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...
We had reported 24 hours ago that AT&T had stopped selling iPhone in most parts of New York on their online site. Apparently it has resumed sales and act as though nothing ever happened. This is something they might have learned from Apple. Some bloggers have felt that AT&T was unable to handle traffic in high density areas which other speculated it might have happened due to some minor glitch which has since worked itself out. Whatever maybe the case consumers in New York can now order the iPhone online from AT&T. Northrup told NPR whatever the cause, it doesn't look good for AT&T: From a PR standpoint, it makes them look bad that they've just quietly cut off sales without making an announcement. If they had announced this and said this is why we're remitting iPhone sales in the New York metro area, I think people would still be annoyed, but at least they'd understand why, and at least there'd be a straight answer from AT&T as to why this is. An...