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...
According to the LA Times there were two other incidents of incited violence against redheads from the school at Calabasas. This brings the total to three students who suffered violence as a direct result of a message posted on a facebook group. The message said that Friday was "Kick A Ginger Day" and redheads were targeted. This FB group is based on a 2005 episode of "South Park" "Ginger" is a label given to people with red hair, freckles and fair skin. No arrests have been made as these are not being considered as hate crimes. FB on the other hand said that they rely on users reporting content that is not appropriate and this group not the message was reported. "Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said the network relies on its more than 300 million users to report problems with groups or events. Staff members then follow up to see if groups should be removed or reported to law enforcement, he said. Schnitt said he had not been made aware of this speci...