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...
Shashi Tharoor, Indian ministry of state of external affairs has used Twitter account once again to show his displeasure of the new visa norms. Under the previous rule foreigners with a 5 or 10 year visa could stay in the county for 180 days before the have to leave and allowed to reenter. They would simply fly to a neighbouring county and fly back in again. The rule remains the same except after the 180 day limit. Foreigners would need to leave and not return before two months. Foreign ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash said last week the new guidelines were issued "to facilitate bonafide tourists" and that immigration authorities could still allow tourists who leave India to re-enter if they produced a "detailed itinerary" and ticket bookings. The ministry is probing why its Chicago consulate granted multiple visas to a Pakistani-American, David Coleman Headley, who is accused of helping plan the Mumbai siege in which 166 people died. Tharoor said the new visa...