President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping sat across from each other in the Great Hall of the People on Thursday morning, opening a two-day summit that both governments are calling the most consequential meeting between the two leaders since Trump’s first visit to Beijing in November 2017.
Trump said the relationship between the two countries is going to be “better than ever before,” CNBC reported. Xi responded with a question. “Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations?” he asked, according to CNBC. “Currently, a transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe, and the international situation is fluid and turbulent.”
The Thucydides Trap is a framework from Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, who in his 2017 book Destined for War traced the pattern that Thucydides identified twenty-four hundred years ago: when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, the result is often conflict. Thucydides wrote that it was the rise of Athens, and the fear that rise inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable. Allison studied sixteen cases over five hundred years in which a rising power confronted a ruling power. Twelve ended in war. Four didn’t.
Xi also warned that Taiwan remained “the most important and sensitive issue” in the relationship, and that mishandling it would push the two countries toward a “dangerous” place, CNN reported. Trade, artificial intelligence, rare earths, and Iran are all on the two-day agenda.
The summit opened against a backdrop that neither delegation is likely to discuss on camera. A confidential U.S. intelligence assessment, reported by the Washington Post on Tuesday, found that China has been exploiting the war in Iran to maximize its advantage over the United States across military, economic, and diplomatic fields. The report was prepared for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Among the findings: China has closely studied American military operations in Iran in anticipation of a possible conflict over Taiwan. It has sold weapons to U.S.-allied Gulf states struggling to defend their bases from Iranian missile and drone attacks. And it has woven criticism of the war into its public messaging, labeling the conflict “illegal.” The war, which began February 28, has cost $29 billion so far, Pentagon officials told Congress this week. The country on the other side of the table in Beijing has been watching all of it.
The South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously overturned Alex Murdaugh’s double murder conviction on Wednesday and ordered a new trial, NBC News reported.
Murdaugh was convicted in March 2023 of killing his wife, Maggie, and their son, Paul, at the family’s hunting estate in Colleton County in June 2021. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. The televised trial drew a national audience.
The court found that Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca “Becky” Hill interfered with the jury, steering jurors toward a guilty verdict by suggesting they couldn’t trust Murdaugh’s testimony. “The breathtaking and disgraceful effort of Hill to undermine the jury process is unprecedented in South Carolina,” the justices wrote in a twenty-seven-page unsigned opinion. Hill “placed her fingers on the scales of justice,” they wrote, “thereby denying Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury.” Hill pleaded guilty to related charges in December 2025 and was sentenced to three years of probation.
Murdaugh won’t walk free. He separately pleaded guilty to dozens of financial crimes and is serving concurrent state and federal sentences of twenty-seven and forty years. Prosecutors said they intend to retry him on the murder charges.
Lebanon and Israel begin a third round of peace talks in Washington on Thursday, with the current ceasefire approaching its expiration, Arab News reported.
Lebanon’s delegation is led by special envoy Simon Karam. Israel’s includes its ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter. The last round took place April 23 at the White House, where Trump announced a three-week ceasefire extension and expressed optimism about a permanent agreement. The State Department said the talks “aim to break decisively from the failed approach of the past two decades,” according to Arab News. The war in Lebanon, which began March 2, has killed more than 2,800 people. The ceasefire is holding. Whether it holds past this week is part of what Thursday’s talks are meant to settle.
Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, California, resigned Sunday and will plead guilty to one count of acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government, CNN reported. Wang admitted that from 2020 through 2022 she coordinated with U.S.-based contacts to run a website that published content directed by Chinese government officials, presenting it as independent news for Chinese Americans. She didn’t register as a foreign agent, as federal law requires. The charge carries a maximum sentence of ten years.
The Senate Banking Committee meets Thursday morning to mark up the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, a 309-page bill that represents Congress’s first comprehensive attempt to write federal rules for cryptocurrency, CoinDesk reported.
More than a hundred amendments have been filed. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said the bill won’t advance without an ethics provision. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, whose vote the Republican majority needs on the thirteen-to-eleven committee, remains uncommitted, CryptoTimes reported. The House passed its version with 294 votes in July 2025. The Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934, which still govern most of what Americans call the stock market, took two years of hearings and another two decades of case law before the regulatory framework settled. Thursday’s markup is the beginning of a similar process, not the end.
It is Thursday. Two presidents sat in Beijing and one quoted Thucydides. A classified report says China has been gaining while America has been spending. A California mayor admitted she worked for the Chinese government. In South Carolina, a court clerk’s misconduct overturned a murder verdict. In Washington, Lebanon and Israel sent delegations to talk about whether the shooting stops, and a Senate committee opened the first bill that would write federal rules for cryptocurrency. That’s the day.
