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 teenage boy has been charged with the murder of an 18 year old. Apparently triggered over Facebook postings. Salum Kombo was found dead with stab wounds on Sunday, with friends saying he was targeted after posting a message on the page of another boy who was not invited to a party. The police said the 15 year old boy was from Bow, East London and is appear at The Thames Magistrate Court. Mr Kombo was was studying art at the Tower Hamlets college and was discovered bleeding by a passer-by around 6:40 PM Passer-by Gary Byrne , 46, held the teenager in his arms as 'the life drained out of him'. 'We saw the kid lying on the ground with a crowd of young boys standing around him,' he told The Sun. 'I pulled up and got out of the car. When I went over there was another guy trying to stem the flow of blood. 'I was speaking to the ambulance while holding his head and trying to talk to him, trying to keep him awake. His eyes were flickering and I could see the life d...