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...
The Australian government has announced compulsory internet filtering. Rejecting arguments that it will trifle free speech. " Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said new laws would be introduced to ban access to " refused classification " (RC) sites featuring criminal content such as child sex abuse, bestiality, rape and detailed drug use." " Under the Chinese-style system, Internet service providers (ISPs) in the country would be legally obliged to filter out banned material . The move would mean more than 1,300 sites that show child pornography, bestiality, sexual violence or give instructions about committing crime would be blocked. The government says such a system would help protect people, especially children, from harmful material found online. Telstra Australia's leading Internet Service Provider had this to say . " Telstra, Australia's largest Internet service provider, said blacklisting ...