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...
YouTube has gone through a complete redesign with a view to keep all of us watching longer. There is also a lot more interactivity and sharing options. Most of what you used to see on the left of the video has now been moved below the video. You can also share a video now with a single click on Facebook. Twitter, Myspace, Orkut, StumbleUpon, LiveSpaces, Hi5 And Bebo. You can also share by email. For those of you who use the embedding options which used to be on the right. It is now found below the video. With regards to user comments. The comment with the highest rating is now featured prominently above all the other comments. Additional information about the video is also consolidated below the video. This is a very subtle change but noticeable for long time YouTube users. You will no more see the five stars rating system on YouTube. You now have only two buttons like with a thumbs up and another button with a thumbs down. The logic being that when the five stars were around people st...