Long reads shortened
Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan (R) with Sudan’s de facto military ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. UAE Presidential Court/Anadolu Agency/Getty
How the UAE became Africa’s “offshore capital”
In the opening salvos of Sudan’s civil war in April 2023, say William Wallis and Peter Andringa in the FT, paramilitary troops carried out “one of the largest gold heists in world history”. After seizing the state-owned gold refinery and central bank, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stole at least 1.5 tonnes of bullion, worth $100m – plus some jewellery from bank safe-deposit boxes for good measure – and transported it to neighbouring South Sudan. From there, the loot was flown to its final destination: the United Arab Emirates. This extraordinary theft wasn’t a one-way transaction. Abu Dhabi has armed the RSF with top-of-the-range drones, air defences and fleets of armoured personnel carriers. And it reflects the degree to which the UAE is becoming Africa’s “offshore capital”.
Under the leadership of autocratic ruler Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan (MBZ), the Gulf state has spread investment, influence and military kit across Africa with “dizzying speed”. Since 2017 it has announced projects worth $168bn – more than any other foreign country – including a $10bn wind farm in Egypt, a $4bn oil refinery in Uganda and a $1.2bn port in Senegal. Emirati companies have built up “industrial scale farms”, leasing millions of acres of agricultural land to bolster food security. They have acquired mining rights from the likes of DR Congo and Guinea to secure minerals crucial to the green energy transition, and committed billions to mining ventures everywhere from Zambia (copper) to Mali (gold) and Mauritania (iron ore). The pace of these investments and the “imperial ambition” of MBZ have caught African policymakers on the back foot. More than two decades after China began aggressively courting the continent, there’s a new player in town.
Advertisement
Property
THE BOND VILLA This two-bedroom apartment sits within Villa La Gaeta on Lake Como, the palazzo featured in the closing scene of Casino Royale, says Country Life. Built in 1921 in a neo-medieval style, the villa was split into five apartments in 2011. On the ground floor are a living area opening on to a terrace with panoramic lake views, a kitchen, a double bedroom and a bathroom. The lower level has French doors on to the marina, a second double bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, and a study. Residents share the gardens, swimming pool and a private beach, and the apartment comes with its own boat mooring. Milan is a two-hour drive. €1.2m-€1.4m. Click on the image to view the listing.
Heroes and villains
A pre-race bra check
Villains
Female cyclists, who appear to have been faking a larger bra size to gain an aerodynamic edge over their rivals in the Tour de France Femmes. Officials carried out pre-race kit checks after several teams raised concerns that riders were padding their bras to improve the airflow around their bodies, a practice known as “chest fairing”.
Hero
Donald Trump, for acting with characteristic good grace after triumphing in the “senior” and “super senior” competitions at his New Jersey golf course. “Unlike the rest of the field, I’m given very little time to practice, because I’m focused on many other things,” he wrote on social media afterwards. “It’s called TALENT, and I have it, and they don’t!”
Hero
Sean Carrington, who spent £550 on a massive tattoo prematurely declaring England as World Cup 2026 winners, for making the best of a bad lot. After the Three Lions’s defeat to Argentina in the semi-finals, the roofer from Wigan went back to the tattoo parlour and got them to add a two-word addendum: “Just joking!”
Villains
A pair of hapless robbers who put on comically unconvincing scouser accents as they held up their local convenience store in Derbyshire. Stephen Bradley and David Oakley made several less-than-subtle references to their supposed home town during the heist, such as “we’ve got to get back to Liverpool” and “hurry up so we can get on the motorway to Liverpool”. They were both jailed for four years. Watch the clip here.
Books
Dua Lipa with a “hefty hunk of words in her hand”. Instagram/@Service95bookclub
There’s nothing wrong with performative reading
In the past couple of years, says Kara Kennedy in The Telegraph, there’s been a significant rise in “performative reading”: the act of reading to be seen doing so, rather than for the pleasure of the prose. The singer Dua Lipa is papped almost daily with a “hefty hunk of words in her hand”, and like dozens of other celebrities she has started an online book club, interviewing famous authors. Jacob Elordi never seems to leave the house without a novel, and heaps of “dorky men” in trendy parts of London and New York are constantly clutching classics. I’d normally be the first to roll my eyes. But when it comes to performative reading, “I can’t find it in myself to make fun of them”.
These performative readers, you see, are likely part of the reason that “reading is back”. The National Literacy Trust reported that 36% of young Brits said they enjoyed reading in their free time this year, up from 33% in 2025. Daily reading among eight to 18-year-olds has increased for the first time in three years. Besides, hasn’t reading always been performative? I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea last week “smoking like a sailor on my porch”, half-imagining that I was being filmed by a movie crew. My husband is only reading Dostoevsky because he hated having to admit to someone at a dinner recently that he hadn’t. When I suggested he was only reading it for attention, he told me: better a Dostoevsky than a mid-life Lamborghini crisis. In the long run, the showy-offy Instagram posts will fade. But with any luck, the lessons taken from Fitzgerald or Austen will last. “So go ahead, read like everybody is watching.”
The Knowledge Crossword
Tomorrow’s world
A dictator ordering a mass propaganda campaign, as imagined by ChatGPT
A “dictator’s dream”
The Chinese Communist Party has always had a knack for adopting new technologies as tools of repression, says Michael Schuman in The Atlantic. The mobile phones that many hoped would usher in a new age of freedom in China soon became tools of surveillance and repression. Every mobile number in the country is linked to a national ID card, making privacy impossible. The internet only made things worse, allowing even more snooping of people’s personal computers and browsing habits, and giving Beijing unprecedented opportunities to flood social media with propaganda and vicious attacks on critics. Now, with AI, things are getting worse still.
Suddenly, Beijing can create mass propaganda campaigns – in English as well as Chinese – at the click of a button, target susceptible groups with ever-greater precision and better analyse the results, all in the interests of the party. OpenAI claimed last month that it had identified a covert Chinese government campaign using ChatGPT to create polarising social media content (trying to turn Americans against data centres, as it happens). In February, the company caught a Chinese user asking ChatGPT to plan an online intelligence operation to discredit the Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, specifically asking the bot to stir up anger about immigration and the cost of living. The firm says busting that one user revealed a “large-scale, resource-intensive and sustained” covert operation involving “at least hundreds of staff” and “thousands of fake accounts across scores of platforms” to suppress dissent both inside and outside China. AI is also making censorship vastly faster and cheaper, allowing Beijing to scan vast reams of media to identify dissent and erase it. Some AI boosters hoped the technology would democratise intelligence. Instead, it’s just another “dictator’s dream”.
Weather
Quoted
“To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.”
American country singer Reba McEntire
That’s it. You’re done.
Let us know what you thought of today’s issue by replying to this email
To find out about advertising and partnerships, click here
Been forwarded this newsletter? Try it for free
Enjoying The Knowledge? Click to share
