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...
Iranian protesters use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to spread live updates. On Sunday when the second wave of protesters hit the streets. Photos and videos of live updates were uploaded to social networking sites and the updates kept coming. Taking citizen journalism to a whole new level. With western and world news bureaus unable to operate out of Tehran. The onus fell on it's own citizens to keep the world updated on what's going on. The associated pres also mentioned that cell phone use and text messages services were restricted within Iran. Images posted on Twitter and Facebook or other sites have had to be blurred to protect people from the government who would crack down on them. Bloggers have also taken up the task of spreading news about the conflict. An original post by Sociolatte