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...
All URL shortening services. Google has launched it's own URL shortening service close on the heels of facebook launching it's service called FB.me. " Facebook launched the service without any fanfare, and was first uncovered by Inside Facebook on Monday. At the moment, it looks like any link you share using a mobile Facebook client will shorten a URL to FB.me , and you will also see fb.me URLs when you push out status updates or any other information from Facebook to Twitter." Here are three reasons why Google has launched Goo.le " 1. Security. Google said in a blog post by software engineers Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Ben D'Angelo and Devin Mullins that the service will automatically check each URL to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites. 2. Reputation. Google thinks that its household name will appeal to users who will find it reassuring that Google shortened these UR...