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...
India is launching what it's calling the world's cheapest tablet computer. Called 'Aakash' meaning Sky the tab will be sold at a subsided cost to students for $35 and later be sold in retails stores for $45. One of the chief uses of the device will be to help eradicate poverty in villages in India. It is being manufactured in India by Datawind a UK based manufacturing company. The tablet has been jointly developed by DataWind and Indian Institute of Technology - Rajasthan. The Tablet uses Google Android and uses resistive LCD display rather that full touchscreen. Future versions would include a cell phone connection as well. The device actually costs nearly $50 – the government is paying 2,250 rupees each for the first 100,000 batch of them. Previously referred to as the Sakshat tablet, it’s now being called “Aakash,” or “sky.” This will go a long way in helping the rural poor because of the device's simplicity and portability. it can reach people in remote village...