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...
Twitter has released it's Top Twitter Trends for the year 2009. And the topic that came out as the most engaging has been the Iran Elections. the terms #iranelections, Tehran and Iran were used to follow the elections and these three combined formed the most tweeted topic of the year. #iranelections the term finished second behind the ever popular #musicmonday. Twitter further went on to give a whole list of topics that were the top favorites for the year 2009 and this is a good indicator of what the last decade has been interested in. So as this decade comes to a close we have reposted fro their blog the top lists News Events 1. #iranelection 2. Swine Flu 3. Gaza 4. Iran 5. Tehran 6. #swineflu 7. AIG 8. #uksnow 9. Earth Hour 10. #inaug09 People 1. Michael Jackson 2. Susan Boyle 3. Adam Lambert 4. Kobe (Bryant) 5. Chris Brown 6. Chuck Norris 7. Joe Wilson 8. Tiger Woods 9. Christian Bale 10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez) Movies 1. Harry Potter 2. New Moon 3. District 9 4. Paranormal Activ...