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 Facebook book campaign started at the grassroots level and led to the humbling of Simon Cowell by deniying one of his new acts the No 1. Christmas spot. The Facebook campaign was organized by an English couple Jon and Tracy Morter in a concerted effort to break Cowell's recent stranglehold on the holiday No. 1 song, a traditional source of status and bragging rights inside Britain. "Rage Against the Machine was built for moments like this," the band's guitarist Tom Morello told The Associated Press . "We are honored to have the song that liberated the U.K. pop chart." Fed up with Simon and his cookie-cutter approach to stardom the English couple launched their Facebook campaign which has 1 million members. The group has delivered the blow that many were hoping to a bland sort of pop music which Xfactor always managed to push to the top of the charts every Xmas season. The Sydney Morning Herald had said. Killing in the Name, an expletive-heavy rock song f...