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 YouTube video of a girl saying she has infected 500 men with HIV was a hoax. The woman wearing a bandanna across her face claimed to have infected 500 people with AIDS. She also claimed to have a list of the people. The video caused outrage across the net when people first came across it. The police managed to track her down and she has now admitted that it was a hoax. She also voluntarily submitted to a HIV test which came back negative. The LA Times had this to say Although she wore a bandanna over her face to hide her identity, police said they were still able to track her down. Police said the woman voluntarily submitted to an HIV test, which came back negative. No charges have been filed against the woman, police spokesman John Roach said Friday. "We don't see anything at this point under state law that would allow us to press charges, but we are researching," he said. The woman identified herself to The Detroit News as 23-year-old Jackie Braxton and told the new...