Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 13 August 2026
Somewhere beneath the Pacific, about 1,850 kilometres south of Tokyo, lies Minami-Torishima — a coral atoll so small it barely registers on most maps. What lies beneath it, however, could reshape the geopolitics of critical minerals for decades. The United States and Japan have announced plans to develop what would be the world's deepest undersea mine, targeting vast deposits of rare earth elements in the seabed mud surrounding the island.
A joint US-Japan statement described deposits that could "meet centuries' worth of industrial demand." That is not hyperbole dressed up for a press release. Japanese government surveys conducted over the past decade have consistently found that the deep-sea mud around Minami-Torishima contains concentrations of rare earths — including dysprosium and terbium, essential for electric vehicle motors and wind turbines — at levels far exceeding most land-based deposits. The challenge has always been extraction at depths of 5,000 to 6,000 metres, which no commercial operation has ever attempted.
The strategic logic is blunt. China controls roughly 60 per cent of global rare earth mining and close to 90 per cent of processing. Beijing has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to weaponise that dominance — restricting exports to Japan in 2010 during a territorial dispute, and more recently tightening controls on gallium and germanium. Every defence system, every EV battery, every MRI machine in the Western world runs on materials that pass through Chinese hands. The Minami-Torishima project is an attempt to break that dependency at scale.
But deep-sea mining remains one of the most contested frontiers in resource extraction. The International Seabed Authority has spent years failing to agree on regulations. Environmental groups warn that dredging the abyssal plain destroys ecosystems we barely understand — species catalogued for the first time only to be bulldozed months later. The nodule fields of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the other major deep-sea mining target, have already generated fierce opposition from Pacific Island nations.
The Japan project sidesteps some of those objections by operating within Japan's exclusive economic zone rather than in international waters, removing the ISA from the equation. But the environmental questions remain. And the engineering challenges are formidable — no existing technology can economically extract mud from six kilometres down and process it at surface. Japan's JOGMEC agency conducted small-scale pilot lifts in 2024, but scaling that to commercial production is a different order of problem.
What makes this signal significant is not the mine itself — which is years from production — but what it reveals about how seriously Washington and Tokyo now take supply chain sovereignty. This is not a research grant. It is a bilateral strategic commitment to build extractive infrastructure in one of the most technically hostile environments on Earth, because the alternative — continued dependence on Beijing — is now considered an unacceptable national security risk.
Source: The Japan Times · 12 August 2026
Now — Brazil's soy moratorium collapses and the Amazon loses its most effective market-based protection: The US-Japan rare earth push is a story about governments building new supply chains. Brazil's Supreme Court has just validated the destruction of one of the most successful ones. The court upheld state laws in Mato Grosso and elsewhere that denied tax incentives to farmers who adhered to the Amazon soy moratorium — the voluntary agreement, in place for nearly twenty years, that barred major grain traders from purchasing soy grown on deforested Amazon land. In response, the traders withdrew. The moratorium, which credible research credited with dramatically reducing deforestation in soy-producing regions, is effectively dead. What killed it was not a lack of science or a failure of environmental will. It was the fiscal logic of state governments that depend on agricultural tax revenue and resented a private-sector agreement that constrained their most powerful industry. The court ruled that both the moratorium and the punitive tax laws were constitutional — a legally coherent but practically devastating outcome that leaves no instrument in place to prevent soy expansion into newly cleared forest. For the rare earth story, the parallel is instructive: supply chain arrangements built on voluntary cooperation or market incentives are fragile. The ones that endure are backed by sovereign commitment and strategic necessity.
Soon — South Korea's housing crisis forces the state to bet against its own citizens' balance sheets: South Korea has raised its cap on household debt growth and pledged a wave of new housing supply in Greater Seoul, in an increasingly desperate attempt to contain a property rally that is becoming a direct political threat to President Lee Jae Myung. The measures amount to an admission that market forces alone cannot cool a housing market inflated by cheap credit, constrained supply, and the cultural centrality of property ownership in Korean wealth accumulation. But the deeper tension is structural: by loosening debt caps to allow more borrowing while simultaneously flooding supply to suppress prices, the government is pulling in two directions at once. If supply arrives faster than demand absorbs it, the households that borrowed at the new higher limits will find themselves underwater. If supply arrives too slowly, the political pressure intensifies. The rare earth story and the Korean housing story share a common architecture — governments forced to make large, irreversible bets on physical supply in environments where the cost of inaction has become politically unbearable, and where the cost of getting the timing wrong is borne by citizens, not officials.
Later — The ocean becomes the next contested commons: The precedent being set is significant. If Japan successfully extracts rare earths from its own EEZ, the pressure on the International Seabed Authority to open international waters to mining will intensify enormously. Pacific Island states, which have positioned themselves as guardians of the deep ocean, will find their leverage diminished. The philosophical question — whether the seabed is a shared heritage of humanity or a resource frontier for those with the technology to exploit it — will move from academic debate to geopolitical confrontation. The parallel to the scramble for Arctic resources as ice retreats is exact, and equally uncomfortable. Sources: The Japan Times · 12 August 2026; Mongabay · 12 August 2026; Bloomberg · 12 August 2026 ---
A DER SPIEGEL investigation, conducted with international media partners, has exposed the depth of military cooperation between Russia and China through secret documents. The reporting reveals joint operational planning that goes well beyond the "no limits" rhetoric both capitals have deployed publicly. The documents detail coordinated exercises, intelligence-sharing protocols, and joint development programmes that suggest a functional military alliance — even as both governments insist no such alliance exists. For European defence planners who have been treating Russia and China as separate threat vectors, this is a rude awakening. Source: Der Spiegel · 12 August 2026
The World Health Organization's director-general has warned that the current Ebola outbreak is on course to become the deadliest ever recorded, with more than 2,000 deaths and thousands more confirmed cases since the outbreak was declared on 15 May. The numbers have surpassed the early trajectory of the 2014–16 West African epidemic that ultimately killed over 11,000 people. Health systems in the affected regions are buckling under the strain, and international response funding remains far below what the WHO says is needed. The speed of spread suggests containment measures are failing, and the longer the outbreak runs, the greater the risk of it reaching densely populated urban centres where contact tracing becomes effectively impossible. Source: BBC World · 12 August 2026
A coalition of Indigenous peoples in Indonesia has filed a legal challenge against parts of the country's recently enacted conservation law. The groups argue the legislation allows the government to designate ancestral lands as conservation areas without community consent — effectively expropriating territory under the banner of environmentalism. It is a pattern visible across Southeast Asia and Latin America: conservation as dispossession. The case will test whether Indonesia's Constitutional Court treats Indigenous land rights as a ceiling or a floor. Source: Mongabay · 12 August 2026
Zambians went to the polls on 13 August in national elections where the rising cost of living and governance failures dominate voter concerns. But hovering over the contest is the legacy of former president Edgar Lungu, who died earlier this year. His political allies are attempting to channel his memory into votes, turning the election into a contest between continuity and the promise of reform. The outcome will signal whether southern Africa's fragile democratic norms can survive populist nostalgia. Source: The Africa Report · 12 August 2026
The car bomb killing of Khalifa Haftar's intelligence chief in Benghazi on 10–11 August has thrown fresh doubt on Washington's plan to unify Libya's rival governments ahead of elections scheduled for February 2027. The US special envoy Massad Boulos has been shuttling between the Haftar and Dbeibah camps, but the assassination exposes how fragile any settlement remains. Libya's oil production — still among Africa's largest — depends on a stability that no one can guarantee. Source: The Africa Report · 12 August 2026; Le Monde · 12 August 2026
Just as Nigeria's investment story was improving — the naira stabilising, dollar millionaires rising to 8,100 for the first time since 2021 — uncertainty over capital gains tax is emerging as the biggest concern for offshore investors. The lack of clarity on how gains will be assessed and collected threatens to undo months of careful signalling by Nigerian authorities. For a country that needs foreign capital to fund its energy transition and infrastructure deficit, the timing is painful. Source: Business Day Nigeria · 12 August 2026
Kenya Power is now requiring all new wind and solar projects to include battery storage, as the grid struggles to absorb intermittent renewable energy. Developers are pushing back, arguing the added cost will raise tariffs and slow deployment. The tension is familiar across emerging markets: the grid cannot keep up with the pace of renewable installation, and the cost of balancing supply and demand falls on the newest entrants. Kenya's decision will be watched across East Africa. Source: The Africa Report · 12 August 2026
Colombia's new right-leaning government has authorised joint military operations with the United States in its fight against narcotrafficking, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in Panama. The move represents a dramatic shift from the previous government's negotiation-first approach and raises questions about sovereignty, civilian casualties, and the long record of failed militarised drug policy in the region. It also cements the new Colombian president's alignment with Washington. Source: Folha de São Paulo · 12 August 2026 ---
In the Falkland Islands, the government this week paused Loligo squid fishing for two weeks after biomass dropped to worrying levels. The decision was taken in consultation with the fishing industry — a tiny community of operators who depend on the resource and participate directly in its management. It is a small, overlooked story. But somewhere else in the world, a far noisier version of this same principle — people with ideas in poor contexts who see what nobody else sees — is playing out in a way that deserves attention.
Actually, the more compelling story from today's feed is what Kenya's mandatory battery storage requirement reveals when viewed from the other side: developers in East Africa who are building off-grid solar-plus-storage microgrids not because the regulator told them to, but because the grid never reached their customers in the first place.
But the truest expression of the spirit today comes from a different corner. Data of 15 million Kazakhstanis has allegedly been leaked from the country's eGov digital service platform. A hacker claims to have stolen the data. The authorities are investigating.
This sounds like a cybersecurity story. It is not. It is a story about what happens when a Central Asian state — one that has invested heavily in digitising government services as a modernisation showcase — discovers that centralised digital infrastructure is also centralised vulnerability. Kazakhstan's eGov platform was built to leapfrog paper bureaucracy, to make the state efficient and modern. And it did. But in building a single system that holds everything — identity, property, tax, health — the government also built the single richest target for anyone with the skill and the motivation to break in.
The lesson here is not that digitisation is bad. It is that monopoly architecture — even digital monopoly architecture, even when built with good intentions — creates fragility. The most resilient systems are distributed. The most robust identities are not held in one place. The builders who understand this are working on decentralised identity protocols, on systems where no single breach can expose an entire population. They are mostly small teams, underfunded, working in places like Nairobi, Tbilisi, and Tallinn — places that learned the hard way that putting all your data in one basket is putting all your citizens at risk.
Kazakhstan's eGov breach is a reminder: the monopoly you build to serve people can become the weapon used against them. The future belongs to architectures that assume the breach will happen — and make it irrelevant.
Source: The Diplomat · 12 August 2026
An apartment in the Victorian townhouse at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London — where Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell grew up — is now for sale. The house shaped both artists profoundly: Woolf wrote about it repeatedly, and the claustrophobic social rituals of the household fed directly into her fiction. For those who believe in the archaeology of creative lives, this is a rare chance to walk the rooms that produced two of the twentieth century's most original minds. Source: Artnet News · 12 August 2026
Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens — the 1843 amusement park that inspired Walt Disney — has opened Hikari, an immersive Japanese-themed zone featuring rides, architecture, food, and art installations. The design draws on Japanese festival culture rather than theme-park cliché, and represents one of the most ambitious expansions in Tivoli's 183-year history. Whether it achieves cultural depth or decorated kitsch will depend on execution, but the ambition is welcome. Source: Monocle · 12 August 2026
Monocle asks whether the art market's current convulsions — high-profile gallery closures, declining fair attendance, cautious collectors — represent an existential crisis or a healthy correction. The argument for correction: the pandemic-era speculation inflated prices and gallery counts beyond what the market could sustain. The argument for crisis: mid-career artists are losing representation, and emerging markets are being abandoned. The truth, as usual, lies between the two — but the human cost falls on artists, not dealers. Source: Monocle · 12 August 2026
The Danish university city of Aarhus is running what may be the world's most ambitious municipal experiment in eliminating single-use coffee cups. University cafeterias have stopped offering disposables entirely; if you want your coffee to go, you use a reusable system. The programme is expanding citywide. It is not regulation — it is design. By removing the option rather than taxing it, Aarhus is testing whether convenience defaults can be reset without coercion. Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 12 August 2026
Hasan Dhaimish — known as "The Cleaver" for his satirical cartoons skewering Muammar Gaddafi — settled in the English town of Burnley after fleeing Libya. There he pursued his other great passion: American jazz and blues. The portrait of a political satirist who found peace in George Benson records is a quietly wonderful reminder that exile reshapes people in directions nobody predicts. Source: Middle East Eye · 12 August 2026
A New York Times feature, highlighted by Reasons to be Cheerful, explores the city's growing "soundwalking" movement — guided walks where participants wear no headphones, carry no phones, and simply listen to the urban environment for an hour. In a city engineered for distraction, the practice is both radical and ancient. Participants report hearing things they have walked past for years without noticing: the pitch of different subway ventilation grates, bird calls calibrated to traffic rhythms, the silence between construction shifts. Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 12 August 2026 ---
Rest of World makes a case that the most significant AI threat to elections is not the deepfake video that goes viral, but the opaque AI systems now embedded in election infrastructure itself — voter roll management, polling station allocation, results tabulation. These systems are rarely audited, their training data is proprietary, and their errors are invisible until after the fact. In countries with weaker institutional checks — and Rest of World's reporting draws on examples across the Global South — the risk is not that AI fabricates a candidate's speech but that it quietly shapes who can vote, where they vote, and how their vote is counted. The deepfake obsession, the piece argues, is a distraction from the structural vulnerability. Source: Rest of World · 12 August 2026
A team based in Japan has used CRISPR to remove the Y chromosome from male mouse embryos, producing female clones of male mice — a first in reproductive biology. The technique works by targeting and eliminating the Y chromosome early in embryonic development, allowing the default mammalian developmental pathway (female) to proceed. The applications range from conservation biology — cloning females of endangered species from male tissue samples — to livestock breeding. But the deeper implication is a demonstration that sex determination in mammals is more malleable than assumed, with consequences for developmental biology that will take years to fully map. Source: MIT Technology Review · 12 August 2026
Anthropic has rolled out a new watermarking system for its Claude models that allows third parties to detect AI-generated text. The intended purpose is provenance — making it possible to verify whether a document, essay, or piece of code was produced by Claude. The unintended consequence: users who have been quietly using AI in workplaces and classrooms that discourage it are furious that the watermark will expose them. The backlash, playing out across social media, reveals a tension that the AI industry has been content to ignore — millions of people use these tools in contexts where their use is technically prohibited, and any transparency measure that works will also function as a surveillance mechanism. Anthropic's move is technically sound and ethically defensible, but it forces into the open a question most companies would prefer to leave ambiguous: who gets to know that AI was involved? Source: TechCrunch · 12 August 2026 ---
15,000,000
15,000,000
That is the number of Kazakhstani citizens — nearly 80 per cent of the country's population — whose personal data was allegedly compromised in a single breach of the national eGov platform. The figure, if confirmed, would make it one of the largest government data breaches in history relative to population size. Kazakhstan has 19 million people. The eGov system was built as a centrepiece of the country's digital modernisation strategy, consolidating identity documents, tax records, and public services into a single platform.
The number exposes a paradox at the heart of digital government: the more services you consolidate, the more efficient the state becomes — and the more catastrophic a single point of failure. Estonia, often cited as the gold standard of digital governance, mitigates this through a distributed architecture called X-Road, where data stays in its original database and is queried rather than copied. Kazakhstan chose centralisation. The breach reveals the cost.
For citizens, the exposure potentially includes national ID numbers, addresses, tax records, and health information — the raw material for identity fraud at industrial scale. For governments across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the developing world that have modelled their digital strategies on similar centralised platforms, the Kazakhstan breach is a stress test they did not volunteer for.
Source: The Diplomat · 12 August 2026
In perspective
That is the number of Kazakhstani citizens — nearly 80 per cent of the country's population — whose personal data was allegedly compromised in a single breach of the national eGov platform. The figure, if confirmed, would make it one of the largest government...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Fifteen million people's most sensitive data set adrift after a single breach. Kazakhstan's digital flagship, built to modernize the state and make life easier for its citizens, became overnight the country's greatest vulnerability. This isn't a bug in the system. It is the system.
I've been building tech companies my entire adult life and I know how tempting it is to centralize. One platform, one database, one interface. It's elegant, it's efficient, and it's deadly dangerous. Every time you put everything in one place you're not just creating an asset but also a target. And someone will always try to hit it.
Estonia understood this early. Their X-Road architecture lets data stay where it belongs and retrieves it on demand, without copying it to a central repository. It's more complex to build, harder to explain to politicians who want flashy launches, and it doesn't generate any big press conferences. But it works. When the breach comes, and it always comes, a fraction is exposed instead of everything.
The real lesson isn't about Kazakhstan. It's about every government, every company, every organization that still believes centralization is strength. It's not. Distributed architecture isn't just better technology. It's respect for the people whose data you steward.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai