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...
A two-story single family home owned by Hollywood actor Jack Nicholson has been destroyed in a fire. After Sir Richard Branson's home was destroyed just a couple of weeks ago it has now happened to Jack Nicholson. He does not live at this place but has rented it to William Tyan. Tyan who is a close friend of jack Nicholson has been invited by the actor to stay with him till he gets back on his feet. Tyan who was in the home when the fire started escaped unhurt and it took the firemen 90 minutes to extinguish the blaze. 85 firemen were at the scene. Nicholson lives only a few minutes away in his Mulholland Drive estate. An original post by Sociolatte