On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
This is a first for mankind again, landing on a comet. Rosetta is a robotic space probe built and launched by the European Space Agency. The spacecraft consists of two main elements. the Rosetta space probe orbiter and the Philae robotic lander. The Philae robotic lander has landed on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenkoand has been confirmed by the agency. They have however stated that there might be a minor glitch as the harpoons launched by it might have failed to anchor it to the surface. The pic above is of the lander as it was nearing the surface of the comet and for the time-being no more photos will be sent back -- as the craft needs to do some manuring and settle itself on the comet and all communication has been severed. [More live news here]
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