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...
A user tweeted about a snowball fight in Washington D.C. and a crowd arrives and begin to enjoy themselves, in the melee threw a few snowballs on passing vehicles. Passing by is an under cover cop driving a hummer. A few of the snowballs make contact with his vehicle. Out jumps the cop pulling his gun to stop the fight. Cops admit to pulling the gun because as one of the cops says he got hit with a snowball. The second video is the longer one and clearly shows the cop with the gun in his left hand. When backup arrives another cop with a gun because he things someone else in crowd has a gun. This was a Twitter crowd and sure enough the tech savvy got the videos and the pics. Take a look and decide for yourself... An original post by Sociolatte