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...
If you have logged in to Facebook today you will notice that the old chat window is gone and in its place is a new sidebar. The chat window was a small application from which you used to chat with all your friends and could be collapsible. It works the same as the old window but with a few changes. In the new sidebar you are also able to see the friends you most interact with using messages etc. With the sidebar you can quickly message friends and if a friend is not available to chat you can type in their name and send them a message. When you send a message through the chat window, two things happen, they are sent a message and as soon as they login to Facebook there is already a chat window open with your message. There is no way they are going to miss your message. This new bar is being rolled out to everyone and there are a few changes to your chat list, you are unable to see your old chat lists since Facebook populates your sidebar dynamically, however to limit visibility you can ...