THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM IS COMING FOR YOUR STEAK.

WEF Dr. Matthew Liao: We can engineer MEAT ALLERGIES using Lone Star Ticks so you physically CAN'T EAT BEEF OR OTHER MEATS. pic.twitter.com/jNbMpFCWRd

— Valerie Anne Smith (@ValerieAnne1970) August 17, 2026

Thousands of Dutch farmers are protesting against EU tyranny and increased taxes. pic.twitter.com/WJX3ZJvdhH

— 𝕊𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕻𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕤 (@SprinterPress) August 17, 2026

by Andrew Korybko

The amended 1956 compromise put forth in this piece would advance their interests and arguably also America’s as well but requires Russia to make the first move by informally floating this proposal.

Putin’s first-ever visit to the Kuril Islands during his trip to Iturup was harshly condemned by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi due to her country’s continued claims to that island and several others that Tokyo considers to be its “Northern Territories”. Kunashir, Shikotan, and the uninhabited Habomai Islands round out the rest of the Russian territory whose control is disputed in Northeast Asia. For background, the Yalta Agreement returned the Kuril Islands to the USSR, but Japan raised a technicality.

From its perspective, the abovementioned islands supposedly weren’t ever legally considered part of the Kuril Islands, but a 1949 State Department memo argued that aquaculture-rich Shikotan and the Habomai Islands are the only ones whose legal status under the Yalta Agreement might be debatable. Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956 that restored their diplomatic relations included a compromise whereby Moscow agreed to transfer those two to Tokyo after they sign a peace treaty.

For reasons beyond the scope of this analysis to detail but which many on the Russian side suspect was due to American influence over Japan, their grand compromise fell apart, ergo why the dispute persists to this day with Tokyo claiming all four of the previously mentioned areas. Putin invested considerable time and effort into restoring the 1956 compromise so as to unlock more Japanese investment, open up more of its energy market to Russian exports, and preemptively avert Russian dependence on China.

These outcomes are also in Japan’s objective national interests, but the emotive nature of this dispute for some of the Japanese electorate impeded a resolution even under the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who Putin considered to be a close friend and with whom he discussed this issue at length. “Putin Lamented The Worsening Of Russian-Japanese Relations” during his tour of the Russian Far East right before his trip to Iturup to signal that this is Moscow’s response to the trend that he blames on Tokyo.

The preceding hyperlinked analysis also directs readers to these two analyses here and here to respectively learn more about why Russia considers Japan to pose a growing threat to its security and the role that the US envisages Japan playing in the new regional security architecture. The purpose in referencing them is to highlight the military-strategic stakes of potentially worsened Russian-Japanese relations with a view towards drawing attention to why Japan should compromise with Russia instead.

Peace and stability are the paramount imperatives, which could then unlock economic and geostrategic dividends for Japan so long as Tokyo returns to the 1956 compromise with Moscow. In that scenario, even if Japan doesn’t lift all of its anti-Russian sanctions right away, it might begin by doing so in a blended sectoral-geographic way modeled off of this proposal here from a decade ago regarding a “Northern Islands Socio-Economic Condominium” (NISEC) between Sakhalin, the Kurils, and Hokkaido.

The idea is that these three regions could become the core of a more comprehensive economic integration project that could scale to include the entire resource-rich Russian Far East with privileged Japanese access to its energy and mineral wealth as elaborated on here and here. Instead of remaining dependent on unpredictable West Asian energy imports and politically vulnerable Chinese rare earth mineral processing, Japan could rely on Russia as a nearby solution with the right investment strategy.

On the geostrategic front, Russia would advance its goal of preemptively averting dependence on China, which is in Japan’s interests too. Given Japan’s closeness with India, and recalling that India is already making inroads in the Russian Far East via their Eastern Maritime Corridor, large-scale joint Japanese-Indian resource-centric investments – both in extraction and processing – are possible. Russia’s copious hydroelectric resources there and the resultantly cheap cost of energy make this all the more attractive.

To recap the amended 1956 compromise that’s being proposed, Japan would receive Shikotan and the Habomai Islands in exchange for dropping its claims to Kunashir and Iturup, the quid pro quo of which would be sweetened by the creation of NISEC and privileged access to the Russian Far East’s resources. Upon its full implementation, this (likely phased) plan would preemptively avert Russian dependence on China while reducing Japan’s dependence on the US, therefore mutually strengthening their sovereignty.

Moreover, the Japanese economy would no longer be held hostage to a hypothetical conflict in the South China Sea due to its reduced dependence on West Asian energy imports, while trade with the EU could be optimized via Russia’s Northern Sea Route. With low-cost energy and mineral resources flooding into the country from just across its namesake sea, the Japanese economy might experience a long-overdue renaissance, thus enhancing its competitiveness in the emerging global economic order.

For as much as Takaichi might truly believe in the merits of her country’s claims to Kunashir and Iturup, not to mention the influence of domestic political pressure from some voters and discreet international pressure from the US, she should therefore boldly explore the compromise put forth in this piece. After all, it’s also in the US’ interests that Russia preemptively averts dependence on China as explained here and here, so Trump might be convinced if his new friend Takaichi’s argument is persuasive enough.

Considering the three influences upon her – her own views on the issue, domestic political pressure, and discreet international pressure from the US – this proposal might require Russia to make the first move by informally floating it through diplomatic and/or expert channels. That could raise greater awareness of it among Japanese officialdom, experts, and then eventually society alike, which might then possibly reduce domestic political pressure upon Takaichi and thus embolden her to discuss this with Trump.

American diplomats and experts could also catch wind of this from their Japanese counterparts if Russia first informally floats it through one or both of these channels. With this in mind, Russia would do well to make the first move, which could then reconceptualize Putin’s first-ever trip to the Kuril Islands as the third example of him newly “escalating to de-escalate” by following up a “political escalation” (from the Japanese viewpoint) in this case with a viable de-escalation proposal. The Kremlin should reflect on this.

by Sama Hoole @SamaHoole

If you had trusted the settled science of the day, here is how it would have gone.

1890s: you dose the baby with Bayer’s new cough syrup, the non-addictive alternative to morphine, marketed for children. It was heroin. They named it after the German for heroic.

1900s: you rub calomel teething powder on your infant’s gums. It is a mercury compound, and it leaves a generation with pink disease. Swollen, peeling hands and feet, screaming for months, and some of them died.

1910s: you cook in Crisco, launched by a soap and candle company, because cottonseed oil is modern and lard is what your mother used. The process that made it solid produced trans fat, banned outright a century later.

1920s: you drink Radithor, certified radioactive water, on prescription. Eben Byers took fourteen hundred bottles for his vitality. His jaw was removed in pieces and he was buried in a lead coffin.

1930s: a chemist dissolves a new sulfa drug in diethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. It kills 107 people, mostly children, and only then does America give the FDA power to demand safety testing.

1940s: your doctor lights a Camel in the surgery. More doctors smoke them than any other brand, and the advert runs in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which sold him the page.

1950s: DDT is sprayed over your kitchen, your garden and your children at school. The man who found its insecticidal properties has already been given a Nobel Prize.

1960s: your wife takes thalidomide for morning sickness because it is remarkably safe. More than ten thousand children are born with missing and shortened limbs.

1970s: the country puts down the butter and picks up the margarine, on the instruction of the American Heart Association. The fat everybody switched to was banned in 2015 as unsafe at any level.

1980s: the fat comes out of everything and sugar goes back in to make it edible. Obesity begins a climb it has never come off.

1990s: your father is prescribed OxyContin, because fewer than one per cent get addicted. The company later pleads guilty to criminal misbranding, and the overdose count runs into hundreds of thousands.

2000s: you take Vioxx for your knee. It is pulled in 2004, and the FDA’s own safety officer estimates tens of thousands of excess heart attacks.

Not one of those was fringe. Every one had a professional body, a literature and a man in a white coat standing behind it.

Nobody who followed that advice was stupid. They were obedient, to the most qualified people available.

Settled is a word about money. It means the questions stopped being funded, so they stopped being asked.

So which of today’s instructions will your grandchildren read out in disbelief.

The oil washed in hexane and built into every cell you own. The statin that blocks the pathway making your hormones, to prevent one heart attack per hundred people. The injection where a third of the loss is muscle. The infant formula built out of vegetable oil.

All settled. None of it funded to be otherwise.

Denmark has a dark past in Greenland, a past it would rather you didn't talk about, child abduction, forced sterilisation, forced Labour and exploitation.

Denmark’s possession of Greenland, whose actual name is Kalaallit Nunaat, began as a mission to reclaim land from "lost"… pic.twitter.com/id8g2UDErJ

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) August 16, 2026

What has Mr Rouse been up to?

Parliament was in recess last week, but politics continued. ACT celebrated David Seymour’s reforms to school attendance with record numbers (11,579) of Not Enrolled students returned to school in the first half of this year. Charter school enrolments, meanwhile, increased 18 per cent in six months. Many charter schools are now looking for bigger buildings because space is their constraint. Giving communities a chance to compete for education funding is ACT philosophy in action, and it’s transforming lives let down by the state system.

The Party also released new policy that was welcomed as ‘a breath of fresh air and common sense.’ The Local Tourism Dividend would give a Council one dollar for each bed night tourists stay in the Council’s area.

It would help Councils support tourism without a new tax to administer. Councils and tourism operators have been braying for a new tax for years, ACT strongly opposes any new tax, because once they’re in, they always grow. The policy, and five reasons why it’s better than a new tax, are here.

One Law for All, One Future Together

The current Government was elected to fix the rampant and deliberate racism that grew up under its predecessor.

Since November 2023 it has: removed the separatist Māori Health Authority, given communities a referendum on Māori words, cancelled Three Waters with its co-governed boards, replaced the ‘Aotearoa Histories Curriculum’ with a balanced view of human history in New Zealand, issued a Cabinet Circular that services must be delivered on need, not race, so things like diabetes medicines and bowel cancer screening are no longer funded along racial lines… We could go on, but the point is a lot has been done.

For all the progress that has been made, though, there is a niggling feeling that the public service has carried on its merry way, giving a big fat finger to the Government of the day. It shows up when karakia are required at the start of meetings, job ads advertise for knowledge of te ao Māori (but no other culture), and people lose out because they didn’t ‘demonstrate their commitment to te tiriti in the home.’

Last week’s Free Press argued that Treatyism has become New Zealand’s new religion. Colonisation was the original sin, but if you wear the adornments around your neck, practice the rituals before your meetings, and smite non-believers as ‘racist’ then, maybe, you will be saved.

The Public Service has become the church of New Zealand’s new religion, and if you doubt that you only need to look at the Ministry of Education’s Tātai Pou Competency Matrix. A workers’ competency is ranked from ‘unsatisfactory’ to ‘high.’ You don’t just need to promote Treatyism to move up the matrix, you need to promote it to others to be highly competent.

If you are not a believer, even not practicing in your home, you may not get a job in the public service.

Missionaries would be proud, but our country was built on secularism and tolerance. The Treaty says every New Zealander should have the ‘same rights and duties’. In 1847, between the Treaty and the first Parliament, Governor Grey issued an education ordinance requiring school instruction to be secular for parents who demanded it, while acknowledging many parents would want religious instruction. Parliament’s 1877 Education Act also demanded education be secular.

Not long after that, Kate Sheppard, perhaps the greatest New Zealander and a devout Christian, said “All that separates, whether it be of race, class, creed or sex, is inhuman and must be overcome.” A century later New Zealanders protested en masse against apartheid, even at the expense of seeing the ABs.

New Zealand is a society founded, at least in part, on secularism and racial equality. What is happening in the Public Service, in spite of the elected Government, is counter to the foundations of secular tolerance this country is built on, and must be overcome.

That’s why the ACT Party has launched policy to remove Section 73 of the Public Service Act 2020, the section that requires the Public Service carry out discriminatory hiring. The Party pledges to upgrade its successful Need-not-Race Cabinet Circular to law enforceable in Court. It will ban taxpayer financing for cultural practices. It pledges to separate spiritual rituals from government work.

The full policy is here, but one question remains. Wasn’t this done already? Yes, ACT negotiated to reform the Public Service Act, and improvements were made. The roughest edges of that law made under the Labour-Green-New Zealand First Government in 2020 have been knocked off. The new Section 11A says Chief Executives should focus on performance first.

But, even Free Press underestimated the religious fervour that drives Treatyism. Learning from this term of Government, ACT has refined its plans to tackle the high church of Treatyism in its next term of Government.

This focuses on a legal challenge to California’s covid-19 misinformation law, arguing that doctors should retain First Amendment protections when discussing medical information and treatment options with patients. Attorney Richard Jaffe tells Jimmy that after earlier rulings treated doctor-patient advice as regulable “conduct,” a later Supreme Court decision on protected therapeutic speech changed the legal landscape, leading a federal judge to rule in favor of three doctors challenging California’s restrictions.

Dr Pierre Kory argues that the case has implications far beyond covid-19 because allowing governments or medical boards to dictate what physicians may say could suppress medical dissent and independent judgment. The three characterize the ruling as a major victory for doctors’ and patients’ freedom of medical discussion, while also crediting legal organizations that supported the litigation.

At the time Biden’s war began in 2022 the town had a population of about 14,000 (about the same as Waikanae); it is now only about 1,000. The next city for liberation is Zaporizhzhia about 60 km away on the banks on the Dnieper River which makes it strategically important. In 2022 it had a population of about 710,000 (metro area 840,000) but it will be less now.