paris for top teams is “a heck of a signal” that “shows we’re capable of packing the Adidas Arena,” Deniele said.

The Paris venue’s 8,000 seats are more often filled by basketball or music fans.

Chinese internet giant TenCent is investing in some of Ubisoft’s top games 

– Copyright AFP/File BERTRAND GUAY

In China, “it’s totally natural for the new generation to watch esports matches and play with their friends in PC bangs (cybercafes)… very similar to Korea,” Deniele said.

This year’s busy esports season for “Siege” follows on from last year’s revamp of its systems and graphics, which “laid the foundations for the 10 years ahead,” he added.

A team first-person shooter in the vein of genre classics like “Counter-Strike”, “Rainbow Six Siege” is one of Ubisoft’s biggest titles, rewarding coordinated tactical play and deft use of destructible environments.

– Fierce competition –

“Siege” has not escaped wobbles of its own in recent months.

Hackers gained access in December to systems that allowed them to ban or restore large numbers of accounts and manipulate the game’s cosmetic item marketplace — a key source of revenue.

In such cases “the community needs to be reassured very quickly”, Deniele said, crediting the “ultra-fast” reaction of the development team for the fact that “people came back to the game and were happy with what we were able to do”.

Developers must also ensure a steady pipeline of fresh content for today’s long-lived online games, with “Rainbow Six” facing competition from incumbents such as “Call of Duty”, “Valorant” or “Overwatch”.

New challengers are also constantly emerging onto the unforgiving field.

Wildlight Entertainment, developers of fantasy shooter title “Highguard”, which launched in January to great fanfare, on Wednesday announced layoffs from its small development team — leaving only a “core group” to maintain the game.

At this weekend’s “Rainbow Six” event “we’ll be announcing a quicker release schedule for content, because people want more and more”, Deniele said.

“It’s a game people play every day, so we have to get faster.”

‘Avatar’ and ‘Assassin’s Creed’ shore up troubled Ubisoft


By AFP
February 12, 2026


Ubisoft's star has fallen with investors in recent months

 - Copyright AFP GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT

Strong performances from major franchises including an “Avatar” tie-in game and juggernaut “Assassin’s Creed” buttressed struggling French games giant Ubisoft’s third-quarter results, the company said Thursday.

Revenue at 318 million euros ($380 million) in October-December had made for a “solid” period “exceeding our expectations” chief executive Yves Guillemot said in a statement.

Ubisoft’s star has fallen with investors in recent months, as it has weathered mixed reception for some new titles and announced a far-reaching restructuring and cost-cutting drive.

Shares in the group have lost almost 95 percent of their value in five years, booking their worst single-day performance in January with a 40-percent collapse.

Ubisoft reported Thursday that its preferred “net bookings” yardstick, which excludes revenue from deferred sales, climbed 12 percent year-on-year to almost 340 million euros in its third quarter.

The pace was still higher over the first nine months of the financial year, adding 17.6 percent to reach 1.1 billion euros.

Major contributors to sales growth included the latest instalment in the Assassin’s Creed series, released last year, and the “Avatar” film tie-in game — updated to coincide with the release of the James Cameron saga’s latest episode in December.

Ubisoft confirmed its January forecast of an operating loss of around one billion euros for the full financial year, sapped by multiple delays and cancellations announced alongside details of its restructuring.

Bosses’ woes are far from over, as the company this week faced a three-day strike by several hundred of its 3,800 French employees.

Triggers for the walkout included an end to work-from-home provisions.

Ubisoft’s restructuring will farm out many of its dozens of studios worldwide into an industry-first system of five “creative houses”, each dedicated to developing a different genre of game.

It also said in January that it was launching a third round of cost-cutting aimed at finding 200 million euros of savings over two years.

The company said the same month that it would look to slash up to 200 of around 1,100 positions at its Paris headquarters.

Such cuts follow studio closures elsewhere in its global network, including San Franciso, Osaka, Stockholm, Leamington in Britain and Canada’s Halifax.

France’s biggest games company, Ubisoft today has around 17,000 employees worldwide after shedding more than 3,000 in recent years.

Struggling brewer Heineken to cut up to 6,000 jobs


By AFP
February 11, 2026


Heineken's beer shipments fell 2.4 percent last year

 - Copyright ANP/AFP/File Freek VAN DEN BERGH

Under-pressure Dutch brewer Heineken said Wednesday that it would scrap up to 6,000 jobs as it faces what it called “challenging market conditions” with beer volumes down compared to last year.

The company said it would be “accelerating productivity at scale to unlock significant savings, reducing 5,000 to 6,000 roles over the next two years”.

“We remain prudent in our near-term expectations for beer market conditions,” chief executive Dolf van den Brink said in a statement.

Van den Brink stunned the company last month by announcing that he would be stepping down after almost six years at the helm.

He told reporters he was leaving with “mixed emotions” after acknowledging that he had guided the company “through turbulent economic and political times”.

“My priority for the coming months is to leave Heineken in the strongest possible position,” he said.

Heineken employs around 87,000 people globally.

In October, the brewer had already announced it was cutting or reassigning 400 jobs as part of a reorganisation of its Amsterdam head office to take advantage of new technologies.

Top executives declined to specify where the bulk of the job cuts would come, but chief financial officer Harold van den Broek hinted they would come in Europe.

“Europe is a big part of our business,” he told reporters. “And you see from the financial results also that it is very tough to drive a good operating leverage there.”

“So we are focusing many of the initiatives to strengthen our European business, but not exclusively so,” he said.

Beer volumes globally at the world’s second-biggest brewer after AB InBev were down 2.4 percent in 2025, the firm reported in its annual results.

The decline was especially severe in Europe and the Americas, which dropped 4.1 percent and 3.5 percent, respectively.

In the fourth quarter of last year, total global beer volumes were down 2.8 percent.

Total annual sales for Heineken came in at 34.4 billion euros ($41 billion), compared to the 36.0 billion it banked in 2024.

Net profits were 2.7 billion euros, which the firm said was a 4.9 percent gain on last year when currency fluctuations were stripped out.

Looking ahead to 2026, Heineken forecast full-year organic operating profit growth of two to six percent, after a 4.4 percent rise last year to 4.4 billion euros.

UK’s crumbling canals threatened with collapse

By AFP
February 11, 2026


The breach happened on the Llangollen Canal at Whitchurch in Shropshire - Copyright AFP Oli SCARFF

Stephen Conneely

On a misty winter’s day in the English midlands, engineers struggled to drag stranded narrowboats from a waterless, mud-filled canal that collapsed weeks earlier, in a delicate, multi-million-pound rescue operation.

The sight starkly illustrated an ongoing battle to maintain the UK’s historic, yet deteriorating, waterways.

Britain’s canal network “is facing pressure it has never faced before,” said Charlie Norman, director of campaigns at the Inland Waterways Association (IWA), an independent charity advocating for the upkeep of the UK’s canals and rivers.

“The entire canal network is vulnerable,” Norman added, pointing to the “increased effects of climate change” such as drought in the summer and heavy rain in the winter.

“Inadequate funding across the sector” has provoked an “overall deterioration” in the 4,700 mile-long (7,600 kilometre) network, they said.

Britain’s 200-year-old canal network was once the backbone of the country’s economic transformation during the Industrial Revolution, but is now crumbling, experts say.

About a dozen workers were overseeing the complex operation to rescue three narrowboats stranded in a canal in Whitchurch, on the English-Welsh border, last month.

Watching from an empty canal bank and wearing a high-viz jacket and white hard hat, was Julie Sharman, the chief operating officer of the Canal & River Trust –- a charitable organisation in charge of maintaining some 2,000 miles (3,200km) of waterways across England and Wales.

Behind her were two 20-tonne narrowboats waiting to be rescued by an imposing winch machine in a nearby field with the help of a specialist excavator.



– ‘Tough decisions’ –



“There’s no disguising the fact that we do need more money to look after our canal network,” she told AFP.

“People sometimes think canals are looked after by local authorities or by the government, and they’re not. They’re looked after by us, as a charity,” she said.

The trust is investigating the Whitchurch breach, but Sharman said “our engineers have to make tough decisions every week” about which projects to tackle and “there’s always a very long list of things we would want to do”.

“Small breaches and failures have happened since the canals were built,” she added, but “it’s rare to have a breach of this scale”.

In January 2025, there was an earlier canal collapse in Bridgewater, northwest England, which led to just under two miles of the canal being drained of water.

The Canal & River Trust, the largest authority, says its fixed annual grant of £52.6 million ($71.8 million) from the government, amounts to just 22 percent of its annual income, but that will reduce by five percent from 2027 for the next decade.

The rest, some 78 percent, is funded by the charity’s own investment and self-generated income, including user fees and fundraising, supported by thousands of volunteers.

Last week, the UK government pledged an additional £6.5 million funding for the trust “to help build long-term resilience across the network”.

“Our historic canals and waterways are not only world famous and precious to communities across the country — they are also a vital part of our national infrastructure,” said Water Minister Emma Hardy.

British Waterways, a statutory body of the UK government, ceased to exist in 2012 and handed maintenance of canals and rivers to a series of 144 navigation authorities.

It was believed the move would diversify funding potential allowing bodies to tap into government grants, commercial revenue and charitable donations.



– Transport, leisure, homes –



“Before canals, transporting goods across Britain was limited to horse and cart,” said historian Mike Clarke.

The advent of the canal greatly increased the nation’s capacity to transport goods.

After declining in use, “a restoration movement came about in the ’60s” and people began to live on canal houseboats, Clarke said.

Now more than 35,000 boats are registered with the Canal & River Trust, plying the network to transport goods or just for pleasure. And about 15,000 people are said to live on canal boats moored on the banks.

Matt Gibson, 52, moors his sage-green houseboat, bedecked with plants, on the Regent’s Canal near central London.

He moved in during the pandemic “to explore a different way of living”.

“I get a bit spooked when I can hear drunk people outside at night,” he told AFP. “I do love living here, though — I don’t need much more space to live”.

The United Nations said Friday it was deeply alarmed by the crisis unfolding in Cuba.

Fire at refinery in Havana as Cuba battles fuel shortages


By AFP
February 13, 2026


A fire at the Nico Lopes oil refinery in Havana - Copyright AFP YAMIL LAGE

A fire broke out Friday at a refinery in Cuba’s capital, threatening to compound the island nation’s struggles as it faces what amounts to a US oil blockade.

AFP observed a massive column of smoke rising from the Nico Lopez refinery in Havana Bay, though it was not known if the blaze was near the plant’s oil storage tanks.

Two Mexican navy ships arrived at the same harbor Thursday with more than 800 tons of much-needed humanitarian aid.

Cuba, already contending with a years-long economic crisis, has risked being plunged into darkness since US President Donald Trump vowed to starve the communist nation of oil.

The Caribbean country of 9.6 million inhabitants lost its main oil supply line when Trump last month ordered the ouster of Nicolas Maduro, the long-term leader of Cuban ally Venezuela.

Trump said no more Venezuelan oil would go to Cuba, and also threatened tariffs for any other country stepping in with crude supplies.

The island, under a US trade embargo since 1962, has for years been mired in a severe economic crisis marked by extended power cuts and shortages of fuel, medicine and food.

No foreign fuel or oil tanker has arrived in Cuba in weeks, experts in maritime transport tracking have told AFP.

Trump and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Miami-born son of Cuban immigrants, have made no secret of their desire to bring about regime change in Havana.

The Republican leader has said Cuba is “ready to fall.”

Emergency measures kicked in this week to conserve Cuba’s fast-dwindling fuel stocks. The government shuttered universities, reduced school hours and the work week, and slashed public transport as it limited fuel sales.

Staffing at hospitals was also cut back.

The United Nations said Friday it was deeply alarmed by the crisis unfolding in Cuba.

Two Mexican navy ships arrive with humanitarian aid for Cuba


By  AFP
February 12, 2026


The Mexican Navy ship ARM Papaloapan arriving in Havana Bay with humanitarian aid - Copyright AFP/File Mauro PIMENTEL

Two Mexican navy ships with more than 800 tons of humanitarian aid arrived in Cuba Thursday, as the island nation struggles under what amounts to a US blockade of oil deliveries.

President Donald Trump has vowed to starve Cuba of oil after the US military ousting of Nicolas Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, which had been the communist nation’s main supplier of the commodity.

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has protested against the humanitarian impact of Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on any country sending crude to Cuba, and promised to provide aid.

The ships Papaloapan and Isla Holbox, sent by Sheinbaum’s government, entered Havana Harbor on Thursday, an AFP team observed.

They are carrying fresh and powdered milk, meat, beans, rice and personal hygiene items, the Mexican foreign ministry says.

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Miami-born son of Cuban immigrants, have made no secret of their desire to bring about regime change in Havana.

The Republican leader has said Cuba is “ready to fall.”

The island of 9.6 million inhabitants, under a US trade embargo since 1962, has for years been mired in a severe economic crisis marked by extended power cuts and shortages of fuel, medicine and food.

It has now also been cut off from critical oil supplies from Venezuela — whose leader was toppled in a deadly US military strike last month — and from Mexico under the threat of US tariffs.

The resulting shortages have threatened to plunge Cuba into complete darkness, with power plants struggling to keep the lights on.

No foreign fuel or oil tanker has arrived in Cuba in weeks, experts in maritime transport tracking have told AFP.

Emergency measures kicked in on the island this week to conserve its fast-dwindling fuel stocks. The government shuttered universities, reduced school hours and the work week, and slashed public transport as it limited fuel sales.

On Monday, Sheinbaum said Trump’s “unfair” measures would “strangle” an already teetering economy.

Her country has been mulling how to send oil to Cuba without incurring punishing tariffs.

“We will continue supporting them (Cuba) and taking all necessary diplomatic actions to restore oil shipments,” Sheinbaum said Monday.

Tourists empty out of Cuba as US fuel blockade bites


By AFP
February 12, 2026


Cuba's tourism industry falters as country struggles amid US fuel blockade - Copyright AFP Paige Taylor White

Rigoberto DIAZ

With rolling power cuts, hotel closures, and flight routes suspended for lack of fuel, tourists are gradually emptying out of Cuba, deepening a severe crisis on the cash-strapped island.

Several nations have advised against travel to Cuba since the US tightened a decades-old embargo by choking vital oil imports.

“I found only one taxi,” said French tourist Frederic Monnet, who cut short a trip to a picturesque valley in western Cuba to head back to Havana.

“There might be no taxis afterward,” he told AFP.

A petroleum shortage has led to regular hours-long power cuts, long queues at petrol stations, and has forced many airlines to announce that they will cancel regular services.

About 30 hotels and resorts across the island are being temporarily closed due to low occupancy and fuel rationing, according to an internal Tourism Ministry document obtained by AFP.

Since January, a flotilla of US warships have stopped Venezuelan tankers from delivering oil to Cuban ports.

Washington has also threatened Mexico and other exporter with punitive tariffs if they continue deliveries.

Several Canadian and Russian airlines are sending empty flights to Cuba to retrieve thousands of otherwise stranded passengers, and others are introducing refuelling stops in the route home.

American tourist Liam Burnell contacted his airline to make sure he could get a flight back.

“There was a danger that I might not be able to return, because the airport says it doesn’t have enough fuel for the planes,” he said.



– ‘Critical, critical’ –



An absence of tourists is more than an inconvenience for the Cuban government.

Tourism is traditionally Cuba’s second major source of foreign currency, behind revenue from doctors sent abroad.

The revenue is vital to pay for food, fuel, and other imports.

And the 300,000 Cubans who make a living off the tourist industry are already feeling the pinch.

A hop-on, hop-off bus touring Havana’s sites on Thursday was virtually empty.

Horses idled in the shade of colonial buildings, waiting for carriages to fill with visitors.

“The situation is critical, critical, critical,” said 34-year-old Juan Arteaga, who drives one of the island’s many classic 1950s cars so beloved by tourists.

“There are few cars (on the street) because there is little fuel left. Whoever had a reserve is keeping it,” he said.

“When my gasoline runs out, I go home. What else can I do?” he said.

The island of 9.6 million inhabitants has faced hard times since the US trade embargo took hold in 1962, and in recent years the severe economic crisis has also been marked by shortages of food and medicine.

On Thursday, two Mexican navy ships arrived in Cuba with more than 800 tons of much-needed humanitarian aid — fresh and powdered milk, meat, cookies, beans, rice and personal hygiene items, according to the Mexican foreign ministry.

Musician Victor Estevez said because tourism has been “a lifeline for all Cubans…if that is affected, then we are really going to be in trouble.”

“The well-being of my family depends on me.”

The tourism sector had already been severely hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, experiencing a 70 percent decline in revenue between 2019 and 2025.

Tourism expert Jose Luis Perello said the island now faces the prospect of “a disastrous year.”

Charcoal or solar panels? A tale of two Cuba's

By AFP
February 10, 2026


Cuban vendor Elio Galvan sells charcoal to families who have begun cooking over open fires amid ever longer blackouts caused by fuel shortages - Copyright AFP Jim WATSON

Lisandra COTS

The US oil siege, which has worsened an already severe energy crisis, has created two classes of Cubans: those who use generators or solar panels to power their ovens, and those who have resorted to cooking over open fires.

On the side of a highway on the outskirts of Havana, vendors sell bags of charcoal and makeshift braziers, some fashioned from old washing machine drums.

“Everyone knows what’s coming. We don’t have fuel in the country; we have to find alternatives,” Niurbis Lamothe, a 53-year-old state employee, told AFP after buying a homemade stove.

“The shoe just got tighter than it already was,” commented another shopper who declined to give her name as she sized up a a bag of charcoal costing 2,600 pesos (US$5.25), roughly half the average monthly salary.

The woman, who has a young child, explained that her salary could not stretch to solar panels or a lithium battery to keep the lights on during power cuts of up to 12 hours a day.

“This is the most affordable way” to cook, she said as she loaded a sack of charcoal onto her electric motorcycle — the vehicle of choice for many Cubans given severe fuel shortages, which they charge when they have power.

Yurisnel Agosto, the 36-year-old charcoal merchant, confirmed that he “has never sold so much” of the fossil fuel.

Before, his customers were primarily pizzerias or grilled-meat restaurants, who cook over coals; now they are families.

“People come and buy three sacks to be prepared for when there’s no electricity,” said Agosto, his hands blackened from filling, stacking, and arranging the sacks on the side of the road.

For most Cubans, even charcoal is a luxury, and wood the staple fuel source.



– ‘Desperate’ –



Cuba, which has been under a US trade embargo for over 60 years, was already struggling through its worst crisis in decades when President Donald Trump took steps to cut off its entire oil supply.

The government has announced drastic measures to ration whatever fuel is left, including preventing airlines refueling on the island.

For some Cubans the crisis has triggered memories of the rationing of the “Special Period,” the severe economic crisis that followed the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, at the time Cuba’s main oil supplier.

Thirty-five years later the writing was on the wall when US special forces overthrew Nicolas Maduro, the socialist president of Cuba’s closest ally, Venezuela.

Washington immediately halted Venezuela’s oil shipments to US arch-foe Cuba and threatened tariff hikes on any other countries supplying the island with crude.

For wealthier Cubans, solar panels are the salvation.

The number of solar panel installation companies has multiplied since 2024, when the Cuban government relaxed restrictions on importing the mostly Chinese-made devices.

“People are desperate to find a solution,” Reinier Hernandez, one business owner, told AFP.

Since mid-January, he has barely slept as he fields a flurry of orders, prepares quotes, and organizes the work schedule of his 20-or-so employees.

“Sometimes I get home at one in the morning,” Orley Estrada, one of his installers, confided.

In the Guanabacoa neighborhood, in eastern Havana, workers are busy installing 12 solar panels on the roof of a nursing home run by the Catholic Church that doubles as a soup kitchen.

The Dominican nuns who run the kitchen prepare food for about 80 elderly or destitute people — growing numbers of Cubans are forced to rummage through garbage bins for food — each day.

Sister Gertrudis Abreu fundraised to amass the $7,000 needed for the panels.

“Without electricity, we had no other option,” she explained to AFP.

But with the smallest solar package from Hernandez’s company costing $2,000, most Cubans have yet to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

‘Outrage’ as LGBTQ Pride flag removed from Stonewall monument

By AFP
February 10, 2026


Human Rights activist Jay Walker speaks during a protest in front of the Stonewall Monument in Manhattan in New York - Copyright AFP Jim WATSON

Gregory WALTON

The removal of an LGBTQ rainbow pride flag from the United States’ most prominent gay monument after new rules issued by the Trump administration sparked an outcry and a noisy protest on Tuesday.

The removal of a large rainbow flag from the Stonewall National Monument in New York followed a January 21 memo from the federally run National Park Service responsible for the heritage site.

It banned the flying of flags other than the US national banner and the Department of the Interior’s colors, with limited exceptions.

About 100 noisy demonstrators, many draped in LGBTQ flags, gathered in a park opposite Stonewall in downtown Manhattan with attendees decrying the move as a “slap in the face” for the community.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he was “outraged” by the removal of the rainbow pride flag from the monument.

“New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history,” he wrote on X.

The Stonewall national monument memorializes the eponymous Stonewall Uprising of 1969, when LGBTQ New Yorkers rose up against discriminatory policies and oppression.

A police raid of the small Greenwich Village gay bar ignited six days of rioting that birthed the modern US gay rights movement, later extended to transgender and non-binary people, who do not identify as male or female.



– ‘Unconscionable behavior’ –



Trump regularly criticized transgender people and what he termed “gender ideology extremism” while on the campaign trail, and days after returning to office he signed an executive order declaring only two official genders in the United States, male and female.

A month later, the National Park Service scrubbed references to transgender and queer people from the website of the monument, with other government departments implementing similar purges.

“To have somebody take down something that is so meaningful to us and to our community outside a historic site like that is basically a slap in the face,” said trans community organizer Jade Runk, 37, who used cable ties to fasten LGBTQ flags to railings in Christopher Park opposite Stonewall.

“It’s a message saying ‘we don’t want you to exist’.”

The area around the Stonewall monument, including the adjacent, privately run Stonewall Inn, is still adorned with many bright LGBTQ flags, as well as banners representing the trans community.

New York state Governor Kathy Hochul said that she would “not let this administration roll back the rights we fought so hard for.”

The National Park Service did not respond to an AFP request for comment.

LGBTQ campaign group GLAAD said “attempts to censor and diminish visibility are tactics that LGBTQ Americans overcame decades ago, and we will continue to defeat.”

Gay history archivist Alec Douglas, 29, told AFP that “we’ve seen this movie before.”

“It’s just unconscionable behavior from an autocratic government to erase a minority,” said Douglas, holding up a rainbow flag from a 1994 pride march signed by the banner’s original designer, Gilbert Baker.

Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal told local media he would reraise the flag at the site on Thursday.

One protester angrily shouted “Let’s do it now. What are we waiting for?”

Noisy humans harm birds and affect breeding success: study

By AFP
February 10, 2026


Scientists say that noise pollution is impacting bird behaviour, stress levels and reproduction. - Copyright AFP Jim WATSON

Noise pollution is affecting bird behaviour across the globe, disrupting everything from courtship songs to the ability to find food and avoid predators, a large-scale new analysis showed on Wednesday.

Researchers reviewed nearly four decades of scientific work and found that noises made by humans were interfering with the lives of birds on six continents and having “strong negative effects” on reproduction success.

Previous research on individual species has shown that single sources of anthropogenic noise — such as planes, traffic and construction — can impact birds as it does other wildlife.

But for this study, the team performed a wider analysis by pooling data published since 1990 across 160 bird species to see if any broader trends could be established.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found clear evidence of a “pervasive” impact of noise pollution on birds worldwide.

“We found that noise significantly impacts communication risk behaviours, foraging, aggression and physiology and had a strong effect on habitat use and a negative impact on reproduction,” it said.

This is because birds rely on acoustic information to survive, making them particularly vulnerable to the modern din produced by cars, machinery and urban life.

“They use song to find mates, calls to warn of predators, and chicks make begging calls to let their parents know they’re hungry,” Natalie Madden, who led the research while at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.

“So if there’s loud noise in the environment, can they still hear signals from their own species?”

In some cases, noise pollution interrupted mating displays, caused males to change their courtship songs, or masked messages between chicks and parents.



– Underappreciated consequence –



The response varied between species, with birds that nest close to the ground suffering greater reproductive harm, while those using open nests experienced stronger effects on growth.

Birds living in urban areas, meanwhile, tended to have higher levels of stress hormones than those outside of cities.

The authors said that noise pollution was an “underappreciated consequence” of humanity’s impact on nature, especially compared to the twin drivers of biodiversity loss and climate change.

Some 61 percent of the world’s bird species have declining populations, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said in October.

But many solutions to combat noise pollution already existed, said the study’s senior author Neil Carter, from the University of Michigan.

For example, buildings are constructed to improve visibility and minimise bird collisions and in much the same way, could be adapted to stifle sound.

“So many of the things we’re facing with biodiversity loss just feel inexorable and massive in scale, but we know how to use different materials and how to put things up in different ways to block sound,” he said.

“We know what to use and how to use it, we just have to get enough awareness and interest in doing it.”

AI cracks Roman-era board game


By AFP
February 11, 2026


This handout picture shows a smooth, white stone dating from the Roman era in Het Romeins Museum, Heerlen that has long baffled researchers - Copyright Antiquity/AFP Handout

A smooth, white stone dating from the Roman era and unearthed in the Netherlands has long baffled researchers.

Now with the help of artificial intelligence, scientists believe they have cracked the mystery: the stone is an ancient board game and they have even guessed the rules.

The circular piece of limestone has diagonal and straight lines cut into it.

Using 3D imaging, scientists discovered some lines were deeper than others, suggesting pieces were moved along them, some more than others.

“We can see wear along the lines on the stone, exactly where you would slide a piece,” said Walter Crist, an archaeologist at Leiden University who specialises in ancient games.

Other researchers at Maastricht University then used an artificial intelligence programme that can deduce the rules to ancient games.

They trained this AI, baptised Ludii, with the rules of about 100 ancient games from the same area as the Roman stone.

The computer “produced dozens of possible rule sets. It then played the game against itself and identified a few variants that are enjoyable for humans to play,” said Dennis Soemers, from Maastricht University.

They then cross-checked the possible rules with the wear on the stone to uncover the most likely set of movements in the game.

However, Soemers also sounded a note of caution.

“If you present Ludii with a line pattern like the one on the stone, it will always find game rules. Therefore, we cannot be sure that the Romans played it in precisely that way,” he said.

The aim of the “deceptively simple but thrilling strategy game” was to hunt and trap the opponent’s pieces in as few moves as possible.

The research and the possible rules were published in the journal Antiquity.

Actor behind Albania’s AI ‘minister’ wants her face back


By AFP
February 11, 2026


Copyright AFP Adnan Beci

An actor whose face was used by Albania’s government for an AI chatbot that it promoted to be a “minister” told AFP on Wednesday that she had launched a legal fight to stop the use of her image and accused the government of “exploitation”.

Prime Minister Edi Rama announced in September that an AI system, dubbed Diella, would oversee a new public tenders portfolio as a “minister” that he pledged would cut corruption.

The move drew criticism from the opposition and experts who questioned the system’s accountability and transparency.

Well-known Albanian actor Anila Bisha, whose face and voice were used to create Diella’s avatar, said she had not approved her identity for use in that way.

Bisha said she filed a petition with the administrative court earlier this week requesting the suspension of the use of her image.

“It’s an exploitation of my identity and my personal data,” the 57-year-old actress told AFP.

According to Bisha, she had originally signed a contract authorising the use of her image until the end of 2025 to represent a virtual assistant on an online government services portal.

But after Rama’s government announced that Diella would become a minister, a video featuring a computer-generated version of her addressed parliament.

In the video, purportedly made with AI, the “minister” appeared as a woman dressed in a traditional Albanian outfit and said it was “not here to replace people”.

Bisha also discovered that the National Agency for Information Society, which developed the AI, filed a patent on her image and voice without informing her — a move that she says affected her ability to work.

Despite reaching out to authorities in the hope of negotiating a solution, she received no reply and decided to take legal action.

Diella, which means “sun” in Albanian, is responsible for all decisions relating to public procurement tenders — in a move that Rama promised would make the process “corruption-free”.

All-in on AI: what TikTok creator ByteDance did next


By AFP
February 13, 2026


ByteDance has the biggest AI team in Chinese tech and plans to spend billions of dollars building AI infrastructure this year - Copyright AFP/File Pedro PARDO

Luna LIN

After soaring to global attention with its hugely popular TikTok app, Chinese tech giant ByteDance is now positioning itself as a major player in the fast-evolving AI arena.

While the Beijing-based company has been embroiled in a range of legal and privacy rows linked to the social media app for years, its team has been busy branching out developing new cutting-edge products.

Among them is China’s most popular artificial intelligence chatbot, Doubao, which has built up more than 100 million daily users since its inception in 2023.

That makes it one of the world’s largest processors of AI queries, alongside OpenAI and Google.

Meanwhile, the cinematic clips created by its latest video generator, Seedance 2.0, have further raised the company’s international profile.

But like TikTok, ByteDance’s AI services could face trouble in overseas markets owing to issues from data privacy to fierce competition in the sector.

Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT revealed the powers of AI on its 2022 debut, ByteDance has believed the technology “would become an even more important application than web search”, CEO Liang Rubo said last month.

“ByteDance’s shift reflects a deliberate evolution from social media toward an AI‑native model,” Charlie Dai, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester, told AFP.

Regulatory and political pressure on ByteDance’s enormously popular video-sharing app TikTok has fuelled the pivot, he said.

This month, the European Commission said TikTok’s “addictive features” breached online content rules, and told it to change its design or face a fine amounting to up to six percent of ByteDance’s annual global revenue.



– ‘Evolving circumstances’ –



The United States had threatened TikTok with a total ban over concerns the platform could be used to harvest Americans’ data or spread propaganda.

After lengthy top-level talks over a TikTok divestiture deal, a majority-American-owned joint venture was established in January to operate the app’s US business, with ByteDance retaining a stake of less than 20 percent.

Rocky Lee, who uses TikTok and other sites to sell Chinese digital gadgets and pet products to buyers overseas, was relieved by the US deal.

“I can now tell other traders that ‘you can go ahead and don’t have to worry about it anymore’,” Lee, who runs a chat group for cross-border sellers, told AFP.

Lee uses Doubao and other AI tools for various tasks including product selection, market research and sales script-writing.

“We used to have more than a dozen people in our team. Now I reckon maybe four to five people are sufficient,” the veteran seller from Xi’an said.

ByteDance was US chip titan Nvidia’s largest Chinese client in 2024, and it plans to spend billions of dollars on purchasing AI microchips and building AI infrastructure in 2026.

Though less prominent internationally than domestic competitors such as DeepSeek and Qwen, Doubao models process more than 50 trillion tokens, or units of text, daily.

Google said in October that it handles more than 1.3 quadrillion tokens monthly, which is roughly 43 trillion daily.

ByteDance’s focus on AI is “a well-considered decision in response to the evolving circumstances”, said Chen Yan, an AI industry analyst at research firm QuestMobile.

“They need to seek out the next generation of productivity,” with strong growth for TikTok becoming more difficult given its already huge user base.



– Big spenders –



Shen Qiajin is founder of ideaFlow, an interactive content generation platform that is a heavy user of ByteDance AI models.

“They are taking the all-in approach with AI, and they are the most aggressive player in the market,” he told AFP.

ByteDance, which has the biggest AI team in Chinese tech, sometimes pays salaries two or three times the market average to recruit top talent, said industry headhunter Shen Wei.

“From a headhunter’s perspective, ByteDance’s advantage lies in its willingness to spend big,” he said.

Bytedance has not hidden its intention to replicate TikTok’s international success with its AI ventures.

The Doubao team is now led by Alex Zhu, who co-founded the lip-syncing app Musical.ly that later merged with TikTok.

The app is called Dola, previously Cici, overseas. Like TikTok, ByteDance’s AI services could face “concerns about data governance and geopolitical frictions”, said Forrester’s Dai.

While TikTok took over a niche, untapped market, Western AI giants “know local regulatory frameworks and user demands better”, said QuestMobile’s Chen.

Competition is also heating up at home. Tencent and Alibaba have run aggressive Lunar New Year promotions, driving their chatbots to the top of Apple’s free app chart.

Like many tech companies, ByteDance is also under pressure to make running an AI chatbot app profitable.

“The real challenge for Doubao is only coming after it has surpassed 100 million daily active users,” a Doubao staffer told Chinese tech media outlet the Late Post.

AI’s bitter rivalry heads to Washington


By AFP
February 13, 2026


Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic is a former staffer of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT - Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Yana Paskova

Alex PIGMAN

Anthropic’s major donation to a political group that competes with an OpenAI-backed organization has highlighted a bitter rift over AI regulation — a key issue heading into the US midterm elections.

With the artificial intelligence industry rapidly advancing, Democrats and Republicans alike have found themselves squeezed between a powerful tech lobby flush with cash and a broadly wary public.

Leading the charge on the industry side is Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC backed by OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, venture capital behemoth Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and AI search company Perplexity.

Brockman, OpenAI’s longtime president, and his wife Anna are also among the largest recent donors to President Donald Trump’s political coffers, to the tune of $25 million last year.

Super PACs are political organizations in the United States that can raise and spend unlimited funds for media campaigns, but not give directly to candidates.

Leading the Future raised $125 million in the second half of 2025, according to official filings, and is co-led by Josh Vlasto — a former adviser to Fairshake, the crypto-aligned super PAC whose playbook Leading the Future is looking to repeat.

That playbook proved devastatingly effective in the 2024 election cycle, when Fairshake poured money into races against candidates skeptical of cryptocurrency.

Now spooked by the prospect of a repeat in AI, Anthropic has entered the fray.

On Thursday, the company gave $20 million to a competing super PAC, Public First Action, which supports AI guardrails — effectively setting up a direct fight against Leading the Future.

The group — whose funders can remain anonymous — plans to back 30 to 50 candidates from both parties in state and federal races during the midterm cycle.

Founded in 2021 by former AI researchers, Anthropic has grown into a world-leading AI company focused on businesses and software developers.

The company, led by CEO Dario Amodei, is disdained by some in Trump’s Washington for its outspoken focus on AI safety and its warnings about the job losses that generative AI could unleash.

The Trump administration has pushed back forcefully, championing a light regulatory touch and giving AI companies free rein to release their latest models without guardrails or pre-release vetting of their products.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has made several visits to Capitol Hill 

– Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP ALEX WONG

White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks recently accused the “left-wing” company of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.”

He also accused Anthropic of retaining Democratic-aligned staffers to “lobby for the old Biden AI agenda.”

The two groups are also clashing over the Trump administration’s repeated — and so far unsuccessful — efforts to ban AI legislation at the state level.

In the absence of federal action, dozens of states have introduced hundreds of proposals to regulate the technology.

– ‘Vast resources’ –

While not as well financed as its rival, Public First Action argues it has something Leading the Future does not: the backing of public opinion.

Polls show that Americans broadly favor AI safety measures and support a more cautious approach to the technology.

“At present, there are few organized efforts to help mobilize people and politicians who understand what’s at stake in AI development,” Anthropic said in a statement.

“Instead, vast resources have flowed to political organizations that oppose these efforts.”

Amodei has also made visits to Capitol Hill to meet with Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren to back a ban on the sending of powerful chip technology from Nvidia to China, something the Trump administration supports.

The battle is already playing out in specific races. In Florida, Leading the Future is preparing to spend millions to support Byron Donalds’ campaign for governor as Republicans in the state fight over AI legislation.

In New York, Alex Bores — a pro-AI safety congressional candidate and former Palantir employee — has already faced a barrage of attack ads from the group.

“Crazy populists…could be about to break all of this and we can’t let that happen,” Palantir co-founder Lonsdale said on CNBC in November, defending Leading the Future’s mission to fight AI safety advocates.

Samsung starts mass production of next-gen AI memory chip


By AFP
February 12, 2026


A protoype chipset featuring Samsung Electronics' high-bandwidth memory technology was unveiled in October last year. - Copyright AFP/File Jung Yeon-je

Samsung Electronics announced Thursday it had started mass production of next-generation memory chips to power artificial intelligence, touting an “industry-leading” breakthrough.

The high-bandwidth HBM4 chips are seen as a key component needed to scale-up the vast data centres powering the explosion in artificial intelligence.

US tech giant Nvidia — the world’s most valuable company — is widely expected to be one of Samsung’s main buyers.

Samsung said it had “begun mass production of its industry-leading HBM4 and has shipped commercial products to customers”.

“This achievement marks a first in the industry, securing an early leadership position in the HBM4 market,” the South Korean company said in a statement.

A global frenzy to build AI data centres has sent orders for advanced, high‑bandwidth memory microchips soaring.

Samsung said its new chip was significantly faster than older models, exceeding industry standards for processing speed by more than 40 percent.

This would satisfy “escalating demands for higher performance”, the company said.

Samsung Electronics stock was up more than six percent in afternoon trade on South Korea’s stock exchange.

The South Korean government has pledged to become one of the world’s top three AI powers, alongside the United States and China.

Samsung and its South Korean rival SK hynix are already among the leading producers of high-performance memory chips, and the two companies had raced to start HBM4 production.

Taipei-based research firm TrendForce predicts that memory chip industry revenue will surge to a global peak of more than $840 billion in 2027.

Samsung Electronics posted record quarterly profits earlier this year, riding on massive market demand for its powerful memory chips.

The company has already earmarked billions of dollars to expand chip production facilities, pledging to continue spending in “transitioning to advanced manufacturing processes and upgrading existing production lines to meet rising demand”.

Nvidia designs hardware that powers AI computing, and has an almost insatiable demand for memory chips made by the likes of Samsung and SK hynix.

The US-based company’s almost singular role in the AI revolution has taken the world by storm since the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have also developed chips with AI in mind, but for now are stuck trying to get their hands on Nvidia’s coveted products.

Major electronics manufacturers and industry analysts have warned that chipmakers focusing on AI sales will cause higher retail prices for consumer products across the board.

Google turns to century-long debt to build AI


By AFP
February 10, 2026


Century-long bond issues by companies are a rarity, and especially for Alphabet which has ample online ad revenue available to pay for investments rather than resorting to debt. - Copyright AFP/File Ronan LIETAR

Google-parent Alphabet will issue bonds maturing in 100 years as it continues to invest massively in infrastructure for artificial intelligence, according to data published Tuesday by Bloomberg.

The Silicon Valley internet giant reportedly aims to raise about $20 billion overall, a chunk of it by issuing bonds that mature in February of 2126, with lenders so keen for a piece of the AI action that some $100 billion orders were placed for the debt.

Alphabet did not respond to a request for comment.

Alphabet and AI race rivals including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft are investing staggering amounts in infrastructure to power the technology, banking on it paying off.

Market reaction, though, has been mixed with some investors worried spending has gone overboard.

Century-long bond issues by companies are a rarity, and especially for Alphabet which has ample online ad revenue available to pay for investments rather than resorting to debt.

But, the rush to lead in AI has changed the game, calling for unprecedented spending on data centers, energy generation and more.

Alphabet allocated $91 billion to spending on computing infrastructure last year and has told financial analysts it expects to spend from $175 billion to $185 billion on it this year.

Alphabet has ramped up longterm debt to handle the spending surge, issuing 50-year bonds late last year.

While 100-year bonds are not new, it has been decades since US companies have resorted to them.

Companies such as Disney, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Ford, and Motorola turned to such century-long debt during the 1990s.

Latam-GPT: a Latin American AI to combat US-centric bias


By AFP
February 10, 2026


Latam-GPT is partly aimed at combating bias found in primarily US-centric AI platforms - Copyright AFP/File Ronan LIETAR

Axl HERNANDEZ

Move over ChatGPT. Chile on Tuesday launched Latam-GPT, an open-source artificial intelligence model for the region, designed to combat bias inherent in a US-centric industry.

Developed by the Chilean National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), Latam-GPT uses millions of data points collected in Latin America to showcase the continent’s cultural diversity.

“Thanks to Latam-GPT, we’re positioning the region as an active and sovereign player in the economy of the future,” President Gabriel Boric said of the initiative.

“We’re at the table — we’re not on the menu,” he added.

According to Chile’s Science Minister Aldo Valle, the program was built to combat what he called prejudices and generalizations about people and countries from the region.

Latin America, he added, “cannot simply be a passive user or recipient of artificial intelligence systems. That could result in the loss of a significant part of our traditions.”

Unlike closed generative models like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, Latam-GPT is an open model that can be used by programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their needs.

Contributions to the project, and data for the model’s training, were provided by Latin American universities, foundations, libraries, government entities and civil society organizations in countries including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay.

“The models developed in other parts of the world do have data from Latin America but it represent a fairly small proportion,” CENIA director Alvaro Soto noted.

This low level of diverse input is sometimes reflected in the depictions of Latin Americans by major AI models. ChatGPT, for example, portrays a typical Chilean man as a person wearing a poncho with the Andes in the background.



– Indigenous content –



Major US tech companies dominate the global AI race, with low-cost Chinese models rapidly gaining ground and Europe lagging in third place.

Other regions of the world are also embracing the importance of developing public AI models that respect their cultural norms and safety standards.

In 2023, Singapore researchers released the open-source Southeast Asian Languages in One Network, or SEA-LION model, while in Kenya, the UlizaLLama LLM provides health services for Swahili-speaking expectant mothers.

Latam-GPT has been trained on more than eight terabytes of data, equivalent to millions of books.

It was developed for a mere $550,000, sourced primarily from the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) and CENIA’s own resources.

A first version was developed on the Amazon Web Services cloud, but in future, Latam-GPT will be trained on a supercomputer at the University of Tarapaca in northern Chile.

For now, it is trained mainly in Spanish and Portuguese content, although its developers plan to incorporate material in Indigenous Latin American languages.



– Slang and sayings –



Latam-GPT will be available free of charge to companies and public institutions to develop applications more specific to Latin America, said Soto, the CENIA director.

He cited potential applications for hospitals “with logistical problems or issues with the use of medical resources.”

Its tiny budget means Latam-GPT has “no chance” of competing against the major AI models, Alejandro Barros, a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Chile, told AFP.

But it has already won over Chilean serial digital entrepreneur Roberto Musso, whose company Digevo plans to use Latam-GPT to develop customer service programs for airlines or retailers.

Musso said his clients were “very interested in having their users express themselves and receive responses in the local language.”

Latam-GPT, he said, provides the ability to recognize regional “slang, idioms, and even speech rate” and avoid biases that could arise in other AI models.

Siemens Energy trebles profit as AI boosts power demand


By AFP
February 11, 2026


Wind turbines being built at a Siemens Energy site. The firm reported suring profits amid the AI boom - Copyright AFP FOCKE STRANGMANN

German turbine maker Siemens Energy said Wednesday that its quarterly profits had almost tripled as the firm gains from surging demand for electricity driven by the artificial intelligence boom.

The company’s gas turbines are used to generate electricity for data centres that provide computing power for AI, and have been in hot demand as US tech giants like OpenAI and Meta rapidly build more of the sites.

Net profit in the group’s fiscal first quarter, to end-December, climbed to 746 million euros ($889 million) from 252 million euros a year earlier.

Orders — an indicator of future sales — increased by a third to 17.6 billion euros.

The company’s shares rose over five percent in Frankfurt trading, putting the stock up about a quarter since the start of the year and making it the best performer to date in Germany’s blue-chip DAX index.

“Siemens Energy ticked all of the major boxes that investors were looking for with these results,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note, adding that the company’s gas turbine orders were “exceptionally strong”.

US data centre electricity consumption is projected to more than triple by 2035, according to the International Energy Agency, and already accounts for six to eight percent of US electricity use.

Asked about rising orders on an earnings call, Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch said he thought the first-quarter figures were not “particularly strong” and that further growth could be expected.

“Demand for gas turbines is extremely high,” he said. “We’re talking about 2029 and 2030 for delivery dates.”

Siemens Energy, spun out of the broader Siemens group in 2020, said last week that it would spend $1 billion expanding its US operations, including a new equipment plant in Mississippi as part of wider plans that would create 1,500 jobs.

Its shares have increased over tenfold since 2023, when the German government had to provide the firm with credit guarantees after quality problems at its wind-turbine unit.

What does understanding human consciousness reveal about future AI?


By  Dr. Tim Sandle
SCIENCE EDITOR

DIGITAL JOURNAL

February 13, 2026


A dancing humanoid robot gyrates to music at a fair in Beijing. - © AFP Pedro PARDO/File

Scientists warn that rapid advances in AI and neurotechnology are outpacing our understanding of consciousness, creating serious ethical risks. New research contends that developing scientific tests for awareness could transform medicine, animal welfare, law, and AI development.

Yet identifying consciousness in machines, brain organoids, or patients could also force society to rethink responsibility, rights, and moral boundaries. Also, what does it mean to be unconscious? The question of what it means to be conscious has never been more urgent, the researchers argue, or more unsettling.

Will machines truly think? — Image by © Tim Sandle

Defining consciousness

The researchers point out that explaining how consciousness emerges is now an urgent scientific and moral priority. A clearer understanding could eventually make it possible to develop scientific methods for detecting consciousness. This breakthrough would have far-reaching consequences for AI development, prenatal policy, animal welfare, medicine, mental health care, law, and emerging technologies such as brain-computer interfaces. This can also aid in understanding what it means to be human.

The scientists warn that if we become able to create consciousness — even accidentally — it would raise immense ethical challenges and even existential risk, in relation to AI.
The Challenge of Defining Sentience

Consciousness, commonly described as awareness of both the world around us and ourselves, remains one of science’s most difficult puzzles. Despite decades of research, scientists still lack agreement on how subjective experience emerges from biological processes.

To date, scientists have identified brain regions and neural activity linked to conscious experience, but major disagreements remain. Yet there continues to be a debate as to which brain systems are truly necessary for consciousness and how they interact to produce awareness. Some researchers even question whether this approach captures the problem correctly.

The new review examines the current state of consciousness science, future directions for the field, and the possible consequences if humans succeed in fully explaining or even creating consciousness. This includes the possibility of consciousness emerging in machines or in lab-grown brain-like systems known as “brain organoids.”
Societal benefit

The researchers argue that developing evidence-based tests for consciousness could transform how awareness is identified across many contexts. These tools could help detect consciousness in patients with brain injuries or dementia and determine when awareness arises in foetuses, animals, brain organoids, or even AI systems.

For example, in medicine, this could improve care for patients who are unresponsive and assumed to be unconscious. Furthermore, understanding the biological basis of subjective experience may help researchers develop better therapies for conditions such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia
Warning

While this would represent a major scientific advance, the researchers caution that it would also create difficult ethical and legal questions. Determining that a system is conscious would force society to reconsider how that system should be treated.

Such insights will reshape how we see ourselves and our relationship to both artificial intelligence and the natural world. In the future, for instance, AI that gives the impression of being conscious raises many societal and ethical challenges.

To fully understand what conscious AI means, the researchers argue that scientific work should place greater emphasis on phenomenology (what consciousness feels like) alongside studies of function (what consciousness does).

To read the discussion, see Frontiers in Science and the paper titled “Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?”

No optical illusion: AI restores James Webb telescope

By  Dr. Tim Sandle
SCIENCE EDITOR

DIGITAL JOURNAL

February 13, 2026

An international research team has revealed the first images of the Orion Nebula captured with the James Webb Space Telescope, leaving astronomers "blown away" - Copyright AFP SERGEY BOBOK

Two scientists from the University of Sydney have performed a remarkable space science feat from Earth, the BBC reports. By using AI-driven software, the researchers have successfully corrected image blurring in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

This innovation, called AMIGO, fixed distortions in the telescope’s infrared camera, restoring its ultra-sharp vision without the need for a space mission. This breakthrough restored the full precision of one of the telescope’s key instruments, achieving what would once have required a costly astronaut repair mission.

The corrective algorithms devised by the researchers ‘deblur’ the data, restoring the telescope’s full potential.

The implementation of AMIGO has led to remarkable improvements in the JWST’s imaging capabilities. With this software, the telescope has successfully captured clear images of faint celestial objects, including direct images of exoplanets and detailed observations of cosmic phenomena such as black hole jets and the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io. This demonstrates the power of combining innovative software solutions with advanced astronomical techniques.


The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is an advanced telescope designed to conduct infrared astronomy. It is the largest telescope in space, and is equipped with high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments, allowing it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope.

Australian science

This success builds on the JWST’s only Australian-designed component, the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI). This feature was created by Professor Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney’s School of Physics and the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. The AMI allows astronomers to capture ultra-high-resolution images of stars and exoplanets.

The component works by combining light from different sections of the telescope’s main mirror, a process known as interferometry. When the JWST began its scientific operations, researchers noticed that AMI’s performance was being affected by faint electronic distortions in its infrared camera detector. These distortions caused subtle image fuzziness, reminiscent of the Hubble Space Telescope’s well-known early optical flaw that had to be corrected through astronaut spacewalks.

Two stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 produce shells of dust every eight years that look like rings, as seen in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JPL-Caltech

Making the repair

Instead of attempting a physical repair, the researchers devised a purely software-based calibration technique to fix the distortion from Earth. In other words, using artificial intelligence (AI) to steer the restoration of the telescope’s intended functionality.

Their system, called AMIGO (Aperture Masking Interferometry Generative Observations), uses advanced simulations and neural networks to replicate how the telescope’s optics and electronics function in space. By pinpointing an issue where electric charge slightly spreads to neighbouring pixels — a phenomenon called the brighter-fatter effect — the team designed algorithms that digitally corrected the images, fully restoring AMI’s performance.

‘Crystal clear’

With AMIGO in use, the James Webb Space Telescope has delivered its clearest images yet, capturing faint celestial objects in unprecedented detail. This includes direct images of a dim exoplanet and a red-brown dwarf orbiting the nearby star HD 206893, about 133 light years from Earth.

Recently, using the improved calibration, the telescope produced sharp images of a black hole jet, the fiery surface of Jupiter’s moon Io, and the dust-filled stellar winds of WR 137 — showing that JWST can now probe deeper and clearer than before.
Space tattoo

The two scientists involved, Louis Desdoigts, now a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and his colleague Max Charles, celebrated their achievement with tattoos of the instrument they repaired inked on their arms.

The corrective research and practical solution appear in the journal arXiv, titled “AMIGO: a Data-Driven Calibration of the JWST Interferometer.”

Can generative artificial intelligence systems genuinely create original ideas?


By  Dr. Tim Sandle
SCIENCE EDITOR

DIGITAL JOURNAL

February 12, 2026


Creative view of the periodic table. — Image by © Tim Sandle

A new Canadian study, comparing more than 100,000 people with today’s most advanced AI systems, delivers a surprising result: generative AI can now beat the average human on certain creativity tests.

Models like GPT-4 showed strong performance on tasks designed to measure original thinking and idea generation, sometimes outperforming typical human responses.

Before people begin worrying too much about an AI takeover, there remains a clear ceiling. The most creative humans — especially the top 10% — still leave AI well behind, particularly on richer creative work like poetry and storytelling.

Scientists from the University of Montreal contend that generative AI systems have now reached a level where they can outperform the average human on certain creativity measures.


At the same time, the most creative people still show a clear and consistent advantage over even the strongest AI models.

To derive at these findings researchers evaluated several leading large language models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others, and compared their performance with results from more than 100,000 human participants.
Methods

To evaluate creativity fairly across humans and machines, the research team used multiple methods. The primary tool was the Divergent Association Task (DAT), a widely used psychological test that measures divergent creativity, or the ability to generate diverse and original ideas from a single prompt.

Tim Sandle’s scores for the Divergent Association Task, February 2026. 

Image by Tim Sandle

Research findings highlight a clear turning point

Some AI systems, including GPT-4, exceeded average human scores on tasks designed to measure divergent linguistic creativity.

“Our study shows that some AI systems based on large language models can now outperform average human creativity on well-defined tasks,” explains Professor Karim Jerbi in a research brief. “This result may be surprising — even unsettling — but our study also highlights an equally important observation: even the best AI systems still fall short of the levels reached by the most creative humans.”

Further analysis revealed a striking pattern. While some AI models now outperform the average person, peak creativity remains firmly human.

Moreover, when researchers examined the most creative half of participants, their average scores surpassed those of every AI model tested. The gap grew even larger among the top 10 percent of the most creative individuals.
Interpretation

The researchers then explored whether AI success on this simple word association task could extend to more complex and realistic creative activities. To test this, they compared AI systems and human participants on creative writing challenges such as composing haiku (a short three-line poetic form), writing movie plot summaries, and producing short stories.

The results followed a familiar pattern. While AI systems sometimes exceeded the performance of average humans, the most skilled human creators consistently delivered stronger and more original work.
What next for AI?

These findings raise an important question. Is AI creativity fixed, or can it be shaped? The study shows that creativity in AI can be adjusted by changing technical settings, particularly the model’s temperature. This parameter controls how predictable or adventurous the generated responses are.

At lower temperature settings, AI produces safer and more conventional outputs. At higher temperatures, responses become more varied, less predictable, and more exploratory, allowing the system to move beyond familiar ideas.

It was also demonstrated that creativity is strongly influenced by how instructions are written. For example, prompts that encourage models to think about word origins and structure using etymology lead to more unexpected associations and higher creativity scores.

These results emphasise that AI creativity depends heavily on human guidance, making interaction and prompting a central part of the creative process.

The research appears in the journal Scientific Reports, titled “Divergent creativity in humans and large language models.”