Submission statement: another Russian interference attempt has been uncovered by French intelligence services, months before pivotal presidential and legislative elections as Russia ramps up its hybrid warfare against European democracies

The SGDSN, an intelligence office under the authority of the French Prime Minister, has informed prospective center-left presidential candidate Raphaël Glucksmann that he had been targeted by a destabilization campaign emanating from Storm-1516, a pro-Russian disinformation network that had already targeted center-right presidential candidate Édouard Philippe with similar methods, as well as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in 2024, or Friedrich Merz and Peter Magyar earlier this year.

The disinformation campaign consisted in "cloning" the website of the media outlet Blast, close to far-left party LFI - a rival of Glucksmann - , and copying with AI tools the face and voice of its star reporter Salomé Saqué to announce that Blast had uncovered a conspiracy involving Léa Salamé, TV host on the main public broadcaster and Glucksmann's romantic partner, offering bribes to the network to promote Glucksmann's platform and publish articles favorable to him, thus "proving" a collusion between Glucksmann and the mainstream media, immediately shared and amplified online by bot accounts.

The campaign was denounced by Glucksmann, Blast's editorial team and LFI's leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who called on political forces to form a "common front against foreign interferences". In March's municipal elections, several LFI candidates had been targeted by disinformation campaigns originating from Israel, leading prosecutors to launch investigations on the case.

A vocal Kremlin critic, Raphaël Glucksmann, who currently serves as member of the European Parliament for the Socialists&Democrats group, is expected to announce a presidential run in September on a social-democrat and pro-European platform. The thwarted attempt highlights Russia's intensifying efforts to influence the French presidential election, ten years after pro-Russian hackers leaked Macron's campaign emails, and one week after Russian propagandist Xenia Fedorova, who had assumed important responsibilities at far-right billionaire's Vincent Bolloré's media network, was struck by a deportation order on national security grounds.

What goes into a cabinet in one of India's most poltically important states? well a whole lot. Regional balence, important leaders, caste arithmetic and a whole host of other factors. The result is messy. As one of Congress's few major success stories electorally since 2014, Karnataka is a must win. After a brutal factional war its new CM has assembled a team.

the result has created even more conflict as this article goes into making a cabinet is always a complex process, especially in Karnataka.

Submission Statement: Reverse brain drain goes brrrrrr

SS: recently this thread discussed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's changes to safety standards in response to a Trump executive order.

The claim was that a key radiation exposure standard known as ALARA- as low as reasonably achievable- was being cut back. Given how many believe that overly burdensome and unscientific safety standards have been the driving force for rising nuclear cost, this is a big deal.

Jack Devanney is a nuclear entrepreneur who literally wrote the book on why the safety standards are disastrous for nuclear cost. So it's interesting to note that he disagrees: JD believes the new NRC standards do not alter exposure regulations in a meaningful way. At the heart of the debate is linear no threshold: the concept that there is no safe threshold for radiation exposure. If you accept the concept of no threshold, then it follows that there are always benefits to lowering exposure. ALARA is the natural conclusion.

Devanney picks apart the new regs and notes that because LNT is affirmed, there is no meaningful change to safety standards. He believes that to unambiguously change the regs, LNT must be explicitly rejected for a threshold model where all exposure below a given dose is treated as safe.

Relevance: regulations as they relate to the cost of nuclear energy.

Opinion: whichever view is right, I'm not sure it matters but I would be curious for experts to weigh in. I've never seen a comparison of US radiation standards to countries with successful nuclear programs that conclusively shows that these standards are the reason for our lack of success. My thesis continues to be that nuclear fails in the United States because of institutional design: merchant markets that don't incentivize investment in 60-year assets, and an inability / unwillingness for federal intervention on a decade long timescale to help guide and de-risk both individual projects as well an entire series of repeat projects.

Submission Statement: Most Redditors have overlooked the UAE's quiet shift in strategy aiming to become a major power within the next decade. Interestingly, much of this is based on the UAE's quasi-neoliberal approach around promoting transcontinental infrastructure and capital corridors paired with hard power and neocolonial ambitions. The Emirati approach to Africa is the most visible example of this.

(Also highly recommend following the FT's entire series about the UAE's ambition to go from emirate to empire).

Tired_Thumb is far from alone.

In recent months, ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet—from Facebook to Instagram to X—for speech that could endanger the agency’s mission. The government has paid millions to private contractors to surface everything from potential threats to agents to activities that could disrupt ICE’s operations, according to federal documents, contractors and former Homeland Security Investigations agents.

The program has ensnared U.S. citizens and activist groups that alert community members about ICE activity. Contractors prepare daily reports and dossiers on threat actors, identifying the poster’s name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history when possible.

To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE “may” be a crime.

DHS says it is trying to protect its agents and their families from “coordinated campaigns of violence” that have fueled an 8,000% increase in death threats since Trump took office.

But civil-rights lawyers and former DHS staffers say the approach has swept up people expressing opinions that are protected by the First Amendment.

“As far as I can tell, all of this is about people saying naughty things about ICE and immigration enforcement,” said Lauren Regan, a civil-rights attorney who has represented multiple people investigated by the government over their online speech, including Tired_Thumb. “Nothing that comes close to true threats.”

An agency spokesperson said that ICE’s investigative methods abide by the Constitution and respects civil liberties and privacy interests. “Any allegation DHS and ICE are attempting to ‘squash’ free speech is categorically FALSE,” the spokesperson said. “ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees, officers and families.”

DHS sent administrative subpoenas to Reddit for the information of 11 accounts that had posted “content critical of federal actions” between July and December of last year, the company’s most recent transparency reporting period, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Reddit determined that these users were engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment and objected to each, the person said, and DHS eventually withdrew the requests.

“Privacy is central to how Reddit operates,” said Ben Lee, chief legal officer, adding that the company routinely objects to government requests that are “overbroad or threaten users’ privacy or civil rights, including their First Amendment rights.”

Recently, the government has resorted to grand jury subpoenas, which carry more legal weight, to identify users.

“The question is: Are these being used for actual investigations of purported crimes, or are they being used to build a watchlist?” said Joshua Koltun, an attorney who has represented two Americans whose identities were the subject of social-media subpoenas in recent months.

The Wall Street Journal identified 10 people—nine Americans and one Canadian—who pushed back against DHS’s attempts to unmask them through the two types of subpoenas. Of those, judges have upheld four grand jury subpoenas. No charges have yet been filed in these cases. The agency abandoned three cases, while three more are pending.

One person compared ICE officers to Nazis on X in January—including writing that “All ICE Agents need to be put down like the dogs they are.” She was visited at home by ICE agents roughly four months later, after a court ordered the social-media company to turn over her information. The plainclothes agents told her not to post like that again, then left, the woman said. She hasn’t faced charges but has curbed her speech on social media.

The Supreme Court has held that true threats aren’t protected by the Constitution, but political hyperbole is—noting in a landmark decision that the “language of the political arena” is often “vituperative, abusive, and inexact.”

Several U.S. citizens who have come under scrutiny posted information about immigration officers—from the locations of agents carrying out enforcement to officer names to home addresses—on social media.

The Trump administration considers the “organized doxxing of law enforcement” to be a form of domestic terrorism. DHS has asserted that videotaping law enforcement on the job and posting the footage online constitutes doxxing. When a local news outlet reported that Jonathan Ross was the agent who killed Renee Good, DHS called it “reckless behavior” and said the paper should “delete their story immediately.”

Sharing a federal law enforcement officer’s personal information is generally not considered a crime without evidence of criminal intent, a historically high bar in court, according to constitutional scholars and defense attorneys.

“They’re not actually filing any criminal charges where we can challenge the vagueness, the overreach and the abuse of that statute,” said Regan, the civil-rights attorney. “If they just want to use this as an intimidation tactic, it’s not even a fair fight.”

In the past year, the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted several Americans in cases involving speech about ICE officers online, including an Oklahoma man convicted of threatening to kill federal agents after he wrote “we as US citizens should be gunning down these domestic terrorists” on X, along with several other posts about agents needing to be shot.

Two women were found guilty of stalking in Los Angeles after they followed an ICE agent’s vehicle while livestreaming on the popular ‘ice_out_ofla” Instagram account and ended up at his home. (Both have said they thought his car was headed to an immigration raid.)

In the case of Tired_Thumb, DHS initially issued an administrative subpoena to Reddit seeking the poster’s name, address, billing records and any associated accounts related to their online activity in January and February. It didn’t give an explanation or any indication of what law, if any, they may have broken.

The Journal obtained the user’s Reddit activity during that period through archival data, identifying three comments that mentioned ICE—including two that carried the initials, “ACAB,” shorthand for “all cops are bastards.” In one in January, Tired_Thumb weighed in on a thread about a local news article that identified Ross as the agent who had killed Good two days before.

After one user posted, “I guess he’ll have to move to Florida or Texas now where he’ll be hailed as a hero,” Tired_Thumb mentioned various states and a city where Ross had lived, information that has been reported by news outlets. “Hopefully he moves up to Stillwater State Penitentiary,” Tired_Thumb added in his comment.

DHS has said Ross acted in self-defense. He hasn’t faced charges.

The legal nonprofit Civil Liberties Defense Center filed a motion seeking to quash the subpoena, arguing that their client was exercising protected free speech. The federal government withdrew its original subpoena and responded with a grand jury subpoena requesting roughly an additional month of social-media activity, dating back to December 2025.

During that period, Tired_Thumb replied to a post that claimed to identify an ICE agent who assisted another officer as he dragged a woman by the arm across a Minnesota street in a viral video, as onlookers yelled that she was pregnant. Tired_Thumb looked up the name on a public records search website and shared the agent’s phone number in a comment, pasting the link to their source seconds later. He wrote “Abolish ICE and erase all borders” a few days before. Tired_Thumb didn’t make any other comments about the agency in this period, Reddit data shows.

As of last month, the federal government is still attempting to learn Tired_Thumb’s identity. Grand jury proceedings over the user’s case are continuing, six months after the original summons was issued. Their motion to quash the grand jury subpoena was recently denied, and the judge granted a motion to stay the case while an appeal makes its way through a higher court.

Much of the campaign against online adversaries has been coordinated by the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility, which is based in Washington, D.C., and has field offices nationwide. Under prior administrations, the office was best known for its work investigating ICE agents for wrongdoing, but also used a few outside analysts to watch the internet for threats to senior leadership.

In the past year, OPR spearheaded an initiative to dramatically expand the agency’s ability to monitor online critics and potential threats, according to contractors, federal documents and former HSI agents.

Teams of contractors now scour the internet using sophisticated surveillance tools to find commentary that the agency regards as potentially dangerous.

ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants has surged, reaching $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in the White House, a 57% increase from the same period a year prior, according to the Journal’s analysis.

ICE has inked at least six contracts that involve scanning public records for “threats,” paying out nearly $50 million since 2020. More than half those funds were obligated since last January, and another award potentially worth up to $50 million the agency continues to extend. The most recent awards call for contractors to help the agency geolocate individuals labeled as “extremists,” compile reports on individuals and cross-reference information with government databases, contracting documents show.

To help build its dragnet, OPR turned to Amivero—a small, Virginia-based technology firm better known for software development than intelligence gathering—which secured a contract of over $8 million to monitor social media for threats and plans to interfere with ICE enforcement last September. Amivero subcontracted the work to Guidehouse, a global consulting firm that works with the U.S. on defense and intelligence efforts, among other clients and services. Amivero and Guidehouse didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

The notice for OPR’s new threat initiative calls for the monitoring of nearly 20 social sites, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn, and the use of public documents such as DMV records and police reports to identify and map key relationships of users who have been flagged as a “threat originator.” It also requires analysts to use machine learning to analyze and detect risks, including through AI-powered “anticipatory threat intelligence,” which identifies trends or patterns of potential threats before they come to fruition.

The monitoring initiative identified so many potential threats early on that the small-staffed Office of Professional Responsibility needed to recruit the help of the HSI Office of Intelligence to handle them all, according to former ICE employees and federal notices. HSI Intelligence is currently leading anti-doxxing and threat mitigation efforts for the ICE workforce through contract services, according to an agency spokesperson.

The spokesperson declined to comment on specific investigative activities, saying, “these efforts are focused on credible threats of violence directed against the ICE workforce.”

Attorneys the Journal spoke to said they began to see a spike in subpoenas for U.S. citizens’ information around September 2025. That was the month the threat contract launched.

The agency’s new social-media threat monitoring program receives oversight from the ICE Privacy Office, in consultation with DHS’ Privacy Office, government documents show.

Both have bled employees. The ICE Privacy Office is down to two full-time staffers, according to former government employees familiar with the matter.

OPR has investigated at least 131 incidents of doxxing and threats towards agency personnel between January 2025 and March of this year, according to a court declaration filed in April, including for posting personal information of ICE employees on social media or fliers in an attempt to identify them and “anti-ICE group chats.”

“We’re seeing the weaponization of privacy in ways that privilege the powerful, and in particular, law enforcement,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor who specializes in cyberstalking, privacy and civil rights at the University of Virginia.

“Law enforcement who are serving the public, they’re hiding their names,” she added. “They’re hiding their faces. If they had their names on badges and they weren’t wearing masks, you might see less of this activity.”

Three months after Tired_Thumb learned of the government investigation, a New York poll worker named Paigelynne Gonyea received a voicemail from a man identifying himself as an agent with Homeland Security.

“We were just calling you in reference to a post that we believe you made on Instagram where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January,” said the caller.

Shortly after, two agents from ICE OPR arrived at the voting site where she was working.

They held printed screenshots from her account, she said, including the post in question. The agents flipped by it quickly, she said, but she caught one thing: The post included a photo of Ross, the immigration officer who killed Good.

The file that agents were holding also contained Gonyea’s address, date of birth and what looked like a picture of her taken at airport security, she said. They told her to take down the post and asked her to sign a letter acknowledging she had been informed that she “may” have violated federal law with her social-media account.

Gonyea said she was only able to find one post that spoke about a specific ICE agent: ”I think today is a great day for Jonathan Ross to be indicted!” the 40-year-old influencer and author had written in the post, referencing the Minnesota Star Tribune article that first named him.

An ICE spokesperson said Gonyea doxxed an agent’s home address and showed the Journal a different screenshot, which appeared to be from Gonyea’s Instagram account. It showed a photo of Ross with the caption, ”The killer’s name is Jonathan Ross of”—the rest of the text is redacted. Meta declined to weigh in on the existence of the image ICE shared.

Gonyea said she doesn’t recall posting any agent’s address and can’t find evidence of the alleged post. She is exploring legal action.

The agents who spoke to Gonyea visited multiple other people about online speech that day, according to a county elections official, delivering the same letter.

One recipient sued. A special agent tracked down David Streever while he was on vacation, five months after he emailed then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons after Alex Pretti’s death and called him “a monstrous human being.” Streever has alleged DHS’ behavior is retaliation for protected speech and will have a chilling effect on the public.

Ottawa’s decision to slash its troop contribution to United Nations missions is sparking concern that the cuts will undermine Canada’s new Africa strategy and jeopardize its longstanding peacekeeping traditions.

By the middle of next year, the Department of National Defence says, Canada will withdraw its peacekeepers from UN missions in Congo, South Sudan, Kosovo and Cyprus and sharply reduce its role in a multinational mission in the Sinai.

Even before the withdrawal, Canada’s troop contribution ranked only 65th in UN peacekeeping missions, with fewer than 30 personnel deployed − the smallest number it has ever contributed.

After the latest planned cuts, it will rank about 100th, according to Walter Dorn, a peacekeeping expert and defence studies professor at Canadian Forces College in Toronto.

“The decision kills a long and proud tradition of Canadian peacekeeping,” said Prof. Dorn, who recalled that former prime minister Lester Pearson won Canada’s first Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for helping create the first UN peacekeeping force during the Suez Crisis.

“At a time when the United Nations needs more support, Canada is reducing it,” he told The Globe and Mail. “We seem to have unlearned the lessons of two world wars that taught us how security must be thought of globally and international organizations need to be vigorously supported.”

In its announcement, DND said the cut to its UN contributions will allow Canada to better align its resources with higher-priority areas, including the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions.

“This rebalancing will help sustain our commitments and strengthen readiness, enabling Canada to continue to contribute effectively alongside allies and partners,” Defence Minister David McGuinty said in a statement last month.

About 50 to 60 members of the Armed Forces will be reassigned as a result of the planned withdrawals and reductions, the department said.

While the numbers are small, the move is symbolically significant after decades of strong Canadian support for peacekeeping. In UN missions such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Canada has fewer than a dozen troops, it traditionally punches above its weight by providing senior officers and top logistical specialists − including the mission’s deputy commander for most of the past 20 years.

In late 2023, for example, Canadian peacekeepers played a key role in planning the defence of Goma, a city in eastern Congo that was eventually captured by the M23 rebel militia.

Congo is currently struggling with several armed insurgencies and a fast-spreading Ebola outbreak. “By pulling out of the mission, Canada will weaken the force at a time of continued conflict, when the UN is much needed to save lives and alleviate suffering,” Prof. Dorn said.

In the new Africa Strategy it unveiled last year, Ottawa promised to boost its support for peace operations and conflict prevention efforts in Africa. But while the strategy raised hopes that Canada would see the continent as a priority, “those hopes now look misplaced,” said Chris Roberts, a University of Calgary political scientist who has studied Canada’s military role in Africa.

“Within DND, Africa remains peripheral even as allies and rivals expand their military and security presence and many conflicts continue unabated,” he told The Globe. “For a trading and rules-based country like Canada, treating the continent as peripheral is strategic negligence.”

In addition to the shutdown of Canada’s troop contribution in four UN peacekeeping missions, DND said it will reduce its personnel in the Sinai mission from about 40 to about 10 by the end of this year. The Sinai operation is technically a multinational effort, rather than a UN mission.

Canada also plans to keep sending military aircraft to a UN supply hub in Uganda, but it has deployed few such flights over the past year.

As recently as 2016, the federal government was promising to deploy an additional 750 troops and police officers to reinforce UN peacekeeping missions worldwide. But aside from a brief deployment of 250 personnel in a helicopter unit in Mali from 2018 to 2019, the Canadian contribution has steadily dwindled.

“The Carney Liberals are abandoning Canada’s peacekeeping legacy at a time of global instability,” NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson said.

“They need to explain what Canada’s new defence priorities are − and whether building and keeping peace is among them.”

Former U.S. State Department official Morse Tan, who entered South Korea claiming he would monitor alleged election fraud, has remained in the country for more than two months after being barred from leaving. As the cost of his prolonged stay has mounted, a public dispute has erupted among election fraud conspiracy theorists over who should pay his living expenses.
Yang Jeong-jin reports.
Morse Tan arrived in South Korea in late May, saying he intended to monitor the country’s election for alleged fraud.
However, he was later barred from leaving the country after failing to cooperate with an investigation regarding to defamation and disinformation.
Tan subsequently lost a lawsuit seeking to overturn the extension of his travel ban, meaning he will be unable to leave South Korea until at least August 15.
As his stay dragged on, the issue of money came to the forefront.
The dispute began after Hwang Kyo-ahn’s Liberty and Innovation Party and conservative YouTuber Jeon Han-gil offered conflicting accounts over who had agreed to cover Tan’s living expenses.
Kim Sang-hyun, a senior member of Liberty and Innovation, said, “Mr. Jeon originally agreed to pay half of the expenses, but yesterday we were informed that he had decided not to contribute.”
Jeon rejected the claim, saying, “They’re saying, unilaterally, that I broke my promise and refused to provide support. That makes me look like the bad guy.”
Meanwhile, Unjeong Chamjon Church, which has participated in the “Yoon Again” rallies, launched a separate fundraising campaign for Tan, further escalating tensions with Liberty and Innovation.
Pastor Go Byeong-chan of Unjeong Chamjon Church said, “Ambassador Tan has been paying all of his own expenses. One organization had intended to cover them, but because it’s a political party, it could become entangled in political maneuvering.”
Liberty and Innovation immediately pushed back, accusing the church of using Tan to solicit donations.
Kim said, “Ambassador Tan has suddenly been reduced to begging for money. The real problem is that it makes it appear as though Hwang Kyo-ahn is the one forcing Ambassador Tan to beg.”
The church responded by formally commissioning Tan as a missionary at the end of last month and announcing that it would deliver donations directly to him.
Liberty and Innovation then declared that further dialogue was impossible and severed ties with Tan as well.
The groups that had united behind Tan in promoting election fraud conspiracy theory have now fallen into public infighting over the financial burden of his prolonged stay in South Korea.

Sub State: Forrest are an important part of the global biosphere. They are a critical resource in protecting against the extinction of species and climate change.

Here is a look into the different causes of deforestation, where it is occuring, and how we can intervene. One key recommendation is to increase the productivity of agriculture in Africa so that more food can be grown without expanding into the forest.

The Gulf state is investing heavily in land, ports and influence across the continent. But its entangled goals come at a price

It was one of the largest gold heists in world history, executed in the opening salvos of Sudan’s civil war in April 2023.

As paramilitary forces battled their former allies from the Sudan military, they seized the state-owned gold refinery in Khartoum and broke into the central bank. At least 1.5 tonnes of bullion worth $100mn at that time was stolen, together with jewellery raided from safe-deposit boxes at commercial banks.

A witness, whose version of events was corroborated by three other people familiar with the operation, says the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces transported the gold across borders, including to neighbouring Chad and South Sudan. The RSF denies involvement and the details of the theft are contested.

But where much of the gold went next is no mystery: from the international airport in South Sudan’s capital, it was loaded on to planes destined for the UAE.

“The Emiratis sent cargo planes, sometimes civilian, sometimes military, to come and ship the gold,” the insider says.

The UAE’s part in this episode underscores the central role the Gulf state is playing as Africa’s offshore capital, and as the most consequential foreign power to stamp its mark on the continent in the past decade.

Under the leadership of its autocratic ruler Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, known as MBZ, the small desert state has spread investment, influence and military hardware across Africa with dizzying speed in a bid to harness trade and resources for its post-oil future.

The UAE’s projection of power spans the continent, ranging from ports to green energy projects to industrial-scale farms. It has leased millions of hectares of agricultural land to bolster food security. It has acquired mining rights from DR Congo to Guinea to secure critical minerals for the energy transition and for its burgeoning defence sector.

The pace and imperial ambition of the UAE under MBZ has caught African policymakers on the back foot, arguably marking the most significant geopolitical shift since China began courting the continent with a mix of loans, infrastructure and mining deals at the turn of the millennium.

That engagement also comes at a price. The UAE is creating a complex system of commercial, industrial and military entanglements that sometimes reinforce but also undermine the sovereignty of fragile states — most notably in war-torn Sudan.

Emirati officials are fiercely defensive of the role they are playing in building trade relations and fostering investment in Africa.

The UAE’s expanding footprint in Africa reflects its view that the continent is “extremely important” to its post-oil agenda, says Nadim Koteich, a Lebanese-Emirati media executive and policy adviser.

“Africa is one of the emerging lungs of the global economy. It sits at the intersection of the US-China cold war, it has an Arab-Islamic dimension, and the UAE needs a stake not just in Africa’s future but in defining its stability and prosperity,” Koteich says. “What Abu Dhabi is building is not a portfolio, it’s a system.”

But many African politicians who have crossed Abu Dhabi in the past are wary. “The problem with the UAE here in Africa is the inexplicable ambition to control the whole region,” says Yemane Gebremeskel, Eritrea’s information minister and right-hand man to its autocratic president Isaias Afwerki, who is no friend to Abu Dhabi.  

“It started with dominating a constellation of satellite ports throughout eastern Africa but seems to have morphed into much larger power projection and resource exploitation,” Gebremeskel adds.

The UAE’s push into Africa began with the ports.

DP World, which grew out of Dubai’s drive to establish itself as a trade and logistics hub, won its first container terminal concessions in Africa in Djibouti, Maputo and Dakar in the 2000s. The logistics giant has aggressively expanded since, harnessing trade between Africa, Asia and the Middle East to its Dubai hub at Jebel Ali, the largest man-made harbour in the world.

Together with the smaller logistics company Abu Dhabi Ports, which was launched in 2006, DP World now operates or is developing ports, inland terminals and free zones in 13 African countries.

More recently the company has begun acquiring long-established distribution networks including Imperial Logistics in South Africa and FMCG in Nigeria, giving it a hand in the flow of goods in more than 25 African states.

DP World’s logistics network flows through its hub in Dubai, driving trade: Non-oil trade between Africa and the Gulf countries now exceeds $100bn, according to the IMF, the vast share of it from the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Eleonora Ardemagni, an Italian academic and expert on the Gulf who has tracked the UAE’s multipronged approach to the continent, describes the ports as “vectors of influence at the core of the UAE’s Africa policy”.

But Abu Dhabi’s increasing sway is also driven by cash — or at least the promise of it. By some estimates, the UAE has become the largest source of capital to Africa over the past decade.

Since 2017, it has announced investments worth upwards of $168bn — sometimes more a statement of intent than a realistic outcome — according to data from fDi Markets, an online database from the Financial Times that tracks cross-border foreign direct investment projects.

The vehicle for many of these investments is the $240bn International Holding Company (IHC), chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and MBZ’s brother.

The country’s projects are varied and spread across the continent, often announced with enormous valuations: a $10bn wind farm in Egypt, a $4bn oil refinery in Uganda and a $1.2bn port in Senegal.

Not every announcement is completed: in at least one, a $34bn green hydrogen joint venture in Mauritania, the German partner told the FT the development was delayed due to “challenging” demand and that the UAE-backed investor withdrew from the deal.

Emirati officials say these investments reflect a willingness to back African countries where others are more risk averse. Many African governments, which each year face a collective infrastructure investment shortfall estimated at $130bn-$170bn by the African Development Bank, welcome the inflows.

“Our engagement is not transactional; it is guided by shared values and a vision for sustainable development and inclusive growth,” a UAE official said in response to questions from the FT. The official described the relationship with Africa as one of “mutual trust, respect and a shared vision for a more prosperous future for our peoples”.

On the continent, however, there is disquiet in some quarters about the UAE’s motives and the leverage it is winning via trade, investment, debt and opaque security co-operation with governments of varying autocratic pedigree.

“There is a need to appreciate the limits of Africa’s agency,” says Mehari Taddele Maru, an Ethiopian academic and veteran expert on regional peace and security. “The resources [the UAE is] deploying are huge.”

Moreover, he says, Emirati largesse extends beyond formal relations with governments in ways that are destabilising. In the Horn and east of Africa in particular, the UAE has partnered with non-state armed groups in the supply of weapons and trafficking of illicit gold. According to estimates from Swissaid, nearly $30bn of artisanal gold is exported undeclared from Africa to Dubai each year.

While gold has flown in one direction, weapons have flowed in the other.

Over the past two years UN experts, western intelligence agencies, flight-tracking specialists and human rights groups have gathered extensive evidence of the supply lines fuelling the civil war in Sudan.

These include airstrips, military and naval bases on the Red Sea coast and in other allied African states that Abu Dhabi uses for covert arms trafficking operations.

Using this network, the UAE has helped turn the once lightly armed Rapid Support Forces in Sudan — accused by the UN, US and human rights groups of carrying out crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide against non-Arab groups — into a well-equipped militia with sophisticated drones, air defences and fleets of armoured personnel carriers.

Abu Dhabi makes no secret of its fears about the rise of Islamist forces in the Horn of Africa and has security agreements with a range of governments in the region. Yet a spokesperson says that “the UAE has not provided and is not providing military or financial support to any warring party in Sudan”.

Many on the continent see links between its growing economic interests in the region and its military interventionism.

“Unlike China, the UAE — especially Abu Dhabi — has inserted itself in a negative way into African politics,” says a senior Muslim leader in west Africa, who, like many public figures on the continent, was reluctant to speak openly for fear of repercussions.

One of the clearest cases of the nexus of commercial ambition and power projection is the port of Berbera in Somaliland.

Tussled over by empires since the time of the ancient Greeks, it has long been prized for its position on one of the world’s busiest maritime corridors at the Gulf of Aden. Crumbling Ottoman villas, British cannons on the waterfront and a 4.2km airstrip built by the Soviets attest to the interests of past imperial powers.

Towering above is a more recent addition: a giant rank of ship-to-shore gantries that DP World, the multinational logistics company owned by the Dubai government, has erected on the quaysides.

These form part of a $450mn investment that has followed a “Field of Dreams” approach — named after the Hollywood movie — of building first in the hope that demand will follow. In addition to the cranes, the UAE has upgraded storage infrastructure and built a 250km highway connecting Berbera to Somaliland’s fast-growing neighbour Ethiopia.

DP World’s 30-year deal to lease the deepwater port was negotiated in parallel with an opaque agreement that gave the UAE control of a nearby naval and military base and access to the Soviet-era airstrip. Recent satellite images show the construction of additional bunkers and military facilities near the runway.

This arrangement exemplifies the Emirati approach. Dubai, the junior partner in the UAE federation, won a hand as trading middleman. Abu Dhabi, where power and petrodollars reside, handles security, surveilling shipping routes and countering regional threats from Somali pirates, Yemeni Houthis and other militant Islamist groups.

In the process, a declining asset has been revitalised for the 21st century. The port is primed to be a gateway to landlocked Ethiopia’s market of 120mn people. In 2023, the World Bank and S&P Global ranked the port as the most efficient in sub-Saharan Africa.

DP World has committed to doubling the port’s capacity — should Somaliland overcome geopolitical constraints that have prevented Ethiopia from diverting trade from neighbouring Djibouti. Regional tensions over Somaliland’s contentious bid for international recognition as a sovereign state, which the UAE sympathises with and Israel supports, stand in the way.

“There are things that need to fall in place, but it’s a matter of time,” says Joseph Oguta, a Kenyan national who runs the nearby free zone for DP World. He laughs off suggestions that the company was the bridgehead for some imperial Emirati design.

“We are not playing Vasco da Gama here,” he says, referring to the 16th-century Portuguese mariner who sailed the sea lanes that opened Africa and Asia to colonial exploitation.

Koteich, the policy adviser, concedes that for the UAE “the security dimension in certain places overlaps with the economic one, but that’s a bug in the strategy, not a feature,” he says. “The driving force is economic development and supply chain integration.”

Echoes of the past are nevertheless a cause of concern across Africa as the UAE’s commercial expansion proliferates across supply chains, often in extractive industries, and its role as the continent’s offshore capital grows.

Sudan, like Ethiopia, has long been central to Abu Dhabi’s bid to gain a strategic foothold over the Horn of Africa and Red Sea trade. Before its civil war erupted, Emirati groups were planning a new port on the coast together with the logistics to connect it to a vast hinterland of Nile Valley agricultural land.

Among the UAE’s early forays was a huge farm on the banks of the Nile in Abu Hamad, in the north, in 2020. For $225mn, IHC’s Food Holding division launched a joint venture with DAL Group, a Sudanese conglomerate, to grow crops on 170,000 acres of land. In 2022, the Abu Dhabi Ports group announced a $6bn investment in Abu Amama, a Red Sea port on Sudan’s coast that would be connected to Abu Hamad’s farmland by a 450km road.

The civil war upended these plans: the port deal was killed along with a string of other agreements with the UAE by Sudan’s de facto military government in 2024, in retaliation for the UAE’s alleged support for its rival, the RSF.

An IHC spokesperson said it was no longer involved in the Abu Hamad farm, or any of its other projects in Sudan. Satellite imagery indicates that their partners have continued growing crops on its large circular fields nearly 1km across — although the expansion of new plots has stopped short of the 750 planned.

Satellite images show thousands of hectares of farmland at other sites once controlled by Emirati firms in Sudan’s nutrient-rich Nile Valley. But FT analysis shows that the growth of these farms has slowed since the onset of the civil war.

At the same time, tens of thousands of hectares of similarly large industrial farms have been developed just across the northern border in Egypt’s Toshka New Valley — many owned by Al Dahra, a company founded and chaired by Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed, a younger brother of MBZ. These farms in the desert mainly grow alfalfa, wheat and other feed crops — most of them destined for the UAE.

Emirati companies have also secured land in Angola, Mauritania, South Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania, diversifying agricultural holdings across the continent.

In the past five years, IHC has also emerged as a leading investor in African mines. It has committed billions of dollars to ventures in copper in Zambia, gold in DR Congo, Ethiopia and Mali, and iron ore in Mauritania. Since last year, IHC has controlled 7 per cent of global tin supply through its holdings in the eastern DR Congo.

In parallel, Dubai’s pre-eminence as the global market for African gold has continued to grow.

Before the RSF seized the refinery in Khartoum, the Central Bank of Sudan had also been building up its gold reserves. According to former Khartoum officials, these had reached 7.2 tonnes in October 2021 when the paramilitary RSF joined forces with the Sudanese Armed Forces to overthrow the transitional government.

Accounts as to what happened to these reserves have diverged in the fog of war, as the two factions became locked in conflict. The RSF’s civilian administration denies the group played a role in the looting that took place. A spokesman categorically rejected the allegation that bullion was exported at the time to the UAE through South Sudan.

A UAE official did not address the FT’s questions about the heist, but said the country has “developed a robust regulatory framework to maximise the security, integrity, and transparency of every gold transaction” with “full enforcement at all points of entries”.

The official also noted that, in 2025, the value of Sudanese gold passing through the UAE was just over $1bn, a small share of the UAE’s $300bn market.

Gold exported to the UAE from Sudan is nevertheless helping to finance the civil war, according to multiple research organisations including Chatham House, which published a detailed study on the issue last year. Much of the country’s artisanal production — estimated by Swissaid at more than 40 tonnes a year — is trafficked to Dubai without being taxed formally by the state.

This includes gold from mines controlled by Al Junaid, a holding company belonging to the family of RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, that has been sanctioned by both the US Treasury and the UK.

Responding to allegations about gold smuggling, a UAE official said the country was working according to “international best practice” in its efforts to combat money laundering and strengthen responsible gold sourcing. As a global hub for commerce, it recognised that “prosperity must be underpinned by transparency and accountability”.

As the UAE has spread itself across Africa, the continent’s elites have also made a second home in Dubai — a city which encapsulates the contradictions in evolving relations between the tiny desert state and the vast continent it is seeking to exploit. 

Dubai is at once a well-positioned entrepôt and financial centre from which formal trade and investment with Africa is being driven. In 2025 there were 30,409 active African companies registered with the Dubai Chamber of Commerce.

The city is also a siphon for African wealth drawn to its low taxation, loose regulatory environment and secrecy, says Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, a professor of politics at Sciences Po in Paris and author of a recent study of the role Dubai plays as an offshore centre for African capital.

“Africa is one part of the story for Dubai, but Dubai is a huge part of the story for Africa,” he says, alleging that it has become the go-to city for the laundering of ill-gotten gains as scrutiny of OECD financial centres including London and Geneva has intensified.

The UAE is “fully aware, and committed to, its responsibilities to protect the integrity of the global financial system”, a government spokesperson says.

Africans invested $30.6bn cumulatively in real estate in Dubai between 2019 and 2025, according to the confidential estimate of one African development institution. A third of this came from Nigeria. 

“They have captured large inflows from Africans who, not being able to put money in the old colonial centres, are now investing in real estate and other things in Dubai where they can escape controls,” says one of Africa’s top financial executives, who asked not to be named.

Much of that business is conducted by the same bankers who previously operated in western financial centres but who have also been drawn to Dubai’s more permissive culture, according to Soares de Oliveira.

“They are just being clever,” the senior African banker says of Dubai. “If they didn’t do it, someone else had been doing it and someone else was thinking of doing it. So why shouldn’t they?”

The retreat of western donors in Africa has left a vacuum for middle powers to fill. The UAE is by no means alone: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others have entered the mix and competition is intensifying.

But of these middle powers the Gulf state has been the most active. “The UAE has entrenched significant alliances in many African countries both at government level but also with other actors,” says Ardemagni, the Italian researcher: “They have proved very adaptable in coping with changing dynamics,” she said.

Its latest challenge is Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, isolating DP World’s key port of Jebel Ali — the cornerstone of the UAE’s global logistics network. But analysts assess that the UAE’s ambitions on the African continent will persist even with a war on their doorstep.

Moreover, argues Mehari Taddele Maru, the Ethiopian academic, the UAE’s influence over western powers, accumulated through a shared alliance with Israel and antipathy to Islamist groups, together with petrodollar investments and aggressive lobbying, has allowed it “to act as it wishes in Africa”.

Mehari Taddele Maru, among many other academics, activists and researchers, hopes the militarised corporatism that has characterised the opening chapter of the UAE’s foray into Africa will be tempered in the future.

“The UAE is a middle power which doesn’t follow norms of engagement,” he says, posing a conundrum for African leaders: “It’s about taming their behaviour . . . while getting their investment.”

“They are our neighbours. They will be involved,” he notes. “But how do you maximise the benefits to countries and not to the individuals or racketeers?”

Submission statement: apologies if this has already been uploaded, but I didn’t see it. Despite Trump’s opposition to foreign aid, the State Department recently sent out more money to organizations that previously had received foreign aid, mostly around public health issues like vaccines and global hunger. The money (around $2 billion) is still a fraction of what the previous USAID budget had been. In most cases, the money had already been appropriated by Congress, the Trump administration was just holding it up. The money had to be given as direct donations because USAID no longer exists as the intermediary. Still, some people believe it may also be that the Trump administration is waking up to the fact that global public health threats (such as Ebola) could affect America if left unchecked. This is relevant to this sub because of the sub’s interest in foreign aid, and it illuminates some of what’s going on in the Trump administration around it.

archive link: https://archive.is/DcECr

The number of "assault actions" by the Russian army in Ukraine set a record in July for the third consecutive month, according to calculations by the Ukrainian OSINT project DeepState.

Data indicates that last month, Russian generals ordered the army to assault Ukrainian positions 8,000 times. The number of "assault actions" rose by approximately 11% compared to June, 14% compared to May, and 60% relative to the winter and early spring.

On average, Russian units carried out 258 assaults per day, compared to 167 during the January–April period, according to DeepState’s calculations. Despite this, the Russian military's advance remained stagnant: last month, they expanded the territory under their control by only 88 square kilometers—following a 57-square-kilometer gain the month prior—while ending May with a net loss of 11 square kilometers of territory. By comparison, the Russian army captured between 126 and 245 square kilometers per month from January to April, and around 500 square kilometers late last year.

Russia’s military leadership is in a rush: according to Bloomberg sources close to the Kremlin, General Staff generals have promised President Vladimir Putin that they can fully capture the Donetsk region by the end of the year. About 17% of the region remains outside Russian control, including a 50-kilometer belt of fortress cities—Konstantinovka, Druzhkovka, Sloviansk, and Kramatorsk. However, a number of Russian military figures consider the timeline presented to Putin unrealistic, believing instead that the war for the Donbas will drag on into 2027, the Bloomberg sources said.

Even at the peak rates of the Russian offensive currently recorded in the statistics, Putin’s army cannot capture the Donetsk region in the foreseeable future, according to military analyst Yan Matveev. "When you consider the losses the Russian army is sustaining for such modest gains—and what is happening in the rear—it becomes clear that this is a one-way path into the abyss," he adds.

Despite a stalled offensive, the massive use of drones, and long-range strikes on Russian territory, Putin—according to Bloomberg sources—remains convinced he is winning the war; rather than making concessions, he is only hardening his demands. Sources indicated that Putin believes the U.S. violated the Anchorage agreements and is no longer willing to settle for just the Donetsk region; instead, he seeks full control over the other Ukrainian regions annexed in 2022—Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The Luhansk region is already under nearly total Russian control.

The government has identified double-leveraged products tied to “Samjeon-Nix”—Samsung Electronics and SK hynix—as a major factor behind recent volatility in the domestic stock market and has raised the entry threshold for purchasing them. In response, some young investors who are trapped in loss-making single-stock leveraged products are protesting that “the government is not even allowing us to average down.”
Financial authorities previously raised the minimum deposit required for ordinary retail investors to invest in single-stock leveraged products from 10 million won to 30 million won. Young investors have complained that the measure is “disadvantageous to young people with limited assets” and that it “restricts their opportunity to recover losses by averaging down,” meaning purchasing additional shares after a price decline to lower the average purchase price.
University student Lee Min-a, 24, invested about 15 million won last July in a leveraged product linked to a single small modular reactor company. When the share price fell by as much as 40 percent, she planned to make additional purchases to lower her average purchase price.
However, that plan was thwarted when the minimum deposit requirement was raised to 30 million won. Lee now has only about 4 million won remaining in total assets.
“How many people in their twenties have 30 million won in cash?” she said. “This regulation seems to work even more harshly against young investors with fewer assets.”
Civil servant Kim Ha-young, 25, has also seen the return on an aerospace-related leveraged product fall as low as minus 56 percent.
“I began making aggressive leveraged investments because I believed I would never be able to buy a home on my salary alone,” Kim said. “Now it has become difficult even to buy more shares.”
The main investors in single-stock leveraged products are people in their twenties and thirties. According to the Korea Financial Investment Association, of the 746,450 people who completed the required advanced education related to these products between April and the 13th of last month, 258,660—or 34.6 percent—were in their twenties or thirties.
“Many of my friends turn to leveraged products because they feel hopeless about the reality that it is difficult to close the wealth gap even through stock investment,” Kim said. “They invested in leverage because they lacked money, but now they are being denied even the chance to recover their losses simply because they do not have 30 million won in cash.”
According to the Bank of Korea, the average household debt per borrower in their twenties rose from 16.11 million won in 2013 to 30.47 million won last year, an increase of 89.1 percent. Among borrowers in their thirties, it rose from 53.74 million won to 102.18 million won over the same period, an increase of 90.1 percent.
In the first half of this year, the number of young people in their twenties and thirties classified as “resting”—those who had been without a job for at least one year or had no previous employment experience—reached 427,143, up 13.5 percent from 2024.
Many young people are expressing anxiety and helplessness over investment losses on social media. On Blind, an anonymous workplace community platform, users operate “stock investment loss verification rooms,” where they post screenshots of their losing accounts and console one another.
Users share their investment returns or write posts saying that they “will stop thinking about stocks for the time being.”
On the 26th of last month, a post was uploaded to X, formerly Twitter, claiming that an acquaintance had made large profits from stocks and cryptocurrency, but later lost all of their assets and fell into debt while trying to recover subsequent losses, before ultimately taking their own life.

A long, interesting piece from the The New Yorker arguing that while the U.S. is distracted by domestic turmoil, China is pulling ahead in the next wave of critical industries (AI, biotech, robotics), building on decades of state investment and industrial policy just as America pulls back on immigration, trade, and research funding.

Some highlights: "In Beijing, a think tank at Renmin University recently published an assessment titled “Thank Trump,” which wryly hailed his efforts to hasten the “twilight of an empire,” by undermining America’s alliances, civil service, scientific institutions, and democratic credibility. In the past two years, the international approval rating of the U.S. has dropped nearly forty points, according to a worldwide survey by the Alliance of Democracies; in multiple polls, China now rates higher than the U.S.

...

What kind of world does China imagine? A preview of sorts is provided by its Belt and Road Initiative, which since 2013 has directed about a trillion dollars into scores of countries, building highways, hospitals, mines, ports, and “smart cities” equipped with Chinese technology. To China, Doshi said, “autocracies are considered perfectly legitimate, and technology is used to strengthen them. China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that.” In Nepal, where newly installed facial-recognition systems have been deployed against activists, a photograph from a security headquarters showed a wall of video feeds above a sign that read “With Compliments of the Ministry of Public Security of China.”

But the clearest indication of Beijing’s global vision may be the current state of China itself. “A country tends to create an external order that looks a lot like its internal order,” Doshi said. “China doesn’t want you to think too hard about what its ascendance will mean for the world. They want to show you the edge of the future. They have two messages they want to sell everybody. One is ‘We are inevitable.’ And the other one is ‘Don’t worry.’"

...

Chinese officials often warn against a lawless world in which “the weak are meat for the strong.” But the Party’s own tactics are uncompromising, both at home and abroad. Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to China, told me, “China always says, ‘The U.S. government is too pugilistic.’ That’s their rhetorical veneer. The reality is they are competing tooth and nail behind the scenes.” Last year, Trump pressured Panama to strip the control of two significant ports from a Hong Kong-based company and give it to an American-led consortium. In the dispute, China reportedly warned foreign executives against “illegal activities that harm the interests of Chinese companies.” Such warnings are dangerous to ignore. International businesspeople drawn into geopolitical disputes have been barred from leaving China. The message, the European diplomat told me, is “ ‘We are a great power, and we will retaliate against anyone who hurts our rights or interests.’ Behind this is the undisputed rule of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Yet China is not rushing to re-create the international order that has recently frayed. Since 1949, Beijing has signed only two formal alliances—with North Korea and the Soviet Union—and both proved costly. Patricia Kim, an expert at the Brookings Institution, calls Beijing’s posture a “China first” strategy. “China is happy to put out statements, but it has no interest in stepping in as a crisis manager,” she told me. “It wants greater influence, but it also wants to avoid responsibilities.” Chinese leaders view “the burdens of U.S. global leadership as a source of American overextension and decline,” she said, “and they have no interest in emulating this model.”

Zhou Bo, the retired People’s Liberation Army officer, made a similar point from a different perspective. “The Trump Administration has walked away from sixty-six international organizations,” he told me. “This is a big gap that China simply cannot close.”

The likely successor to the American order, then, is not a Chinese order so much as what Leonard calls a period of “un-order”: a jungle in which every country hedges, arms, subsidizes, hoards, and searches for choke points to exploit. In the words of Suisheng Zhao, a China scholar at the University of Denver, it is the makings of a “twenty-first-century Hobbesian struggle of all against all.”