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...
"Malaysian tycoon Vincent Tan announced a deal to buy Friendster, a social networking site that still retains a strong following in Southeast Asia after losing in global popularity to Facebook and MySpace. Tan's online payment systems business will buy 100 percent of Friendster through an affiliate company, according to a joint statement Thursday." "Malaysian-based payment on line company MOL Global's purchase of social networking site Friendster has won praises from industry observers." The website that has mostly been forgotten around the world is till quiet popular in Southeast Asia. Friendster has 115 million members strong. " On one hand, Friendster investors are lucky the service is popular enough with Asian teenagers for the sale to happen at all, considering users elsewhere moved on to MySpace, then Facebook and Twitter. On the other, as All Things Digital points out, if then-white-hot Friendster had sold to Google in 2003 for $30 million i...