Giant Trump banner hanging outside DOJ building stirs strong reactions online: ‘Full blown North Korea vibes’

Josh Marcus
Thu, February 19, 2026
THE INDEPENDENT

A huge banner featuring President Trump’s face and the words “Make America Safe Again” was installed on the front of Justice Department headquarters, sparking online outrage and comparisons to authoritarian regimes.


Workers installed a huge banner featuring President Trump’s face and the words “Make America Safe Again” on the front of Justice Department headquarters in Washington on Thursday, provoking online outrage and comparisons between the administration and authoritarian regimes.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a frequent Trump critic, said the gesture was “beyond parity.”

“How many dictatorship-style monuments, building name changes, and fake awards do Americans have to endure?” he wrote on X, echoing another commentator who said the banner had totalitarian “North Korea vibes.”

Since Trump took office, the president and his allies have renamed the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace to include Trump’s name.

Newsom wasn’t the only Democratic lawmaker sounding off on the banner.

Critics of the president were alarmed on Thursday after workers installed a huge banner of Trump on the headquarters of the Department of Justice (AFP via Getty Images)

“Americans believe in the rule of law,” Rep. Ted Lieu of California wrote on X. “MAGA Republicans believe in the rule of Trump. November is coming.”

Others argued the image undermined the Justice Department’s position as an independent institution tasked with impartially applying the law.

“Trump is plastering his face on the building that’s supposed to investigate him,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez, also of California, added on X. “There was once a time when a president couldn’t boss the Attorney General around like his own personal lapdog.”

Some commentators and reporters were also critical of the move.

“Could also be Germany 1930s, Soviet Union 1950s,” The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols wrote on X. “Could be many places, but shouldn't be America.”

Others, like Ken Dilanian, argued the banner was highly ironic given Republicans’ longstanding claims that the Biden administration had politicized the DOJ.

Banners of the president have been put on multiple government agencies since Trump took office (AFP/Getty)

“This is a stunning confirmation of the grim reality, which is that Donald Trump has seized control of the once independent Justice Department and is using it to pursue his political objectives—including trying to punish his perceived enemies,” he wrote on X. “Exactly what his supporters baselessly accused the previous administration of doing.”

Critics of the administration have pointed to federal prosecutions of Trump critics like former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, as well as Democrats who encouraged military members to ignore illegal orders in a video last year, as evidence of this alleged erosion in the separation of powers.


The Trump administration defended the symbol, arguing it was a part of the larger efforts to celebrate the U.S.’s 250th anniversary.

“We are proud at this Department of Justice to celebrate 250 years of our great country and our historic work to make America safe again at President Trump’s direction,” a DOJ spokesperson told The Independent.

Similar banners of the president’s face have previously hung at the Departments of Agriculture and Labor, at a cost of thousands of dollars to taxpayers.

Giant banner of Donald Trump hung at Justice Department headquarters

Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN
Thu, February 19, 2026 


Members of the National Guard walk past a banner of President Donald Trump, hanging on the Department of Justice building in Washington, DC, on Thursday. - Allison Robbert/AP


A large banner of Donald Trump was hung outside of the Justice Department headquarters in Washington, DC, on Thursday, emphasizing the White House’s control over the nation’s top law enforcement branch that once pursued criminal prosecutions against the president.

The image of Trump in shades of blue is a remarkable addition to the storied Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, which is occupied by a department that traditionally has made painstaking efforts to separate itself from politics.

Since Trump retook office last year, the Justice Department has faced repeated accusations of targeting the president’s perceived enemies on his behalf. Those prosecutions include that of former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General and Letitia James, as well as investigations into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and several Democratic representatives who recorded a video urging service members to disobey any illegal orders.

Similar banners of Trump’s face have been draped across other federal departments including the Department of Labor and the Department of Agriculture, each with their own text: “American workers first” and “growing America,” respectively.

The new sign at the Justice Department reads “make America safe again,” the slogan of the Trump administration’s violent crime crackdown.

The Trump Justice Department has repeatedly stated that its investigations under Trump are not political, and said that the department is course-correcting from alleged “weaponization” under the previous administration.

Chief among their examples are the two federal criminal cases brought against Trump by former special Jack Smith for retaining classified documents in his home at Mar-a-Lago and for his alleged role in instigating the 2021 Capitol riot. The classified documents case was dismissed by a judge, and the election interference case was dropped when he won election in November 2020.

“We are proud at this Department of Justice to celebrate 250 years of our great country and our historic work to make America safe again at President Trump’s direction,” a Justice Department spokesperson said.

Trump’s DOJ Bulldog Scolds Prosecutors for Forgetting the President Is Their ‘Chief Client’

Wiktoria Gucia
Thu, February 19, 2026 
DAILY BEAST


SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images

A top Justice Department aide admitted the agency exists to serve one person: President Donald Trump.

During a January meeting with the leaders of 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh called President Trump, 79, the federal prosecutors’ “chief client,” three people briefed on the meeting told Bloomberg Law.

The 33-year-old, whose relatively short legal career has included a charge for driving under the influence (DUI), told participants that anyone unwilling to support the administration’s agenda should step aside, the outlet reported.

Aakash Singh, far right, told U.S. Attorney's offices that the president is their

The remarks reportedly startled meeting participants, as they came on the heels of the resignation of six Minnesota federal prosecutors who quit rather than pursue charges against the widow of Renee Good, 37, who was killed by an ICE agent—a development Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz condemned as “the latest sign that President Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the Department of Justice and replacing them with his sycophants.”

U.S. attorneys are charged with ensuring “that the laws be faithfully executed,” according to the department’s website.

Yet Singh—described by a colleague as an octopus with 93 tentacles, one for each office— has pushed prosecutors to align their work with the Trump administration’s priorities.

A banner showing President Donald Trump is hung from the Department of Justice, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, in Washington, D.C. / Allison Robbert/AP

“You cannot micromanage US attorneys’ offices from Washington—not in the long run—and I’ve never found managing by fear to be very effective in the long run either,” Mark Calloway, a former US attorney in Charlotte, told Bloomberg Law.

Since his promotion to Associate Deputy Attorney General after Trump took office, Singh has allegedly exercised tight control over U.S. attorneys’ offices, often demanding emails with case-specific data—a practice some former career officials have described as bullying.

One email obtained by Bloomberg Law was sent just before Thanksgiving and instructed all 93 federal prosecutors to submit data showing their offices’ compliance with fulfilling Trump-directed crackdowns on immigration, political violence, and other policy priorities.

In another virtual meeting, Singh requested that all U.S. attorneys’ offices identify federal judges perceived to engage in judicial activism, so the information could inform potential impeachment referrals to Congress.

A DOJ spokesperson who confirmed Singh’s meeting request told Fox News Digital that the Trump administration is “facing unprecedented judicial activism from rogue judges who care more about making a name for themselves than acting as impartial arbiters of the law.”

In August, Singh met with federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., as the Justice Department sought to bring severe charges against people protesting the military and federal police presence in the capital ordered by the president.


According to the New York Times, he advised prosecutors to impanel new grand juries if a sitting grand jury refused to indict in efforts to pursue more serious charges.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has executed Trump's demands. / Alex Wong / Getty Images

“That’s way out of line and completely unlike anything I ever heard at the DOJ,” Ken White, a former federal prosecutor, told The Guardian.

Bloomberg Law reported that Singh’s influence has raised concern primarily among institutionalists in the department—officials who prioritize protecting the Justice Department’s independence and long-standing rules—because it departs from norms that emphasize prosecutorial independence and impartiality.

Since the start of his second term in office, Trump’s influence over the actions of the DOJ has been apparent, with the 79-year-old president posting on social media a private message to Attorney General Pam Bondi, insisting that she prosecute his enemies—a step she ultimately took.

Donald Trump's private message to Pam Bondi he posted on Truth Social in September. / Truth Social

“Normally these political appointees are chosen not only for political reasons, but because they have credentials that are impeccable, with extensive prosecutorial and managerial experience,” former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch told The Guardian, commenting on the unusualness of Singh’s appointment to such a high position despite a DUI charge and relatively limited experience, which includes five years as an assistant U.S. attorney.


“But political fealty seems to be the single qualification now,” he added, referring to the second Trump administration.

Senator Tom Cotton’s Ode to US Nuclear Weapons

by Ted Galen Carpenter | Feb 18, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM


Hawkish Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) has never been a big fan of arms control agreements. His new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal confirms that his attitude has not softened in the slightest.

The opening paragraph adopts a highly militant tone. “The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expired this month. The end of New Start is a watershed moment in American nuclear strategy. Far from a failure of diplomacy, this expiration is an overdue correction of a strategic mistake that left America vulnerable to two nuclear rivals: Russia and China. After years of unilateral restraint, while our adversaries expanded their arsenals, America can finally build a nuclear deterrent for the threats we face.”

Although he contends that Russia has engaged in a “nuclear buildup,” he cites no evidence that Moscow exceeded the limits on the number of warheads specified in New Start. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was not a party to the treaty at all. Both Cotton and President Trump seem even more worried about Beijing’s ambitions with respect to strategic nuclear weapons than they do about Moscow’s moves. Indeed, Cotton states so explicitly. “China’s nuclear stockpile has surpassed 600 operational warheads as of mid-2024, and it remains on track to exceed 1,000 by 2030. This isn’t incremental modernization. This is a fundamental transformation from a minimal deterrent to strategic parity with America and Russia in both quality and quantity.”

The lack of treaty limits on the size of Beijing’s strategic arsenal is a legitimate concern. Any worthwhile replacement for New Start needs to include China. But Cotton’s real focus has little to do with genuine strategic arms control. His goal is to justify an extensive increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal under the label of “modernization.”

Cotton’s op-ed presents a six-part plan for doing so. One proposal is to “put multiple warheads back on U.S. land-based ICBMs. To stay below New Start limits, America reduced the load on our ICBMs to one warhead per missile. We should load existing Minuteman III ICBMs to their full capacity and ensure that Sentinel ICBMs are also deployed at full capacity.” Another one of his schemes is to “restore our theater nuclear capabilities. This means completing the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile program, forward-deploying additional U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to Europe and the Pacific, and developing hypersonic nuclear-capable delivery systems.”

Like most hawks, Cotton fails to acknowledge any U.S. responsibility for the breakdown of nuclear arms control in recent years. Yet both the Trump and Biden administrations took actions that eliminated restraints and fomented tensions. The United States decided to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in August 2019. Washington also ended its adherence to the Open Skies agreement with Moscow in November 2020. The Open Skies measure had assured greater transparency regarding the movement and deployment of bombers and missiles. The Kremlin saw that agreement as a crucial reassurance against any buildup or threatening conduct featuring U.S. or NATO strategic weapons on Russia’s doorstep in Central or Eastern Europe.

Cotton also charges, with virtually no evidence, that both Moscow and Beijing have resumed underground nuclear weapons testing. Moreover, in the unlikely event that such tests have occurred, U.S. leaders need to blame themselves. Washington’s longstanding failure to officially embrace the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) has been disgraceful. Although the United States signed the treaty in 1996, it has never ratified the document. In November 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law revoking Russia’s 2000 ratification of the CTBT. In pushing through the de-ratification measure, Putin said that he merely sought to “mirror” the U.S. position. Moscow had complained about Washington’s lackadaisical attitude about that issue for years.

On October 29, 2025, Trump announced that the United States would resume testing nuclear weapons. If the president carries out his pledge, it will mark the end of a long period in which all official or de facto members of the global nuclear weapons club had refrained from conducting such tests. The United States held its last test in September 1992, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in July 1996. The Russian Federation has never conducted a nuclear weapons test; Moscow’s last venture into that area took place in October 1990, when the Soviet Union still existed. Great Britain operated on a similar timetable (1991) and France just a little later (January 1996). India and Pakistan, two of the newer entrants into the ranks of nuclear weapons powers, both conducted their latest tests in May 1998.

The last confirmed episode was the detonation of an underground warhead by North Korea in early September 2017. Despite growing tensions between Washington and Pyongyang on multiple issues, and North Korea’s plethora of moves to advance its ballistic missile program, Kim Jong-un’s regime has not yet ended its moratorium on testing nuclear warheads.

Concern about the possible resumption of nuclear testing by multiple countries is understandable. However, one could see this development coming for years, and contrary to Cotton and other American hawks, the United States bears most of the responsibility. Yet the senator just blandly includes in his six-point “modernization” plan, the observation that “the Energy Department needs to reverse the taboo against testing.”

The flippant attitude throughout his op-ed is alarming. Once again, there is not the slightest sense that any U.S. actions could be provocative and be causing some of the tensions in the nuclear arena. “Deterring nuclear war is far cheaper than fighting one. To those who ask why we should spend so much on weapons we’ll never use: We use our nuclear deterrent every single day. The mere existence of a credible nuclear force prevents adversaries from contemplating attacks they would otherwise consider.”

“And to those who fear an arms race: The race has already begun. Russia and China have been running it for more than a decade while we sat on the sidelines. The question isn’t whether there will be competition in nuclear forces, but whether America will show up to compete.”

Smug, reckless arrogance best describes Cotton’s perspective. Arms races rarely end well.


Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and the Libertarian Institute. He is also a contributing editor to National Security Journal and The American Conservative. He also served in various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,600 articles on defense, foreign policy and civil liberties issues. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

Never Forget Bush’s Bait-And-Switch Iraq War – OpEd

February 17, 2026
By James Bovard

A few presidencies ago, Washington politicians used boundless political and intellectual chicanery to drag America into a ruinous war. Thousands of Americans died and scores of thousands of Iraqis perished due to the official myth of Saddam Hussein as the Twentieth Hijacker.

Last November, Axios published new damning information on the role of Saudi government officials in bankrolling the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. Private lawsuits against the Saudi regime “unearthed evidence showing one Saudi official — who acknowledges aiding two men who became hijackers — made a drawing of a plane and a mathematical formula that allegedly could have been used to fly into the World Trade Center.”

That was only the latest stunning revelation in a coverup that will celebrate its 25th birthday this year.

In 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration rushed to exploit 9/11 to justify invading Iraq. But there was a problem with that con job. A 2002 FBI memo stated that there was “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these [9/11 hijacker] terrorists within the Saudi Government.” A joint House-Senate congressional investigation found extensive evidence that the Saudi government, not Saddam Hussein, propelled the hijackers. The Bush administration succeeded in suppressing the key 28 pages of that congressional report on the Saudi role on 9/11. Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) became a leading proponent of declassifying those 28 pages, declaring in 2013: “If the 9/11 hijackers had outside help — particularly from one or more foreign governments — the press and the public have a right to know what our government has or has not done to bring justice to all of the perpetrators.”

Those 28 page were finally released (mostly) in 2016, revealing how Saudi government officials directly financed and provided diplomatic cover for several of the hijackers in the U.S. shortly before they unleashed havoc.

Truth delayed is truth defused. Blocking the evidence of the Saudi bankrolling of 9/11 enabled the Bush administration to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis.

The Bush administration sold the Iraq war as payback for 9/11. While false claims by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) have received ample coverage, the Bush Saudi-Iraqi Bait-and-Switch has faded into memory.

In a memo Bush sent on March 18, 2003, notifying Congress that he was launching a war against Iraq, Bush declared that he was acting “to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

Bush invoked this justification even though his administration had never offered a shred of evidence tying Saddam to 9/11. Bush and team continually threw out new accusations and then backed off, knowing that few people were paying close enough attention to recognize that previous charges had collapsed like a houses of cards.

In the first months after 9/11, there was little mention of Iraq in the public pronouncements by Bush and his top officials. But in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, Bush stunned many people by announcing that Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, were part of an “axis of evil.” Since the war on terrorism had stratospheric support levels in the polls from the American people, the best way to sanctify a war against Iraq was to redefine it as part of the war on terrorism. Bush declared on September 25, 2002: “Al Qaeda hides, Saddam doesn’t, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is that al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam’s madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world. . . . You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. They’re both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive.”

The next day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that the U.S. possessed “bulletproof ” evidence linking Saddam and Al Qaeda. But it was a bullet that could never be exposed to sunlight. An earlier alleged link between Iraqi agents and hijacker Mohamed Atta meeting in Prague had collapsed, with the story disavowed by both the CIA and the Czech government.

On October 7, 2002, Bush, speaking to a selective audience of Republican donors in Cincinnati, laid out his logic: “We know that Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy—the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade… And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.” The fact that some Iraqis cheered the carnage on September 11 proved Saddam could team up with Al Qaeda for a second 9/11.

The link between Saddam and Al Qaeda then took a three-month recess, returning in the 2003 State of the Union address, when Bush declared that “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda.” Bush reached for the ultimate hot button: “Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.”

Three days later, when Bush was directly asked by a journalist at a White House press conference, “Do you believe that there is a link between Saddam Hussein, a direct link, and the men who attacked on September the 11th?” Bush replied: “I can’t make that claim.” Yet, that did not stop him from endlessly making the inference.

But the Bush administration’s new “evidence” failed the laugh test. The Los Angeles Times revealed: “The Bush administration’s renewed assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda are based largely on the murky case of a one-legged Al Qaeda suspect who was treated in Baghdad after being wounded in the war in Afghanistan.” Time noted of Bush’s message on Saddam and Al Qaeda: “If there was no visible evidence to link the two, he just used that fact to argue his point: the danger is everywhere, even if we can’t see it; the threat is growing, even if we can’t prove it. The Administration’s argument for war is based not on the strength of America’s Intelligence but on its weakness.”

In the days after 9/11, when pollsters asked Americans who they thought had carried out the 9/11 attacks, only 3 percent of respondents suggested Iraq or Saddam Hussein as culprits. But by February 2003, 72 percent of Americans believed that Hussein was “personally involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shortly before the March 2003 invasion, almost half of all Americans believed that “most” or “some” of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17 percent of respondents knew that none of the hijackers were Iraqis. Seventy-three percent believed that Saddam “is currently helping al-Qaeda.”

American soldiers were hit with more concentrated doses of propaganda than private citizens. A 2006 poll of American troops revealed that 85% believed the U.S. mission sought “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.” That belief likely helped spur some of atrocities against Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops.

U.S. intelligence agencies always knew that the Saddam-9/11 link was a political concoction by pro-war politicians. In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a 511-page report that recognized that the CIA accurately concluded that “to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance” in the 9/11 attacks. The report noted that the CIA’s accurate judgments on Saddam, Al Qaeda, and the non-link to 9/11 “were widely disseminated [prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq], though an early version of a key CIA assessment was disseminated only to a limited list of Cabinet members and some sub-Cabinet officials in the administration.”

Neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney were ever held liable for their lies that led to carnage in Iraq. Perhaps that is the biggest lesson that Washington policymakers take from the Iraq War.

On the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, Donald Trump sounded as if he recognized the vast folly of invading Iraq to topple Saddam. But Trump’s promise to “end the endless wars” seems like a hundred years ago. An Associated Press poll last month found that 56% of Americans believed that Trump had already “gone too far” with his military interventions abroad. But will pro-war politicians and political appointees fabricate new pretexts to attack Iran or elsewhere?

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.

James Bovard

James Bovard, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is author and lecturer whose commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of ten books, including Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.

Trump Is Turning the US Into the World’s Rogue Policeman

The United States has long been tempted to play good cop-bad cop with the world. President Trump is simply taking things to the next distinctly psychopathic level.


Nicolas Maduro is seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad, escorted by heavily armed Federal agents as they make their way into an armored car en route to a Federal courthouse in Manhattan on January 5, 2026 in New York City.
(Photo by XNY/Star Max/GC Images)

John Feffer
Feb 14, 2026

Common Dreams

A mere 15 years ago, during an epoch that now seems as distant as the Paleozoic era, an American president attempted to use military power to prevent a dictator from slaughtering his own citizens. Barack Obama billed the action in Libya as a humanitarian intervention, citing the new United Nations doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” or R2P. The president hoped to avert a massacre by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi rather than, as usual, coming in afterwards to count the dead and try to bring the malefactors to justice.

Obama intervened like a global police officer, following the letter of the (international) law. Eager to be seen as a “good cop,” the president even promised to “lead from behind.” It’s impossible to know if the US-led action did indeed prevent massive war crimes. However, the disastrous aftermath of that Libyan campaign—the summary execution of Qaddafi and a civil war that would kill tens of thousands—was yet more evidence that Washington’s attempts to police the world are quixotic at best.

Public support for the Libyan action was decidedly mixed, with criticism of the president coming from all sides of the political spectrum. On the left, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich thundered that “we have moved from President Bush’s doctrine of preventive war to President Obama’s assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation.” Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation complained that Obama was too scrupulous in his adherence to the principles of R2P, which might only raise the bar for future US interventions.

Ah, the good old days, when the left and the right both took international law seriously enough to argue over how a US president should engage with it!

That’s exactly the kind of police officer that Donald Trump aspires to be, wielding power not on behalf of principle but in the service of personal gain and autocratic control.

Donald J. Trump has shown no such scruples. He considers international law nothing more than a trifling impediment by which the weak try to drag down the strong. He boasts that he didn’t even bother to consult the UN when pursuing his trumped-up peace plans and creating his laughably ill-named “Board of Peace.” He certainly didn’t consider international law recently when he bombed Nigeria, seized Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and threatened to annex Greenland. He may be the first American president to treat international law as if it were as fictional as intergalactic law.

By contrast, the only principle that Trump now invokes in his foreign policy is the infamous law of the jungle. He believes that power—its threat and its exercise—is all that matters for apex predators like the United States (and himself). The rest is just the chittering of potential prey.

“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” the amoral Trump told the New York Times in a recent (and terrifying) interview. “I don’t need international law.”

Global cop, then, would not seem to be a suitable aspiration for the likes of Donald Trump. Unlike Obama, he’s not interested in making sure that laws are observed and miscreants punished. Instead, Trump practically fawns over the miscreants: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. The duties of policing the planet—both the adherence to law and the expenditure of resources—simply don’t appeal to him.

“We’re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn’t be the priority,” Trump said back in 2018. “We want to police ourselves and we want to rebuild our country.”

That was the old Trump. The new Trump looks at things quite differently.
How Real Cops Operate

Maybe when you hear the expression “world’s policeman,” you think of Officer Clemmons on the once-popular children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: a genial upholder of community morals, but on a global scale.

Or maybe you’re like former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen who, in 2023, pined for an upright world policeman with superpowers and lofty principles. “We desperately need a US president who is able and willing to lead the free world and counter autocrats like President Putin,” he wrote. “The world needs such a policeman if freedom and prosperity are to prevail against the forces of oppression, and the only capable, reliable, and desirable candidate for the position is the United States.”

Donald Trump doesn’t want either of those jobs.

But let’s face it, that’s not how a large number of police officers actually operate. In 2025, police across the United States killed 98 unarmed people, the majority people of color. The misconduct of more than 1,000 dirty cops in Chicago—ranging from false arrests to the use of excessive force—cost that city nearly $300 million in court judgments between 2019 and 2022 alone, a pattern repeated at different magnitudes across the country and still ongoing, given the recent killings by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.

Elsewhere in the world, the police suppress dissent and fill prisons at the behest of dictators from Russia and North Korea to Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.

In democracies, the police break laws, often with impunity; in autocracies, they follow unjust laws while systemically violating human rights.

A globocop embracing that kind of outlaw justice would disregard international law, make a mockery of institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, and attempt to establish alternative bodies that privilege the powerful. That’s exactly the kind of police officer that Donald Trump aspires to be, wielding power not on behalf of principle but in the service of personal gain and autocratic control.

The United States has long been tempted to play good cop-bad cop with the world. President Trump is simply taking things to the next distinctly psychopathic level.
Upholding the Law?

The first American president to dream of raising his country to the status of world policeman was Teddy Roosevelt. As a former police commissioner of New York City, he ardently believed that the federal government needed to use its constabulary power to intervene in society to maintain order, including suppressing labor unrest.

At the international level, like Trump, Roosevelt articulated his vision as a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In a 1904 address to Congress, he laid out his vision this way:
Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.


Roosevelt believed that the United States—and other major powers—had to step in to right wrongs in the absence of robust international institutions. He proposed a global “League of Peace” to prevent wars and end conflicts. In the meantime, according to his problematic take on “civilized” behavior, Roosevelt justified US interventions not only in the Western Hemisphere but also farther afield. In fact, Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War where, in a secret agreement, he gave Japan control of Korea in exchange for US control over the Philippines.

Trump has borrowed much from Roosevelt in his approach to global affairs, now aptly known as the Donroe Doctrine. The “League of Peace” has become Trump’s “Board of Peace.” Roosevelt’s interventions in the Western Hemisphere to keep out European powers have become selective moves to push out the Chinese and (less so) the Russians in Venezuela and elsewhere. Roosevelt’s “civilizing mission” has become an equally abhorrent commitment by the Trump administration to advancing the interests of white people, as in the preferential treatment of white South Africans when it comes to immigration to this country. Like Roosevelt, Trump considered a “spheres of influence” swap with Russia, exchanging Ukraine for Venezuela, before ultimately rejecting the deal.

By now, all of America’s historical justifications for acting as the world’s policeman have fallen away, including the assertion of self-determination (Woodrow Wilson), the mobilization against fascism (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the crusade against communism (Harry Truman et al), and all talk of global democracy and human rights (the post-Cold War-era presidents). Trump has instead quite openly embraced Teddy Roosevelt, big stick and all, along with Roosevelt’s tendency to link the suppression of conflict at home and abroad. In Donald Trump’s world, federal immigration agents killing protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and Special Forces kidnapping Nicolás Maduro are two sides of the same impulse: the use of constabulary force to extinguish dissent and maintain a pyramidic order nationally and hemispherically, with Donald Trump on top of it all.

Like Roosevelt, Trump showed no regard for the principles of sovereignty in his intervention in Venezuela. Roosevelt didn’t think Filipinos were civilized enough for self-government and Trump, by insisting that Greenlanders must submit to US control, repeats the colonialist pattern. Trump’s major innovation: Speak loudly and carry that big stick.

The trajectory of the world order over the last 75 years has been in the direction of safeguards for weaker nations and controls on the exercise of power by stronger nations. An elaborate system of international agreements governing human rights has been designed to protect individuals and groups from the predations of states and corporations.

Trump wants to reverse that trajectory, just as he wants to roll back all the gains social movements have made within the United States, from civil rights and feminism to the victories of the LGBTQ community.

In TrumpWorld, those with the guns make the rules. They take Crimea, Gaza, and Greenland—at gunpoint, if necessary.
Profiting Off Policing

Corrupt cops have long been involved in protection rackets, shaking down gambling establishments, prostitutes, and drug dealers. Trump, a shady businessman at heart, thrills to that side of the globocop business. All of his “peace deals” cut him or his cronies in on a piece of the action.

Take, for instance, last year’s deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It includes a “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” that connects Azerbaijan with its enclave of Nakhichevan. In addition to naming rights, Trump negotiated as part of the agreement a TRIPP Development Company to construct the corridor, with the United States owning 74% of its shares for the first 49 years.

There’s no word yet on who the members of the US-Armenian steering committee will be for that project. If Gaza is any indication, however, it will be yet one more goodie to be distributed to friends and CEOs through Trump’s patronage system. The Gaza peace deal established a Board of Peace whose executive committee is dominated by Trump cronies, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, diplomatic emissaries Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, billionaire businessman Marc Rowan, and Trump security advisor Robert Gabriel.

For all of us who found fault with the “good cop” approach of Obama in Libya—and there was much fault to be found—it’s once again time to get a taste of America as the “bad cop.”

An even more audacious profit-seeking deal was his recent multipoint proposal to end the war in Ukraine. In it, Witkoff and his Russian counterpart imagined a scenario in which US businesses would profit by gaining access to frozen Russian funds for the reconstruction of Ukraine, while also making billions from restarting business relations with Russia. Again, it’s not difficult to imagine who would profit from such arrangements. After all, Jared Kushner, architect of the Abrahamic Accords that normalized diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, became a billionaire thanks to contacts in and investments from the Gulf States.

Trump is all about extraction. If he has his way, the Venezuelan operation will net billions of dollars in oil revenues for major US companies. Similarly, his obsession with Greenland is driven, at least in part, by his lust for the reputed mineral wealth that lies beneath that giant island’s snow and ice. The United States is dependent on imports of critical minerals, many now controlled by China. Like a cop who eyes the riches generated by someone else’s protection racket, Trump is desperate to muscle in to grab some of the profits.

Perhaps the most vulgar expression of his desire to run a global protection racket is that Board of Peace of his. Countries that want to have permanent seats on it have to pony up a billion dollars apiece. Warmongers like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are welcome as members as long as they’re willing to fork over the money. On the other hand, Canada has been banned from it because, in a speech at Davos, its prime minister, Mark Carney, tried to rally the globe’s middle powers against the United States and other rule-breaking great powers.

Originally established to administer the Gaza peace deal, the board seems to have much greater ambitions. As its “president for life,” Trump has promised to cooperate with the United Nations. But the board’s membership, with the United States first among unequals, suggests a rival body with no interest in abiding by international law. Think of it as the UN’s evil twin and its creation as a signal that the United States has officially gone rogue cop.
The Future of US Foreign Policy

Not everyone in the MAGAverse is happy with America as a globocop.

Some isolationist remnants of the Republican Party have criticized the operations in Venezuela, though not enough to make a difference in Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once Trump’s greatest congressional advocate, parted ways with the president on a number of issues, including the Venezuela intervention, and decided to step down early from her position rather than face his political vengefulness.

Trump has insisted that, the attacks on Venezuela’s sovereignty notwithstanding, the United States is not at war with that country. He ruled out any alternative interpretations of MAGA doctrine. “MAGA is me,” he said. “MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

Trump has made some noises about a spheres-of-influence approach with his Donroe Doctrine, prioritizing US control over the Western Hemisphere. He has been happy to reward Russia for its “policing” of neighboring Ukraine, and he’s been ambiguous at best about coming to the defense of Taiwan, should China threaten it. Indeed, he has been more than happy to delegate such responsibilities to others, whether it’s Israel in the Middle East or acting president Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela. In a complex world as full of nukes and conventional missiles as the United States is of handguns, globocops need their deputies.

However, neither isolationism nor the idea of global spheres of influence has truly captured Trump’s imagination. In the first year of his second term, he has instead driven a stake through the very idea of isolationism by launching military operations in Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria. Nor has he shown any deep interest in confining his ambitions to the Western Hemisphere. Instead, he has continued to build the Pentagon budget to counter China, while fancying himself a peacemaker across the Global South. Wherever his critics continue to dance beyond his grasp, as in Cuba and Iran, and wherever valuable resources can be extracted for personal and political gain, as in Greenland and the Congo, Trump will try to press any military advantage he might have.

For all of us who found fault with the “good cop” approach of Obama in Libya—and there was much fault to be found—it’s once again time to get a taste of America as the “bad cop.” So far, Trump’s targets have been weak (Venezuela) or easy to attack (Iran, after Israel destroyed its air defenses). The grave danger is that, encouraged by such “successes,” Trump may move on to larger targets like China or the 60% of American citizens who oppose his policies.

Cops, protected by their badges and their guns, think they’re invincible. Taken to court over their crimes and corruption, they suddenly discover that they’re not in fact above the law. Trump is now turning the United States into a “bad cop.” Let’s hope that he learns a lesson about the limits of his power before he goes apocalyptically rogue.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


John Feffer
John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel "Splinterlands" (2016) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His novel, "Frostlands" (2018) is book two of his Splinterlands trilogy. Splinterlands book three "Songlands" was published in 2021. His podcast is available here.
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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.”