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...
Members of the American dialect society have voted and chosen two words. One will be the word of 2009 and the other the word of the decade. The results: 'tweet' word of 2009 and 'google' is the word of the decade. Tweet used as a noun is a short message sent via the social networking service Twitter.com. Tweet used as a verb is the act of sending such a message. Google used as a verb means the act of searching the Internet and derives from "Google," the U.S. corporation specializing in Internet search. "It's hard to imagine life before we were Googling," American Dialect Society executive councilmember Ben Zimmer tells CBSNews.com . In the end, "Google" beat out five formidable finalists for Word of the Decade: "9/11," "green," "blog," "text" and "war on terror." (The ADS deemed "tweet" top word for 2009.) Zimmer notes that way back in 2002 (when "weapons of mass destruc...