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...
Image Credit: DigitialTrends After the SOPA fiasco where the internet stood still for a day the US congress now wants to push ahead with a bill Called CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act). This bill like SOPA is causing quiet a stir online. With techdirt stating that 'With this bill the Government is saying that the 4th amendment does not exist for people online. And as long as the US Government can claim that an individual committed a cyber security crime they can do whatever they want with information collected from an someone's online activity. In a Q&A article Cnet goes on to describe this bill as a way for the US government to spy on its own citizens. it would give the Gov the right to monitor Social Networks and more than that even Internet Service providers. Which would essentially give them the power to monitor all activity of everyone online in the US. The national.ae also goes on to report that the bill has the support of Facebook and Goog...