McConnell wife Elaine Chao’s father founded shipping company Formost Group.

Most of Formost’s ships were built by China’s state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corp (CSSC).

CSSC is one of the top 10 defense groups in China.

1 So, today we turn to early Islamic Beirut. what do we know of the earliest times of #Beirut under early Islamic rule, starting with the #conquest. How and when did Beirut enter the emerging Muslim empire? -rm

2 Let’s start with traditional sources for the early Islamic period. Of those, only al-Balādhurī (d. ca. 892), the Abbasid scholar, is informative. Other Muslim and non-Muslim sources including al-Ṭabarī's Tārīkh are silent on the matter.-rm

3 In his small tome, Futūḥ al-Buldān, al-Balādhurī tells his readers: “After the conquest of Damascus, Yazīd came to Sidon, ʿArqa, Byblos, and Beirut which lie on the sea coast with his brother Muʿāwiya leading the van of the army.”-rm

4 Hence, the men who conquered Beirut were Yazīd b. Abī Sufyān (d. 639) and his half-brother and future caliph Mu‘āwiya (r. 661-680). The date of the conquest of the coast falls between 636 and 639 at the latest, the date of the death of Yazīd in the plague of Emmaus. -rm

5 Yazīd and the Muslim army likely took the coastal road to Beirut, a path taken by numerous armies before. They would have either swung from Damascus to Baalbek through the Hims gap to ‘Arqa, then Byblos, crossed the Dog River, and arrived at the eastern side of Beirut.

NEW SCOOP from @zachsdorfman: China's Ministry of State Security has demanded that private Chinese companies, including Baidu and Alibaba, help them process stolen U.S. data, such as from the OPM hack, U.S. intelligence officials

Zach writes, "In what amounts to intelligence tasking, China’s spy services order private Chinese companies with big-data analytics capabilities to process massive sets of information that have intelligence value, according to current and former officials."

“Just imagine on any given day, if NSA and CIA are collecting information, say, on the [Chinese military], and we could bring back seven, eight, 10, 15 petabytes of data, give it to Google or Amazon or Microsoft, and say, ‘Hey, we want all these analytics," said one official.

It's hard to overestimate the significance of this intelligence assessment.

There has been speculation that Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent might have ties to China's security state. In fact, they work directly with them and for them—because they have to. According to US intel.

If you have been enjoying this series of scoops from @zachsdorfman, also take some time in your day to appreciate the skill and dedication that FP editor @BeijingPalmer has put into them.

Xi Jinping's speech at Davos boiled down to: The world has no choice but to do business with China, and if you want to do business with China, you need to stop criticizing our tyranny and questioning our lies about the

Xi's address to the World Economic Forum will serve as well as any other moment for historians to mark the beginning of the Authoritarian Era. He said nothing new, but he restated the narratives and demands of Chinese fascism from a post-pandemic position of aggressive strength.

For the first time, Xi spoke to a world that is beginning to accept the tenets of authoritarianism, thanks to the incredible political and economic damage from China's coronavirus. China's ideals have become as viral as Covid-19.

Thanks to the pandemic, the political elites of the world now universally see their citizens as dangerous mobs that must be tightly controlled for their own good. Most of them always thought that way, but now they can say it openly and act aggressively on their prejudices.

Xi clearly stated that China will not be contained, censured, or judged for its actions. He denounced Western ideals of human rights as "arrogance" and imperialism. After Covid and Biden's inauguration, he sees no nation with the strength or will to thwart China's ambitions.

I am in a meeting now that is so annoying but I want to take my mind off things that upset me to talk about love and marriage.

I have been listening to people talk in many @joinClubhouse rooms about what they expect from potential partners and laugh very hard each time.

I laugh because those expectations are what keep a lot of people single. Being single is also not a bad thing as I have been more single in my lifetime than I have been in relationships. I also learned a lot about what kept me single for all those years. It was largely idealism.

Let me digress a bit to one of the pivotal encounters in my life when someone literally came out of the darkness to evangelize to me.

He deliberately ran towards me to deliver a message as if he had been sent on an errand. He told me that God doesn't want perfection.

He said, God wants us to strive towards perfection but knows we will never attain it. He said I should not beat myself up whenever I don't measure up but I should remain trying. It is the act of trying that is desirable. God is the only perfection and we strive to be like God.

I became an Atheist after that conversation. I took the opposite direction in search for perfection. In a roundabout way, it led me back to faith.

That is also my story of love and relationships. The best came at my most skeptical moment after I gave up on everyone else.