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...
Twitter Guide : Learn some interesting tips and tricks for Twitter. Q: Can I respond directly to someone’s tweet? What’s the difference between an @reply and a direct message? A: You can respond to people one of two ways: with direct messages, which are private, 140-character exchanges, or with @replies, which are publicly viewable. You can send a ‘@reply’ by simply adding the ‘@’ symbol and the particular user’s name to the beginning of your message (example: “@switched: I really liked that article on Twitter!”). These @replies are ideal for furthering a public dialogue. On the other hand, direct messages, which you can send by clicking ‘Direct Messages’ in the Web site’s right-hand bar (or by preceding a text message with ‘d’ and the user name), are better for things you want to say to an individual, rather than the whole ‘Twitterverse.’ Q: What is ReTweeting? A: ReTweets are re-posted updates that give credit to the originator of the message. In other words, you’re simply cuttin...