Singapore wants to put nutrition labels on your AI apps. Not metaphorical ones. Actual labels, modelled on the kind that tell you a ready meal has too much sodium, except these would tell you what an AI product is designed to do, what it cannot do, and how not to misuse it. Minister Josephine Teo confirmed the government is in active talks with technology companies about the scheme, which would be a world first if implemented. The labels would cover consumer-facing AI applications and distinguish between the “right ways” and “not-so-correct ways” of using the tools. Singapore plans to start with a voluntary framework before deciding whether to legislate.
That is the number of people executed worldwide in 2025, according to Amnesty International’s annual death penalty report, the highest figure the organisation has recorded in 44 years. A 78% jump from 2024’s total of 1,518, the surge was driven overwhelmingly by Iran, which executed at least 2,159 people, more than double its previous year’s count. Saudi Arabia added at least 356 more, largely for drug offences. The US executed 47 people, up from 25. These numbers do not include China, which Amnesty believes continues to execute thousands each year but does not publish figures.
What It Is: From May 19 to 21, Russia and Belarus conducted their largest joint nuclear exercises since the Cold War. For the first time in any such drill, live nuclear warheads, not dummies or mock weapons, were transferred to missile and aviation units in both countries. Tactical nukes and Iskander-M missiles were moved to Asipovichi in Belarus, roughly 200 kilometres from Ukraine’s border. Russia launched a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. The exercises involved 64,000 troops, 200 missile launchers, and 13 nuclear submarines. Putin and Lukashenko watched proceedings via video link.
Why It Matters: The decision to use live warheads, rather than inert ones, is the part that should focus minds. It turns a routine signal into an operational rehearsal. The timing is not accidental. Europe is living through an anxious period: the US has spent the past year operating on a fairly explicit “might is right” basis, invading Venezuela and Iran, openly threatening that Cuba is next and is treating international norms as optional. When Washington behaves that way, it quietly licenses others to draw the same conclusion. Putin has been watching and testing. Russian drones have appeared over cities and villages in Finland, Estonia, and Poland in recent months: not strikes, but probes, checking response times, radar coverage, and NATO’s appetite for escalation.
The Big Picture: An outright Russian attack on Latvia or Estonia remains a remote scenario. Article 5 still carries deterrent weight, and NATO’s eastern flank is better armed than it was in 2022. But the conditions for miscalculation are building. A US preoccupied with its own military stockpile crisis (more on that below), a European defence industry still catching up, and a Russian leadership that has watched two years of Western red lines move and shift: all of that creates a volatile mix. These drills are less about scaring Ukraine, which is already at war with Russia, and more about reminding every capital between Berlin and Vilnius that Russia still holds cards it has not yet played.
What It Is: The US Department of Justice dropped all criminal and civil charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who had been accused of bribing Indian officials to secure solar energy contracts and lying to American investors in the process. The charges were dropped shortly after Adani’s conglomerate pledged $10 billion in US investments and 15,000 jobs. Adani had hired Robert Giuffra Jr, one of Donald Trump’s personal attorneys, to lead his legal team. A separate settlement with the US Treasury resolved alleged sanctions violations tied to Iran for $275 million.
Why It Matters: The sequence of events is worth stating plainly: hire the president’s lawyer, announce a large investment, watch criminal charges disappear. This is not subtle. The Trump administration has made its logic consistent and visible. Apple received tariff exemptions that smaller competitors had no path to request. Trump and his son were handed IRS audit immunity recently in a case settlement between Trump and the IRS. The pattern is not corruption in the old-fashioned sense of a bag of cash. It is something more structural: a system in which access is the commodity and priced by net worth. For ordinary people, small businesses, and any government trying to hold a powerful actor accountable through US legal channels, that system now has a published rate card.
The Big Picture: It would be easy to dismiss this as a Trump-era aberration, a phase that passes when the administration changes. That reading may be too comfortable. The Adani case involved alleged bribery in India, a country Washington is courting as a counterweight to China. Dropping the charges removes friction from a relationship that the US considers strategically vital. That geopolitical convenience and the $10 billion investment incentive need not have been explicitly discussed for the outcome to be the same. What gets normalised now (justice as a transaction, prosecution as a negotiating position) tends to outlast the specific administration that normalised it.
What It Is: The Pentagon has warned Japan that delivery of 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles, purchased in a $2.35 billion deal in 2024, could be delayed by up to two additional years. The reason: the US fired over 1,000 Tomahawks during five weeks of operations against Iran, out of a pre-war stockpile of roughly 3,100. Washington has told Tokyo it must prioritise rebuilding its own arsenal before fulfilling export orders. Japan had ordered the missiles to develop a counterstrike capability against China and North Korea, with delivery originally scheduled by April 2028. The delay is not limited to Japan. European allies have received similar notifications about their own pending weapon orders.
Why It Matters: The Iran war surfaced a problem the US military has understood for years but rarely had to explain publicly. America’s most advanced weapons can be expended in days. They take years to replace. The Tomahawk is not the only gap: stocks of Precision Strike Missiles, Patriot and THAAD interceptors, and SM-6 interceptors were all significantly depleted during the campaign. Production lines at Raytheon and other contractors cannot scale quickly enough to close those gaps within a months-long timeline. For US allies whose defence planning assumes American firepower will arrive when needed, that gap is not theoretical.
The Big Picture: Any future adversary with strategic patience now has a visible playbook. Absorb the first wave of US precision strikes, sustain the fight long enough, and wait. There will be a point at which the US has exhausted its advanced munitions and faces a choice between escalating with less precise weapons or accepting a stalemate. The US has long sold its military dominance on the premise that its technological edge is inexhaustible. The Iran campaign showed that it is not. For Taiwan, for South Korea, for the Baltic states: the question of whether American firepower will still be available on day 30 or day 60 of a conflict is no longer academic. It is, after the past year, a question with a known and sobering answer.
🇦🇺 Australia: An Australian Federal Court fined Elon Musk’s X $650,000 after the platform refused to answer questions from the eSafety Commissioner about how it handled child sexual exploitation content.
🇷🇸 Serbia: Serbia’s state railway suspended all train services on May 23 to prevent protesters from travelling to Belgrade for a massive anti-government rally. Tens of thousands still made it to the capital.
🇨🇳 China: China’s State Council issued guidelines to extend basic public services to migrant workers based on where they actually live, rather than their official household registration.
🇰🇪 Kenya: Kenya’s High Court ruled that sections of the Sexual Offences Act cannot be applied to adolescents in consensual peer relationships, directing prosecutors and police to distinguish between consensual teenage conduct and genuine exploitation.
🇫🇷 France: France banned Israeli far-right police minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from French territory after footage emerged of him taunting detained flotilla activists who were forced to kneel with their hands tied.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UK net migration fell 48% to 171,000 in the year to December 2025, the lowest level since 2012, excluding the pandemic.
🌱 Energy: Wind and solar generated more electricity than gas globally in April 2026 for the first time on record: 531 TWh against gas’s 477 TWh.
🇦🇫 Afghanistan: The Taliban’s Decree 18 states that a girl’s silence at puberty can be interpreted as consent to marriage, effectively legalising child marriage for girls as young as nine.
The European Parliament voted 558 to 35 this week to pass the EU’s first comprehensive animal welfare law, covering how cats and dogs are bred, sold, and kept. The legislation bans breeding practices that cause physical deformity for aesthetic purposes, ending the legal production of flat-faced breeds engineered to have airways so narrow they cannot breathe properly, and prohibits close inbreeding between parents and offspring or siblings. Breeders and sellers have four years to comply. The law was years in the making, pushed by welfare groups who had documented widespread suffering in popular pedigree breeds. It is a rare instance of the EU moving decisively on something that has no powerful commercial lobby opposing it, and every vet in Europe quietly exhaling with relief.
“The law is a spider’s web: it catches small flies but the great ones break through.”
- Honoré de Balzac
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