.@N12News assessment of Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi's tenure as IDF Chief of Staff at 2 yrs:

How do you explain the Trinity in Chinese? If you're a Christian in Tang China, there's a few ways!

I'm @ChenHuailun, back for my last #Twittistorian thread, this time on translating the names of God in Chinese Christian documents. ~ahc #jingjiao 1/

There are two main writers/translators credited in the extant documents of the Christian (called 'Jingjiao' 景教 in Chinese) corpus of Tang China: Aluoben and Jingjing. ~ahc #jingjiao /2

Aluoben (阿蘿本) was said to have been the Persian missionary responsible for bringing Christianity to China, arriving in Chang'an in 635 and building a church there with 21 monks. ~ahc #jingjiao /3

'Observing the azure clouds, he [Aluoben] bore the true sacred books; beholding the direction of the winds, he braved difficulties and dangers.' - Xi'an stele ~ahc #jingjiao /4

Let's pause on this name, Aluoben (阿蘿本). Some translate it as 'Olopen.' Is it a Syriac name, perhaps a rendering of Yahballaha or Abraham? Or perhaps a Middle Persian name Anōš-ruwān (meaning immortal soul)? ~ahc #jingjiao /5

Today is “Korean American Day”.

#OTD in 1903, the first large group of Korean immigrants arrived in US-conquered territory. [Thread]

102 Korean men, women, and children arrived in Honolulu aboard the SS Gaelic to work in Hawaii’s sugar plantations. By 1905, Koreans comprised 11% of Hawaii’s plantation workforce—around 7000 people.

This first wave of Korean immigrants arrived amid sharpening imperialist rivalry in the Pacific. Korea had slowly been losing its independence for decades, and by 1903 was just two years away from becoming a protectorate of Japan.

At the same time, the US was consolidating its position in the Pacific, annexing Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines in 1898, and partitioning Samoa in 1899.

(Pictured: US troops in the Philippines)

US missionaries colluded with the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association to secure a new, cheap labor force for Hawaii’s sugar fields. Many of the Koreans who arrived in Hawaii from 1903-1905 were Methodists.

Let me talk to those who are planning to buy cars these year; Buying a car is good. Very essential for making life easier. However, a car isn’t cheap, the cheapest car is around 450USD in Kenya. Today owning a car may seem very easy as compared to the 70s, THREAD 1/3

Today you can buy a car either in cash 💰, by bank finance, hire purchase and through trade in. But my interest on this post is on bank financing and Hire purchase. Bank finance is where the bank buys for you a car and you pay the bank for a period of time.

Hire purchase terms of purchase is where by you identify a car in a dealership, negotiate for its final price, pay an agreed deposit upfront then clear balance in defined period of time I.e in 6/12/18/20/24 months. So HP =Deposit + total Monthly Installments.

Whenever a bank offers to buy you a car, there is always a 99.9% chance that they will retain the logbook[A substitute for a collateral in lending] A logbook is the only instrument of ownership for any car in Kenya. So the bank will issue you with your logbook once you finish,

Finish paying for the car. The only problem I have with bank financing is the possibility of the buyer losing the car and servicing the loan. It has happened and it does happen. The bank repossesses the car and they auction it. You shall have lost two important things; the money

Bellingcat and its investigative partners have established that Russian politician, Vladimir Kara Murza, was followed by a specialist FSB team prior to his suspected poisonings in 2015 and 2017.

Members of the same FSB team, some of whom have medical and chemical weapons backgrounds, tailed Alexey Navalny before he was poisoned with a Novichok substance in August 2020.

Kara-Murza is a well-known Russian politician, film-maker and an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The circumstances around his suspected poisonings have long remained a mystery.

Travel details of FSB team members show they followed Kara-Murza on a campaign trip outside Moscow that ended less than 48 hours before his first poisoning incident in May 2015.

Kara-Murza recovered in the US before returning to Russia. Yet the same team began tailing him again just five months after he came back. He was poisoned for the second time in February 2017.

An article by Jan Nyssen, a Belgian physical geographer, and professor of geography at Ghent University, on the ongoing war and its impact on civilian life in Tigray

"Ever since I started research in Tigray in 1994, the fight against famine has been a major priority. With academic colleagues, we tried to assist through studies and projects for environmental conservation. But now, it feels as though we are back to square one" he says

From February to May 2021, more than half of Tigray’s territory is expected to suffer “Emergency” outcomes by the U.S.’s Famine Early Warning System Network—the last stage before “Famine.

What is reported is therefore catastrophic; worse even than anticipated in our prescient paper in November. In that analysis, we warned that food security in Tigray was already critical before the start of the conflict: for instance....

....large areas were on a path towards hunger due to a desert locust invasion that significantly reduced harvests.