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 is working on a new services that combines stories published in The New York Times and Washington post to make it easier for readers to follow evolving news stories. "The "Living Stories" project introduced Tuesday marks Google Inc.'s latest attempt to frame itself as an ally of the ailing newspaper industry " Google will now build stories based on importance and this may in some way help the ailing newspaper industry. The concept of grouping articles by topic isn't new . Yahoo came up with its version, called Yahoo News Topics , two years ago. Here's Yahoo's page on " Google ," for example. What's different is that Google sees publishers using Living Stories on their own websites, not just on Google. Here's an example from the Times of what a page about the war in Afghanistan looks like. So with this Living Stories will help categorize a list of ongoing stories on a single page. Which in turn will help users follow u...