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...
The Spat between Nokia and Apple has just moved to a new level the International Trade Commission (ITC) in the US. Nokia has said that Apple infringes virtually in all its patents with respect to Mobile phones, Portable music players and computer sold. Nokia is now asking the ITC to do something about it. Nokia has sued Apple in October over 10 patents the said the company had infringed upon. Apple in reply counter sued them over 13 patent infringements and also anti-competitive charges. If Nokia prevails it could be a real dampener for Apple as the US ITC could ask them to stop importing their toys from China. Where all Apple products these days are made. Normally what happens in cases like these is that both companies would come to a compromise and allow each other to use the other's patents to a large extent. Nokia is going ahead with it's complaint even after bing counter sued by Apple saying that the counter suit did not change anything fundamental in it's own course. ...