France abolished slavery in 1848. It just repealed its slavery law in 2026. For 178 years after emancipation, the Code Noir sat quietly on the books, never formally struck down. The 1685 decree, signed by King Louis XIV, classified enslaved humans as property and permitted their owners to work, beat, sell, rape, or kill them. On Thursday, the French National Assembly voted 254-0 to finally do it, in a rare show of cross-party unanimity in one of Europe’s most fractious parliaments. President Emmanuel Macron said the Code Noir’s survival beyond abolition was something that “should never have happened.” He’s right to say so. What’s harder to answer is why it took until 2026 for anyone to do something about it.
📊 Number of the Day
10,000
The United Nations verified nearly 10,000 cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2025, more than double the figure from the year before. The surge prompted the UN’s annual blacklist, which this year named two new state actors: Israel, listed for the first time in the report’s 15-year history for documented incidents involving Palestinian detainees in Gaza and the West Bank, and Russia, for violence against Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. Both countries rejected the findings. Israel’s foreign ministry announced it would sever all ties with UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Moscow said it would write its own report instead.
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🇪🇺 Europe Cannot Afford to Rent Its Place in Space
What It Is: The European Commission has proposed reserving most of the 2GHz satellite frequency band for European operators, with two-thirds earmarked for EU-based providers and government use. The move is designed to limit the European expansion of SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper, and to give momentum to IRIS2, the EU’s own constellation of around 290 satellites currently in development.
Why It Matters: Europe has spent the better part of this decade absorbing the consequences of depending on American platforms. The US launched its war on Iran without consulting European allies. Ukraine peace negotiations are taking place in rooms where European leaders cannot get a seat. In both cases, Europe watched events unfold with no meaningful leverage. Satellite infrastructure belongs to the same category of strategic dependency. If Starlink becomes the communications backbone for European governments, businesses, and militaries, Brussels is one contract dispute, one ideological pivot in Washington, or one bad-faith negotiation away from losing control of its own connectivity. This risk already has a real precedent. SpaceX is already in a billing dispute with the Pentagon over fees charged for LUCAS drone operations. Private companies negotiate on commercial terms, and Europe has no particular reason to assume Elon Musk’s interests will align with European security priorities when a crisis arrives.
The Big Picture: China is building its own satellite network. The US has Starlink. Europe has IRIS2 on paper and, now, a regulatory proposal. The gap is substantial. What the Commission is doing with this spectrum allocation is buying time and protecting airspace for European providers to develop. The US Federal Communications Commission chairman has already warned Brussels against favouring domestic operators, which is itself instructive: American officials do not issue warnings about things that do not threaten American interests. Europe’s window to shape this market closes the longer it waits. A continent that depends on foreign-controlled communications in a crisis can’t act like a sovereign power, even if it looks like one on paper. Europe is running out of time to change that.
🇺🇸 US Wants to Silence Federal Employees
What It Is: The Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management has proposed a government-wide nondisclosure agreement for all federal employees, covering both new hires and existing staff. The draft rule, posted to the Federal Register, requires workers to commit to “safeguarding non-public, confidential or proprietary information” obtained through official duties. A 30-day comment period is underway. If adopted, it would be the first government-wide NDA in US history.
Why It Matters: The same administration that has made “freedom of expression” a foreign policy weapon, wielding it against European content moderation laws and international bodies it dislikes, is now proposing to bind two million federal employees to legally enforceable silence. The official justification points to recent leaks about immigration enforcement actions and the secretive details about Situation Room conversations, but that logic is inverted. Leaks are one of the core mechanisms of democratic governance. They are frequently the only way the public learns that something has gone wrong. The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act already limits what these NDAs can legally restrict, allowing disclosures to Congress and agency inspectors general. The administration is aware of this. The goal is simpler than watertight legal enforcement: make enough employees uncertain about what they can say that they choose to say nothing.
The Big Picture: Accountability in government depends on the credible possibility that wrongdoing will surface. Remove that possibility and you remove one of the few structural checks on what appointed officials can do behind closed doors. Federal employees who know they face legal scrutiny if they speak out will, rationally, say nothing. Sustained institutional silence is a condition in which the next Venezuela-style operation, or whatever follows it, can proceed without anyone inside the building feeling safe enough to raise a hand. The proposal frames this as operational security, but in practice, it discourages employees from speaking, which is likely the actual goal. Leaks represent one of the few remaining checks on what this administration can do without consequence, and the NDA proposal is a direct attempt to eliminate that check.
🇨🇳 China’s Most Valuable Export Is People
What It Is: China has begun requiring government pre-approval for overseas travel by senior AI professionals at private companies, including Alibaba and DeepSeek. The restrictions apply to founders, lead researchers, and executives considered strategically important to national AI development. Previously, formal travel controls of this kind were reserved for nuclear scientists and senior executives at state-owned firms. Extending them to the private sector marks a significant policy shift.
Why It Matters: A top AI researcher can shift a lab’s competitive advantage almost by themselves. The architectural choices, training approaches, and research directions that make one lab more capable than another live largely in the heads of a few hundred people worldwide. Companies in Silicon Valley understand this, which is why retention packages for leading AI talent now routinely run into the millions of dollars. China has watched the same market and drawn a harder conclusion: paying people well keeps them comfortable, but controlling their movement is what stops them from leaving.
The Big Picture: As recently as March 2025, Beijing’s guidance to AI researchers was advisory: we would prefer you not travel to the United States. By May 2026, that guidance has become a formal pre-approval requirement, regardless of destination. The shift reflects how seriously China takes the prospect that its recent gains in AI research could erode if key individuals are recruited or defect abroad. DeepSeek’s models drew significant attention in the West for their efficiency and capability, and Beijing has no intention of allowing the talent behind them to become available on the open market. The US-China competition in AI spans compute, data centres, and chip export controls, and now human capital, too. Both sides are treating that last dimension with the same strategic weight as a weapons programme.
🌐 Around the Globe
🇷🇴 Romania: A Russian Geran-2 drone struck a residential building in the city of Galati in the early hours of May 29, injuring a 14-year-old boy and a 53-year-old woman. It was the 28th breach of Romanian airspace since Russia began targeting Ukrainian ports across the Danube, and the first to hit an inhabited building on NATO territory.
🕊️ Vatican: Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, calling for global regulation of AI, issuing the Catholic Church’s clearest apology to date for its historical role in supporting transatlantic slavery, and declaring the centuries-old just war doctrine “outdated” in the age of autonomous weapons.
🇺🇸 US: Senior Trump administration officials confirmed that any American who contracts Ebola and needs advanced care will be treated in Europe, not the US. A 50-bed quarantine facility has been set up in Kenya for exposed Americans, but those who test positive will be transferred to European hospitals.
🇷🇺 Russia: Putin signed a decree cancelling up to 10 million roubles ($139,700) in debt for new military recruits and their spouses, provided the contract was signed on or after May 1.
🇬🇧 UK: The Equality and Human Rights Commission published updated guidance confirming that single-sex spaces such as hospital wards and changing rooms may lawfully exclude transgender people, following the UK Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling that “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to biological sex.
🇮🇩 Indonesia: From July 1, every new SIM card purchase in Indonesia will require mandatory facial recognition, one of the largest AI biometric deployments at the telecom level anywhere in the world.
🇮🇷 Iran: Iran’s president ordered the restoration of international internet access after an 88-day blackout, the second such shutdown since US-Israeli strikes on Iran began in late February.
🇬🇭 Ghana: Parliament passed the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, imposing prison sentences of up to three years for identifying as LGBTQ+ and up to ten years for promoting LGBTQ+ activities.
🌟 Good News of the Week
Oklahoma is now the 17th US state to ban child marriage outright. Governor Kevin Stitt signed Senate Bill 504 into law on May 13, setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage with no exceptions. Under the previous law, minors could marry with parental consent, and those aged 16 or under could marry with a court order. The bill passed the Senate unanimously, though it cleared the House by a single vote, with 36 Republican lawmakers voting against it over the absence of exceptions. The movement has been building since Delaware became the first state to act in 2018, and now covers roughly a third of all US states. Thirty-three states still allow child marriage in some form, but the direction has been consistent and, with this week’s vote, picks up speed.
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🧠 Brain Food
✨ Quote of the Day
“The Church’s just war theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, has become outdated.” — Pope Leo XIV
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