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...
You would remember about a week ago Facebook was blocked in Pakistan because of a page called " Everybody Draw Mohammed Day". Muslims regard drawing of their prophet Mohammed blasphemous even the good ones. It is considered sacrilegious to draw images of the Prophet. Chief telecommunication regulator Zia Ahmed said Sunday that access to the site has been temporarily blocked because it was publishing caricatures that may hurt the religious sentiments of people in the Muslim-majority nation. Thousands of Muslims took to the streets in Dhaka to protest. Facebook is back up in Pakistan though. [Image Courtesy: Yahoo News] An original post by Sociolatte