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...
T witter is already trending with the news of the earthquake that has hit Northern Illinois. News of the earthquake is spreading faster on Twitter than on traditional news channels. News of the earthquake has sent feelings of shock and fear to some users but there are no reports of any damage. Magnitude 4 is now trending at the number 3 spot and will rise to number 1 in a short while as news of the earthquake spreads. The U.S. Geological Survey has reported an earthquake shook the area near Dekalb, IL at 4:59:34 EST Wednesday morning. According to the government website , the magnitude was 4.3 and took place 4 miles WNW of Virgil, IL, 5 miles E of Sycamore, IL, 5 miles N of Maple Park, IL, 8 miles ENE of DeKalb, IL, and 48 miles from Chicago. According to USGS, "a magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 60 miles from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually c...