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...
Five major publishers have announced they plan to join forces to develop an online storefront for their content. As more and more readers cancel their subscriptions to read stories online. Major publishing houses have needed to come up with ways to attract and retain the modern audience who has begun to spend more and more time online. Looking for and gathering information. "Five major publishers -- Conde Nast Publications, Hearst Corp., Meredith Corp., News Corp. and Time Inc. -- announced Tuesday they will join forces to develop an online storefront to rival Amazon.com Inc" They also hope to create software for devices that do not exist. Cell phones that are highly advanced compared to anything available right now in the market. e-readers that are more sophisticated that today's mostly black and white readers. The venture has still not been named but its outlines are visible. It was originally thought to be an online store to sell magazines but we now see that the f...