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...
On Monday the Lahore court in Pakistan barred the deportation of 5 Americans until judges review the case. A Taliban recruiter first made contact with the 5 young men after one of them " Ahmed Abdullah Minn" posted comments on YouTube videos praising attacks on American troops. These YouTube postings were a regular feature which led the Taliban recruiter Saifullah to contact Minni. "On Monday, the Lahore High Court barred the government from deporting the five Americans until judges review the case . The court gave the Punjab authorities until December 17 to provide a detailed report on the arrests." The way Minni and the terrorist shared messages was to leave draft messages on a shared yahoo account. They reason that this would reduce the chances of an intercept by authorities. " The men traveled overseas without telling their families, triggering an international manhunt after concerned relatives contacted the FBI . The five – Ramy Zamzam , 22; Ahmad M...