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...
Ivy Bean the world's older social networker has died at the age of 104. She embraced Facebook at the ripe old age of 102 and has since become a sensation around Social Networking sites. She has 56,566 followers on Twitter and counts Peter Andre among her star followers. During her Star Twitter career she was also invited to meet the Prime Minister, Gordon Browne at 10, Downing Street. She tweeted that she used the private toilet in Mr Brown's study. She is now on the Trending at No.1 on Twitter and this comes as no surprise to anyone. Tweeps are offering their condolences and sharing news about her death. The Manager of the care-home where Ivy has been in for the last few weeks since she became unwell. Came on her Twitter account to announce the sad news. "Hello all of ivys twitter friend by now you will have heard about our daer friend she i cannot explain how we are all feeling here ivy passed away peacefully at 12.08 this morning Im sorry it took me so long to tell you...