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...
Amazon has announced that it will add two new features that would make it's Kindle e-book reader more accessible to blind and vision-impaired suers. "Monday's announcement comes a month after Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y., and the University of Wisconsin-Madison said they would not consider widely deploying the device as an alternative to paper textbooks until Amazon makes it easier for blind students to use. Both universities bought some Kindles to test this fall." So with it's new feature of Text-To-Speech, Amazon will make it more vision-impaired friendly and stand by it's commitment to improving the device for the visualy challenged. "The update will be available during the "summer" of 2010 and was prompted by feedback from Amazon users. "The Kindle will have a read-aloud feature that could be advantageous to blind students and those with other disabilities including dyslexia, but getting to that point is a problem. T...