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 · 3 June 2026
The continent that agonises most about its dependency on Chinese critical minerals is sitting on a deposit it has barely touched — its own waste. A landmark EU-funded study, published this week by researchers coordinated under the Horizon programme, finds that urban mining of discarded batteries, electronics and retired wind turbines could supply more than half of the lithium, cobalt and rare earths the European clean-energy economy will need through 2040. The numbers are large enough to reshape procurement strategies across the automotive, defence and energy-storage sectors.
The logic is straightforward but the execution is not. Europe already collects vast quantities of electronic waste, but recycling rates for critical minerals within that waste remain startlingly low — often in single-digit percentages. Lithium recovery from spent EV batteries, for instance, is technically feasible at industrial scale but commercially marginal because virgin material from Australian and Chilean mines remains cheaper. Cobalt extraction from consumer electronics faces a fragmentation problem: the devices are small, widely dispersed and designed without disassembly in mind. Rare earths embedded in wind-turbine magnets require chemical processes that few European facilities currently operate.
What the study argues — and what makes it a signal rather than an aspiration — is that the economics are shifting fast. China's consolidation of rare-earth processing, Indonesia's rolling export controls on nickel and cobalt, and the EU's own Critical Raw Materials Act (which sets binding recycling targets for 2030) are converging to close the cost gap. Several pilot plants in Belgium, Finland and Germany are already demonstrating extraction rates above 90 per cent for battery-grade lithium. The Swedish firm Northvolt, despite its recent financial difficulties, proved before its restructuring that closed-loop gigafactory recycling could work at scale.
The geopolitical dimension is hard to overstate. Europe currently imports roughly 97 per cent of its rare earths and 80 per cent of its lithium from outside the continent, predominantly through supply chains that pass through Chinese refineries. Every solar panel, every EV motor, every missile guidance system depends on materials over which Brussels has negligible control. Urban mining does not eliminate that dependency, but it introduces a second supply line that is politically secure and logistically proximate.
The obstacles are regulatory as much as technical. Waste shipment rules across EU member states remain balky. Classification of end-of-life batteries as hazardous material adds transport costs. And the sheer capital expenditure required — the study estimates €35–50 billion in new recycling infrastructure by 2035 — demands public-private coordination that Europe has historically struggled to deliver at speed.
Yet the direction is unmistakable. The trash heap is becoming a strategic asset.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 2 June 2026
Now — Recycled minerals reprice Europe's supply chains before the infrastructure exists: If recycled minerals can cover half of projected European demand, landfill operators and waste-management companies suddenly sit on resources that look more like ore deposits than rubbish tips. The study gives procurement officers at automakers like Stellantis and Volkswagen a quantified domestic alternative to present to finance ministries, shifting the debate from "how much to import" to "how fast to recycle." But member states have not yet defined mineral-rights frameworks for urban mines. That legal vacuum will trigger regulatory fights over who owns the mineral content of municipal waste streams — and the companies positioned inside the gap first, such as Umicore and Finland's Fortum, will capture early rents.
Soon — Waste becomes a regulated commodity class: The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act already mandates recycling targets, but the enforcement architecture is skeletal. As the economic case for urban mining hardens, expect Brussels to classify recycled critical minerals as a distinct commodity category — with traceability requirements, quality grades and cross-border shipment rules that do not yet exist. The waste-management industry will be dragged into the same compliance frameworks that apply to mining companies, and the capital markets will follow: green bonds tied to urban-mining infrastructure are a near certainty by 2028.
Later — The geopolitics of scarcity gets a circularity discount: If Europe can demonstrate that 50 per cent self-sufficiency in critical minerals is achievable through urban mining, the leverage Beijing currently holds via rare-earth export controls diminishes structurally. This does not end dependency — it caps it. The strategic implication: European negotiators in trade talks with China gain a credible walk-away option they do not currently possess. Circularity becomes not just environmental policy but foreign policy. Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 2 June 2026; EU Critical Raw Materials Act (2024) ---
A Tunisian court sentenced Rached Ghannouchi, the 82-year-old leader of the Ennahdha party, to life in prison, along with dozens of other defendants convicted of "forming a terrorist alliance." Ghannouchi, who led Tunisia's most influential post-revolution political movement, has been in detention since 2023. The sentence effectively eliminates the last institutional check on President Kais Saied's one-man consolidation of power. Whatever one thought of Ennahdha's Islamist politics, the trial's mass-conviction structure — more than 100 defendants, closed proceedings, compressed timelines — follows the authoritarian playbook that has already buried the democratic promise of the 2011 revolution. Source: Al Jazeera · 3 June 2026
An unnamed shipping billionaire told the Financial Times that a per-vessel toll to transit the Strait of Hormuz would be preferable to the current uncertainty of the US-Iran confrontation, which has effectively closed the waterway for unescorted commercial traffic. The comment landed as the US struck Iran's Qeshm Island and Tehran launched ballistic missiles at targets in Kuwait and Bahrain. The Strait handles roughly a fifth of global oil flows. The idea that industry would rather pay a transit fee to a hostile state than rely on military guarantees says more about confidence in US power projection than any editorial could. Source: Financial Times · 3 June 2026
China Vanke, long considered the most stable of China's major developers, reported a huge loss that raises fresh questions about whether Beijing's property crisis has a floor. Vanke is not an overleveraged speculator — it is a state-backed company that was supposed to be part of the solution. Its deterioration suggests the contagion has moved beyond the Evergrande-era casualties and into the segment of the market the government believed it had ring-fenced. The result is a policy dilemma: let Vanke restructure and risk a further confidence collapse, or inject state capital and set a precedent that makes every developer's debt the taxpayer's problem. Source: Wall Street Journal · 3 June 2026
The US Trade Representative concluded its Section 301 investigation into Brazil and proposed a 25 per cent tariff on Brazilian goods, citing deforestation linked to soy expansion. A separate probe into forced labour across 59 countries also names Brazil. Ironically, the USTR report cites peak deforestation under the Bolsonaro government — the very administration that Trump publicly embraced. Brazil's agricultural exporters, who have built a $100 billion trade surplus, are scrambling to assess exposure. The tariff proposal, if enacted, would be the most significant US trade action against Brazil in decades. Source: Folha de São Paulo · 3 June 2026
The president appointed Bill Pulte — a real-estate heir with no national-security experience — as acting Director of National Intelligence. Pulte has been running the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The Atlantic noted that his main qualification appears to be loyalty: he can be counted on to target the president's adversaries within the intelligence community. The appointment continues the hollowing-out of institutional expertise that has defined the second Trump administration's approach to the security state. Source: Financial Times · 3 June 2026; The Atlantic · 3 June 2026
Le Monde reports on the remnants of Algeria's pro-democracy Hirak movement, six years after massive street protests shook the regime. The activists who remain face continuous judicial harassment — surveillance, travel bans, prosecutions under vague terrorism statutes. The piece profiles individuals who continue to advocate for free expression in near-total isolation, without international attention or NGO support. It is a portrait of what happens to a democratic movement when the cameras leave and the state does not. Source: Le Monde · 3 June 2026
Berlin and Vienna — ostensible allies within the EU — are locked in an aggressive campaign for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, with the General Assembly vote set for Wednesday. The contest has turned surprisingly bitter, with both sides deploying diplomatic capital, trade-delegation sweeteners and pointed public lobbying in a manner more typical of geopolitical rivals than neighbours. The outcome will reveal how much weight mid-sized European states can still pull in multilateral institutions — and whether EU solidarity means anything when national prestige is on the table. Source: Politico Europe · 3 June 2026
Asian equities hit an all-time high, driven by investors doubling down on the artificial-intelligence trade that has powered global markets through the first half of 2026. The yen hovered near 160 per dollar — a level that ordinarily triggers intervention talk in Tokyo. The juxtaposition is striking: a region whose net-oil-importing economies are being squeezed by the Gulf war is simultaneously setting equity records on the back of a single technological narrative. The rally's narrowness — concentrated in semiconductor and AI infrastructure names — makes it both impressive and fragile. A correction in the AI thesis would hit Asian indices harder than most investors currently assume. Source: Bloomberg · 3 June 2026 ---
A UK parliamentary committee has concluded that the British government's growing dependence on Palantir Technologies represents "an unacceptable point of weakness" — and the warning lands at a moment when the relationship between democratic states and data-analytics firms is being renegotiated everywhere.
The concern is not abstract. Palantir now runs critical data infrastructure across the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence, and several law-enforcement agencies. The committee's report argues that this concentration gives a single foreign-owned company structural leverage over British state functions that no private contractor should possess. If Palantir were to raise prices, restrict access, or suffer a breach, the operational consequences would cascade across departments that have no fallback systems.
What makes this more than a procurement story is the sovereignty question underneath it. Palantir is an American company, subject to US law, including potential national-security orders that could compel data disclosure. The UK government has treated it as a vendor; the committee is arguing it should be treated as critical national infrastructure — with all the regulatory, audit and contingency obligations that entails.
The parallel to cloud computing is instructive. A decade ago, governments began migrating to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud without fully considering what it meant to run sovereign data on foreign platforms. The Palantir case is the analytics layer of the same problem: not where the data sits, but who builds the tools that interpret it. If the interpretation layer is controlled by a single external provider, the intelligence derived from it is only as independent as that provider allows.
The committee stopped short of recommending contract termination — the switching costs are now too high, which is precisely the problem. Instead, it called for mandatory development of domestic alternatives and contractual escape clauses that do not currently exist. The report is, in effect, an admission that the dependency was created by decisions no one treated as strategic at the time. The question now is whether the UK can unwind it without disrupting the services that depend on it — or whether the lock-in is already irreversible.
Source: Wired · 3 June 2026
Gerard Dillon's *Tea Party* (1955) sold for $1.6 million at Adam's in Dublin — 450 per cent above its estimate and triple the self-taught artist's previous record. Dillon, who grew up in working-class Belfast and never attended art school, painted scenes of rural Irish life with a flat, almost naïve intensity that the institutional art world largely ignored during his lifetime. The result is a body of work that was never hoarded by speculators, which means authentic pieces still surface at regional auctions. Whether this sale launches a broader reappraisal or remains a one-off depends on whether curators follow the collectors. Source: Artnet News · 3 June 2026
The Russian dissident collective Pussy Riot has released a music video for "DISOBEY," filmed during a guerrilla performance at the Venice Biennale. The video is the lead single from their forthcoming debut album, *CYKA*. The piece is deliberately rough — handheld cameras, security guards intervening, tourists gawking — and the refusal to clean it up is the aesthetic point. Pussy Riot has always operated in the gap between art and activism, and the Venice intervention extends that logic: the Biennale becomes both stage and target, a symbol of the institutional art world's willingness to platform dissent only when it arrives in a frame. Source: Artnet News · 3 June 2026
Vanity Fair reports on a striking sartorial shift in the tech industry: as defence-tech companies boom, Silicon Valley founders are trading their T-shirts and Allbirds for field jackets, tactical accessories and quasi-military aesthetics. The trend is not costume play — it tracks real capital flows. Billions are pouring into defence startups, and the founders running them want to signal alignment with their customers in the Pentagon rather than their predecessors in Palo Alto. Whether the look is sincere or performative, it marks the end of the era when tech founders dressed to signal indifference to power. Now they dress to signal proximity to it. Source: Vanity Fair · 3 June 2026
The 2026 edition of Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design festival, running 10–12 June, has adopted the theme "Make This Moment Matter" — a deliberate pivot from the Scandinavian design world's usual reverence for form toward questions of material sustainability and social function. Exhibitors include studios working with bio-based composites, repair-focused furniture makers and projects exploring modular housing. Whether Copenhagen's design establishment can sustain substance over style remains to be seen, but the intent is unusually direct. Source: Wallpaper · 3 June 2026
The artist Oscar Tuazon has recreated a lost public sculpture by Scott Burton — the pioneering artist who collapsed the boundary between furniture and fine art before dying of AIDS in 1989. The work will be unveiled on 20 June at New York's AIDS Memorial in the West Village. Tuazon worked from Burton's original drawings to reconstruct a piece that was never fabricated during Burton's lifetime. It is an act of artistic archaeology: bringing a dead artist's unrealised intention into physical space, three decades late. Source: Artnet News · 3 June 2026
Eater's reviewer tried the Los Angeles luxury grocer Erewhon's new $15,000-a-year VIP membership for a month. The perks include priority access to limited-edition smoothies, personal shopping and invitations to chef dinners. The piece is less a food review than an anthropological study of how consumer brands are monetising exclusivity at a moment when mainstream retail is commoditised. Erewhon has become the place visiting tourists ask to eat at before any actual restaurant — a fact that says as much about the collapse of cultural hierarchy as about the quality of the $22 smoothies. Source: Eater · 3 June 2026 ---
A federal IT staffer filed a formal complaint about the Department of Government Efficiency's access to sensitive government systems, then went public with his concerns. Shortly after Elon Musk amplified a social-media post calling the whistleblower's claims false, someone cut the brake lines on his car. He is now suing for defamation. The case sits at the intersection of several dangerous trends: the politicisation of government IT infrastructure, the use of social-media amplification as a targeting mechanism, and the physical intimidation of federal employees who challenge executive power. Whether or not the brake-cutting is ever linked to the online campaign, the chilling effect is already real — and that is the point. The broader pattern is familiar from authoritarian contexts but novel in an American one. Whistleblower protections exist on paper; what this case demonstrates is that they offer no defence against a billionaire with 200 million followers and a president who treats dissent as disloyalty. The lawsuit will test whether defamation law can function as a check on platform-amplified harassment. Early indications are not encouraging. Source: Wired · 3 June 2026
Oxford Quantum Circuits, the UK-based quantum computing company, has closed a $350 million Series C round — one of the largest quantum-focused funding rounds ever completed in Europe. The raise values the company at a level that puts it in direct competition with American and Chinese quantum efforts, and signals that European investors are willing to make concentrated bets on deep-tech infrastructure rather than ceding the field to US venture capital. OQC's approach — building quantum processors that can be accessed via the cloud — positions it as infrastructure rather than a research project, which is what attracted the capital. The question now is whether European quantum companies can convert funding into operational advantage before the technology matures enough for hyperscalers to absorb the market. Source: Sifted · 3 June 2026
Researchers studying the frozen remains of Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old mummified man found in the Italian Alps, have identified bacteria that appear to be metabolically active — not merely preserved DNA but potentially living organisms that have survived millennia of cryo-preservation. The team also found cold-tolerant fungi that colonised his body after death. If confirmed, the discovery challenges assumptions about microbial survival limits and has implications for astrobiology, cryopreservation science, and the protocols used for handling ancient biological samples. It raises an uncomfortable question: what else is alive in the deep-frozen specimens the world's museums hold? Source: New Scientist · 3 June 2026 ---
97
97%
That is the share of its rare-earth supply that Europe currently imports from outside the continent — predominantly through refining chains controlled by China. The figure, cited in the new EU-funded urban-mining study, captures a dependency more extreme than Europe's pre-2022 reliance on Russian natural gas (which peaked at roughly 40 per cent of supply). The difference is that rare earths have no spot market, no strategic petroleum reserve equivalent, and no rapid-substitution options. They are embedded in electric motors, wind turbines, MRI machines and precision-guided munitions. The study's finding that recycled waste could cover more than half of projected demand by 2040 transforms this statistic from a vulnerability into a policy question: not whether Europe can mine its own trash, but whether it will move fast enough to matter.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 2 June 2026
In perspective
That is the share of its rare-earth supply that Europe currently imports from outside the continent — predominantly through refining chains controlled by China. The figure, cited in the new EU-funded urban-mining study, captures a dependency more extreme than...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Europe imports 97 percent of its rare earth metals, almost all of it through Chinese refineries. That's a level of dependency that makes the old Russian gas exposure look like a footnote. And yet half the solution is quite literally beneath our feet, in landfills, spent batteries, and scrapped wind turbines.
I've been building companies for over thirty years and the pattern I see here is one I recognize. It's not the technology that's missing. Pilot plants in Belgium and Finland are already demonstrating extraction rates above 90 percent for battery-grade lithium. What's missing is the willingness to treat waste for what it actually is: a strategic asset. Europe's reflex is to investigate, classify, harmonize regulations across 27 member states, and then investigate a little more. Meanwhile, China is expanding its control over precisely the materials that every European electric car, every wind turbine, and every defense system depends on.
This is not an environmental issue. It's a security issue and an entrepreneurial issue. Whoever builds the recycling infrastructure now will be sitting on one of the continent's most valuable value chains in ten years. Europe doesn't need to wait for anyone else's permission. The raw material is already here. The only thing required is to stop treating waste as waste and start treating it for what it is: a mine worth trillions.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai