Our daily voyage around the world

🇫🇷 The 76th Cannes International Film Festival begins today. This year’s edition of the annual event held in Cannes, France, will feature the debuts of several high-profile movies, including Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro), and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City (starring, well, everyone). The 12-day festival kicks off today with French-language film Jeanne du Barry, which represents Johnny Depp’s first role since a highly publicized trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard.

🇪🇺🎮 EU regulators approved Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard. With the decision, Microsoft has now cleared one of three hurdles preventing its Activision purchase from being finalized. However, the other two hurdles – aka regulators in the UK and US – are proving more difficult to overcome. UK officials last month rejected the acquisition pending a last-chance appeal from Microsoft, while US regulators are currently suing to block the deal as well. And without approval from all three regulatory bodies, Microsoft’s acquisition can’t go through, per BBC News.

🇨🇳 China sentenced a 78-year-old American citizen to life in prison on spying charges. Chinese officials gave no public details surrounding the case of John Shing-wan Leung, a Hong Kong resident and US citizen, other than revealing that he’s been detained since April 2021. In China, trials involving espionage are typically conducted behind closed doors, with little or no information publicly released (even after convictions).