There is a moment in every political argument when the topic stops being about policy and starts being about who can shout loudest. The capital gains tax debate in New Zealand has reached that moment. Chris Hipkins, the Labour leader, has spent the last week trying to position his party as the reasonable adult in the room, accusing National of deliberately peddling misinformation about what a capital gains tax would actually do. National, he says, is scaring homeowners with talk of a tax on family homes, on retirement savings, on the ordinary gains that people make when they sell the…

On the morning of October 7, 2026, attendees began arriving at a hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania, for one of the most anticipated events in Europe’s counter-disinformation calendar: the #Disinfo2026 conference. They came with lanyards, notebooks, and coffee cups, ready to spend two days talking about foreign information manipulation, digital resilience, and the fight against lies in the public square. But something was off. As participants made their way into the main hall, they noticed that several sponsor logos on flyers, banners, and placards had been hastily covered over with strips of paper. It was a strange, almost surreal sight—like trying…