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...
Google has released its annual 2009 Year-End Google Zeitgeist . An annual report which features the most popular search terms. "Michal Jackson" the late king of pop was the top search term. Bing had also shown MJ as it's top search term.. PCMAG.com also observed that: "Interestingly, two non-English social networks, Tuenti from Spain and Sanalika from Turkey filled out the top five at numbers three and five. Also in the top ten were searches for the new Twilight film, New Moon ; Windows 7; and Lady Gaga, plus "torpedo gratis," a Portuguese Web-based service to send SMS messages." MJ was followed by Facebook, tunti and Twitter respectively. Shows that social networking is on the top of people's interest online. New Moon also made it into the top ten. Among the top ten falling search terms is Beijing 2009 and Barack Obama. An original post by Sociolatte