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...
Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google has just made a presentation at the Iraq's national Museum. What they are going to do is create a virtual copy of all the collections in the museum at their own expense. And make it available freely on Google. Amira Edan, the director of the museum was very happy speaking to reporters that the collection of four millenniums of treasure will now be able for the world to see. The Museum remains closed because of the fear of violence. "Ambassador Christopher R. Hill described the project as “part of an effort spearheaded by the State Department to bring technology to Iraq. We thought, what better way to do that than bring Eric Schmidt here?” A part of the collection has already been digitized by the by Italy’s National Research Center but where not extensive enough. It is also reported that Mr. Schmidt arrived in an conveys or armored suburbans, helicopter cover and snipers on roof tops. The images should be available by early next y...