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 Santa nears North America Norad will be tracking his progress. The North American Aerospace Defense follows Santa each year. Using Radar and other technology to track his progress and report it on the world wide web. This year they can also check out Santa's village and see how well the elves are getting on with making presents. Norad volunteers are on hand on Christmas Eve to answer e-mails about Father Christmas's journey at noradtrackssanta@gmail.com. Norad is a military organisation that is responsible for the aerospace and maritime defence of the US and Canada. The tradition of tracking Father Christmas goes back to a misprint in a Colorado newspaper advertisement in 1955. The hotline to Santa promised by the paper actually connected to what was known then as the Continental Air Defense Command (Conad). As more phone calls came in, the commander on the other end of the phone started to pretend he was Santa and the tradition continued in 1958 when Conad became Norad. ...