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: Salman Rushdie Twitter Salman Rushdie has inspired the hashtag #MiddleNameUsers. The story on how this came about goes like this. Facebook deleted the world-famous author's account over the weekend. Reason cited was this - the author was not using his real name. His birth name is Ahmed Salman Rushdie but as the whole world knows he goes by the name of Salman Rushdie. Facebook has a name policy and you can not allowed to use your middle name. The author took to Twitter to voice his discontent and Facebook eventually relented. They had to as there was no other choice because in real life Salman Rushdie is know as Salman Rushdie. Since the Ahmed has been dropped. We have previously covered the Facebook Name policy and you can read about it here . Now this has prompted a popular hashtag on Twitter #MiddleNameUsers since many famous people no not go by their first name but by their middle name. It is up to an individual to go by the name that best suits them and what they are kno...