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...
W hat is the BlackBerry BlackPad? Research In Motion (RIM) makers of the popular BalckBerry Smartphone, plan to introduce a new tablet computer similar to the iPad. This according to Bloomberg . The new Blackpad is reported to be similar in size to the iPad, would include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and allow tethering to BlackBerrys. An addition to this new device would be a front facing camera, something not found in the iPad. There is no official statement to this effect from the company. So how much truth there is to this story remains to be seen. RIM is stepping up its competition with Apple on multiple fronts. The company is hosting an event in New York Aug. 3 at which it will debut its BlackBerry 9800 slider phone, according to one person familiar with its plans. The device will feature a full touchscreen like Apple’s iPhone and a slideout Qwerty keyboard to allow for easy e-mail typing, the person said. It has also been reported that RIM has taken over the domain Blackpad.com. So if...