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 is abuzz with the rumor that Black Sabbath will be reuniting to create another album. Tony Iommi has put to rest these rumors that have been circulating on the internet and on Twitter. Tony says that he had spoken to a journalist in the month of June and the same journalist prints a story in the Birmingham Mail as though the conversation happened just a day ago. This is his statement that puts an end to any other conclusion "I'm saddened that a Birmingham journalist whom I trusted has chosen this point in time to take a conversation we had back in June and make it sound like we spoke yesterday about a BLACK SABBATH reunion. "At the time I was supporting the Home Of Metal exhibition was merely speculating shooting the breeze on something all of us get asked constantly, 'Are you getting back together?' "Thanks to the Internet it's now gone round the world as some sort of 'official' statement on my part; absolute nonsense. I hope he's e...