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...
A Louisiana man who bet against New Orleans Saints, has lost his 60-inch-high-definition TV to a firing squad. which has also made him an internet star. "Wayne A. Spring told his friends that if New Orleans beat the Washington Redskins on Sunday, anyone who wanted could come to his house and shoot his television . "I was a Saints fan, but used to be they never could win and I admit I was a fair-weather fan," Spring said on Thursday. "And there was all that 'Who-Datting' going on, online, so I just decided to go against the grain." Things were looking good until the Saints tied the game and sent it into overtime. As every football fan knows by now, the Saints tied the game and sent it into overtime before kicking the game-winning field goal. About a dozen Saints fans , toting firearms and a case of beer, showed up at Spring's home in Albany, some 50 miles northwest of New Orleans, and shot up his TV in the back yard. Spring put the video on YouTub...