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 tradition started as far back as the 1940's has now come to an end. The famed toaster would arrive on the night on January 19 - the birth-date of Edgar Allen Poe and leave 3 red roses and a half empty bottle of cognac. he would be dressed on a black frock, black wide-rimmed hat and a white scarf. This has been happening at least from the 1940's and fans of the tradition would arrive to watch the spectacle. Poe House and Museum Curator Jeff Jerome said that die-hard fans waited hours past the arrival time of the toaster but he failed to show, thus ending a long tradition. Jerome also said that one tradition might have does but a new one might have started. With fans coming to the graveside monument to read tributes. The Grave is located at Baltimore's Westminster Hall and his wife, cousin and object of his literary ardor, Virginia, is placed near him as well. An original post by Sociolatte