{
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  "dek": "For decades, China has supplied African militaries with small arms and land-based equipment such as armoured vehicles, trucks and artillery. Now, it is selling them more specialised weapons, including armed drones and electronic warfare systems. Analysts noted that China’s African arms sales were shifting qualitatively",
  "desk": "politics",
  "event_id": "event-db899aa4f13c02b9510ae093",
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      "source_name": "South China Morning Post — China",
      "title": "From rifles to radar: China upgrades its African arms trade as Russia and the West retreat",
      "url": "https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3372870/rifles-radar-china-upgrades-its-african-arms-trade-russia-and-west-retreat",
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  "headline": "From rifles to radar: China upgrades its African arms trade as Russia and the West retreat",
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  "limitations": [
    "Palimpsest retained only feed title, canonical link, time, and a bounded plain-text excerpt; it did not fetch the article body.",
    "The evidence-strength label describes source structure, not truth, intent, impact, or causation.",
    "Declared instrument links are topical pointers until a separate scan or economic observation is joined by time and method.",
    "Title-similarity clustering can miss differently worded or cross-language accounts and can join closely worded updates.",
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      "attribution": "South China Morning Post — China",
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      "published_at": "2026-11-01T10:00:11Z",
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