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...
As the debat over pricing of e-books heats up. There are now three major publishing houses delaying the realase of e-books set to realease early next year. "In an interview, Brian Murray, chief executive of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers , said that beginning in January or February, HarperCollins will delay the e-book publication of five to 10 new hardcover titles each month. The delays are expected to range from four weeks to six months, depending on the book." " On Tuesday, CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster publishing arm said it would delay the e-book publication of an estimated 35 adult and teen titles that it will publish through April 2010. The e-book editions will be delayed for four months. Similarly, Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, which publishes such writers as Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson, said it intends to delay the e-book publication of many titles in 2010 for three to four months." " Simon & Schuster announced ...