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 · 30 May 2026
Somewhere in Brussels, a small team maintains EM-DAT — the Emergency Events Database — a public ledger of every flood, earthquake, drought, epidemic and industrial accident recorded since 1900. It is the single most cited source in climate science, disaster-risk finance, insurance modelling and humanitarian planning. Thousands of peer-reviewed papers depend on it. The IPCC references it. Reinsurers price catastrophe bonds against it. And it may shut down within months.
The reason is banal: money. EM-DAT has been housed at the Université catholique de Louvain's Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) and funded largely through USAID grants. The Trump administration's sweeping cuts to foreign aid have now reached this obscure but load-bearing piece of global infrastructure. Without replacement funding, the database faces closure — not because it failed, but because no one thought to build redundancy into the financing of what is effectively the world's memory of disasters.
The implications ripple outward in ways that are hard to overstate. Climate attribution science — the discipline that determines whether a specific flood or heatwave was made worse by climate change — relies on EM-DAT's long historical baselines. Without those baselines, researchers cannot distinguish signal from noise. Insurance companies use the data to calibrate models that determine premiums for hundreds of millions of policyholders. Humanitarian agencies use it to allocate scarce pre-positioning funds. Governments use it to justify infrastructure spending. Remove the dataset and you don't just lose a spreadsheet — you lose the empirical foundation on which rational responses to natural disasters are built.
What makes this particularly striking is the asymmetry between cost and consequence. EM-DAT's annual budget is modest — a fraction of what a single reinsurer earns in a quarter. Yet no private actor, no European government, no multilateral institution has stepped in to guarantee continuity. The database exists in a governance no-man's-land: too academic for corporate sponsors, too global for any single national funder, too important to lose but too unglamorous to champion.
The broader pattern is familiar. Critical public-knowledge infrastructure — weather stations in developing countries, tide gauges, seed banks, disease-surveillance networks — tends to be funded on short cycles by donors with shifting priorities. When one donor withdraws, the asset doesn't transfer; it simply degrades. The result is an invisible erosion of the collective capacity to understand risk, precisely at the moment when climate volatility, pandemic frequency and geopolitical instability demand better data, not worse.
There is a deeper irony here. The AI boom has unleashed a frenzy of spending on training data — companies will pay billions for curated datasets to feed large language models. Yet the world's most consequential public dataset on physical catastrophe cannot find a few million dollars a year to keep its servers running.
Source: Carbon Brief · 29 May 2026
Now — Stressed soils are breeding heat-resistant microbes — and rewriting restoration science: A study reported by Anthropocene Magazine has found that decades of agricultural abuse — tillage, chemical fertilisers, monoculture — have not simply degraded soil microbial communities but have inadvertently selected for unusually heat-resistant strains. The finding upends a core assumption in ecosystem restoration: that damaged soils are biologically impoverished. In fact, some are home to microbial survivors tough enough to be transplanted into fragile ecosystems elsewhere — potentially seeding resilience in landscapes threatened by rising temperatures. For the growing natural-capital investment sector, the implication is provocative: degraded farmland may contain biological assets that current valuation models entirely ignore. The intersection of soil science and climate adaptation just gained a new, counterintuitive data point. Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 29 May 2026
Soon — Climate litigation loses its evidentiary backbone: Climate attribution cases are multiplying in courts from Strasbourg to Lahore. Plaintiffs increasingly rely on statistical comparisons between observed disaster frequency and historical baselines — baselines that come disproportionately from EM-DAT. A gap in the record weakens the evidentiary chain. Defendants — fossil-fuel companies, negligent governments — gain plausible deniability not because the science changed, but because the data disappeared. The legal momentum of the past five years could stall for reasons that have nothing to do with law.
Later — The AI boom is making America a bigger fossil-fuel investor than China: Carbon Brief reports that the data-centre building frenzy — driven by demand for AI compute — has pushed US investment in fossil-fuel power generation past China's for the first time in years. The surge is concentrated in natural gas, the fuel of choice for the always-on electricity that AI training clusters require. The reversal is geopolitically significant: Washington has spent a decade pressuring Beijing to decarbonise while positioning itself as a clean-energy leader. Now American companies are locking in decades of gas-fired capacity to power servers, even as renewable costs fall. The contradiction hands climate negotiators from the Global South a powerful rhetorical weapon — and raises uncomfortable questions about whether the AI revolution and the energy transition can coexist on anything like the timeline the Paris Agreement demands. Source: Carbon Brief · 29 May 2026 ---
China Vanke, long considered one of the country's safest property developers, has reported a huge loss, the Wall Street Journal reports. The result raises fresh questions about whether the real-estate crisis that began with Evergrande's collapse is widening to engulf even state-backed firms — and whether Beijing will intervene before contagion spreads further into the banking system and household wealth. Source: Wall Street Journal · 29 May 2026
Toyota announced it will pull the plug on its next-generation electric vehicle development, redirecting resources toward SUVs where global demand remains robust. The decision is a sharp strategic reversal from Toyota's earlier EV pledges and signals that the world's largest automaker is betting the transition will be slower — and more SUV-shaped — than competitors assume. It also hands an opening to Chinese EV makers hungry for market share in segments Toyota is vacating. Source: The Japan Times · 29 May 2026
Colombians go to the polls on Sunday for the first round of presidential elections that will determine who succeeds Gustavo Petro. The dominant issue is not security or the peace process but the near-collapse of the national healthcare system. An electorate of over 41 million faces a choice between candidates who agree the crisis is dire but diverge sharply on its causes. The outcome will shape Latin America's second-most-populous country for the next four years. Source: Mercopress · 29 May 2026
The Pamir mountains of Central Asia — sometimes called the "roof of the world" — had long defied the global trend of glacier retreat. No longer. New Scientist reports that in 2025, the region's glaciers experienced massive ice loss driven by extreme heat. The Pamirs straddle Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and China, and their meltwater feeds rivers on which tens of millions depend. A sudden shift from stable to melting threatens water security across a region already marked by fragile governance. Source: New Scientist · 29 May 2026
During President Macron's visit to Nairobi, French shipping giant CMA CGM committed to investing in Mombasa's logistics infrastructure. The $800 million deal reinforces Kenya's ambition to become the gateway for East and Central African trade. It also marks a French corporate pivot: as legacy firms retreat from Francophone Africa amid political turbulence, specialised players are quietly building positions in Anglophone markets with stronger institutional frameworks. Source: The Africa Report · 29 May 2026
Divers in Laos have rescued the first of five villagers trapped in a flooded cave for more than a week. The operation, conducted in near-zero visibility through submerged passages, echoes the 2018 Thai cave rescue but with far fewer resources and almost no international media attention. Four remain underground. Source: Al Jazeera · 29 May 2026
The White House designated Brazil's PCC and Comando Vermelho as terrorist organisations, prompting Brasília to issue a formal rejection and warn of possible US intervention. President Lula accused a prominent Bolsonaro ally of "betraying the homeland" by lobbying Washington for the designation. The move risks turning Brazil's domestic security crisis into a bilateral confrontation with unpredictable consequences for trade, migration cooperation and hemispheric diplomacy. Source: Mercopress · 29 May 2026
China's regulators are moving to shut down "ghost kitchens" — unlicensed food-preparation facilities that serve delivery platforms without storefronts, inspections or hygiene oversight. The crackdown follows a surge in food-safety complaints driven by the explosive growth of platforms like Meituan and Ele.me. It is also a proxy battle over platform accountability: Beijing is signalling that tech companies cannot outsource food safety to an unregulated shadow supply chain. Source: Nikkei Asia · 29 May 2026 ---
In northern Nigeria, where the national electricity grid is a rumour more than a reality, a constellation of small solar mini-grid operators is doing what the state-owned Power Holding Company never could: delivering reliable electricity to rural communities that have waited decades for a connection that will never come.
The model is deceptively simple. A local operator installs solar panels and battery storage to serve a cluster of villages, selling power through prepaid mobile-money accounts. No transmission lines. No ministry approval queues. No dependency on the national gas supply that has starved Nigeria's thermal plants for years. The customers — tailors, welders, grain millers, phone-charging kiosk owners — pay less per kilowatt-hour than they paid for diesel generators, and the power actually shows up.
What makes this more than a feel-good story is the economics. Carbon Brief reports that Nigeria's solar mini-grid sector is now attracting serious capital, not just donor grants. The operators are building real businesses with real margins, serving customers the incumbent utility has written off. They are, in effect, building a parallel electricity system from the ground up — not by reforming the monopoly, but by making it irrelevant.
The parallels to early mobile telephony are unmistakable. In the early 2000s, African countries skipped landlines entirely because mobile operators offered a better product at lower cost without requiring decades of infrastructure buildout. The mini-grid operators are doing the same thing with electricity: leapfrogging the centralised grid model that failed Nigeria for half a century.
The political implications are real. Every village that gets reliable solar power is a village that stops waiting for the state. The national utility loses its leverage — and its excuse. The technology is not exotic; it is cheap panels, lithium batteries and mobile payments, assembled by entrepreneurs who understand that the grid's absence is not a problem to be lamented but a market to be seized.
Source: Carbon Brief · 29 May 2026
A seminal work from Lucian Freud's celebrated "Benefits Supervisor" series is coming to auction for the first time, consigned from the Lewis Collection to Sotheby's. The series — monumental nudes of Sue Tilley — redefined portraiture in the 1990s by insisting on flesh as subject, not symbol. The Lewis painting has never been publicly exhibited, making its appearance a genuine event for the London and New York art markets. Estimate undisclosed, but comparable works have fetched north of $50 million. Source: Artnet News · 29 May 2026
The final surviving example of architect Wallace Neff's "Airform" houses — concrete shells inflated like balloons and sprayed with gunite — is on the market in Pasadena for $1.95 million. Built in the 1940s as an experiment in affordable mass housing, the quirky dome was meant to solve postwar shelter shortages. It didn't, but it became a cult artefact of California's experimental tradition. Meticulously restored, it is now equal parts architectural curiosity and liveable home. Source: Wallpaper · 29 May 2026
The 19-year-old Brazilian Joao Fonseca came back from two sets down to defeat Novak Djokovic in the third round of Roland-Garros, 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 7-5, 7-5. Djokovic, 39, was cautious about whether he would return next year. The result confirms Fonseca as the most exciting young talent in men's tennis — a player whose fearlessness from the baseline suggests he is not merely arriving but announcing a generational shift. Source: Le Monde · 29 May 2026
Der Spiegel has processed millions of NSDAP membership cards into a searchable online tool, allowing Germans to look up their own family histories. The project confronts the country's most sensitive collective memory with forensic data: join dates, membership numbers, local party cells. It is an extraordinary act of journalistic public service — and a provocation to every family that preferred not to ask. Source: Der Spiegel · 29 May 2026
A new essay on Aeon reframes Mozart's operas not as showcases of compositional genius but as exercises in moral entrapment. The argument: Mozart's music is so seductive that it draws audiences into sympathising with characters whose actions are indefensible — the manipulative Count, the predatory Don Giovanni. The power lies not in beauty alone but in the ethical discomfort beauty creates. A bracing read for anyone who thought opera appreciation was about high notes. Source: Aeon · 29 May 2026
Frank Gehry, now 97, has been announced as project lead for renovations to the Getty Center's tram station in Los Angeles, alongside WHY Architecture and landscape studio Olin. The centrepiece will be a parametric glass canopy covering the lower staging area. It is a quiet homecoming: the Getty, designed by Richard Meier, has long been Gehry's institutional neighbour in Brentwood. Now the city's two most famous architectural egos will coexist on the same hilltop. Source: Dezeen · 29 May 2026 ---
Rest of World reports that India's major technology services firms — Infosys, TCS, Wipro and their peers — are positioning themselves as the solution to a problem US companies are struggling to admit: most of their AI investments are not producing returns. The Indian firms argue that their decades of experience managing large-scale software deployments give them a unique advantage in the messy, unglamorous work of actually integrating AI into enterprise workflows. The pitch is compelling but carries an existential tension. The same automation that Indian IT firms are helping clients deploy could ultimately eliminate the back-office outsourcing contracts that remain their bread and butter. They are, in effect, building the tools of their own disruption — racing to capture the deployment layer before it cannibalises the labour arbitrage that made them giants. It is a bet that the transition period will be long enough to reinvent their business models. If they are wrong, they will have trained their clients to need them less. Source: Rest of World · 29 May 2026
TechCrunch reports that a ruling by an Indian court has handed founders and brand owners a significant weapon against a practice that has quietly drained value from businesses for years: the sale of competitors' trademarked names as advertising keywords on search and e-commerce platforms. The decision drew immediate support from Indian startup founders, who have long complained that larger rivals — and the platforms themselves — profit from redirecting traffic meant for their brands. Lawyers say the ruling could force Google, Amazon and other ad-driven platforms to revisit their keyword-bidding policies across markets. If the precedent holds, it creates a template that brand owners in jurisdictions from Brazil to the EU could invoke — potentially reshaping the economics of digital advertising in ways the platforms have spent years resisting. Source: TechCrunch · 29 May 2026
MIT Technology Review examines Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical on artificial intelligence, which declares that "technology is never neutral" and calls for AI's economic gains to be universally shared. The document is more than pastoral theology — it is a detailed engagement with questions of algorithmic bias, labour displacement and data governance that secular regulators have struggled to address coherently. For an industry accustomed to setting its own ethical terms, the encyclical represents an external moral authority staking a claim on AI policy at a moment when governments are fragmented and corporate self-regulation has lost credibility. Whether or not one shares the Pope's theology, the encyclical fills a vacuum: it offers a comprehensive, internally consistent framework for evaluating AI's social impact that no government, corporation or international body has yet produced. Source: MIT Technology Review · 29 May 2026 ---
124
124
That is how many years of continuous disaster data EM-DAT contains — from 1900 to the present. It is, as far as anyone knows, the longest unbroken global record of natural and technological catastrophes ever assembled. A single database, maintained by a team small enough to fit in a conference room, covering more than 26,000 events across every country on earth.
The number matters because continuity is the asset. A flood in Bangladesh today is only meaningful in context: how does it compare to 1998, to 1974, to the long-term trend? Without the historical baseline, each disaster becomes an isolated event — shocking but analytically useless. Insurance actuaries, climate scientists and disaster-response planners all depend on the ability to place today's emergency within a century-long statistical frame.
Building such a record took decades of painstaking work: digitising colonial-era reports, standardising definitions across languages, reconciling conflicting casualty figures. Destroying it takes only a budget cut. The 124-year span is not just a number — it is an irreplaceable inheritance that, once broken, cannot be reassembled.
Source: Carbon Brief · 29 May 2026
In perspective
That is how many years of continuous disaster data EM-DAT contains — from 1900 to the present. It is, as far as anyone knows, the longest unbroken global record of natural and technological catastrophes ever assembled. A single database, maintained by a team...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Nigeria is building a parallel power grid right now. Not through reforms, not through government investment, not by waiting for some minister to make a decision. But through entrepreneurs who are putting up solar panels, connecting batteries, and selling electricity via mobile payments to villages that the national grid never reached and never will.
It's exactly reminiscent of what happened with mobile telephony in Africa in the early 2000s. Nobody waited for landlines to be laid in the ground. Mobile was cheaper, better, and faster. The monopoly became irrelevant before it even understood what had happened.
This is the pattern I've seen repeated in every industry I've worked in. The big breakthroughs rarely come from fixing what's broken. They come from someone building something new alongside it and letting the old thing die at its own pace. It applies to energy, it applies to media, it applies to finance. Every time a government fails to deliver a basic service, a window opens for someone who dares to see the gap as a market instead of a problem to bemoan.
It doesn't require a revolution. It requires solar panels, a payment solution, and the courage to start building without asking for permission.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai