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Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (R) speaks next to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden during talks at a hotel in Beijing August 19, 2011.

REUTERS/Ng Han Guan/Pool

What We’re Watching: Biden-Xi on Zoom, Cuban protest, Duterte family drama, Qaddafi junior for prez, Steele Dossier skewered

US-China virtual summit. Joe Biden and Xi Jinping will meet face-to-face (virtually) on Monday for the first time since Biden became US president last January. The two have a lot to discuss: trade wars, the 2022 Beijing Olympics — which Biden won't attend, but probably won't boycott — and how to deliver on the joint US-China pledge on climate made at COP26. But the elephant in the Zoom room is Taiwan, an ultra-sensitive issue for China. Xi is seething at the Biden administration's recent public support for the self-governing island, which the Chinese regard as part of their own territory. The Americans insist they are simply doing what they've always done since 1979 — pledging to help Taiwan defend itself. Can Biden and Xi navigate these issues in a calm, cool way? It may help that the two leaders have known each other for more than a decade, when they were both VPs. With US-China relations getting chillier by the day, the stakes are high.

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany July 7, 2017.

REUTERS/Carlos Barria

What We're Watching: Steele Dossier skewered

US media trust wars. Remember the Steele Dossier? Yes, the oppo research on Donald Trump compiled by a former British spy that alleged Russia had kompromatleverage over the then-US presidential candidate. After Trump won the 2016 election, several media outlets openly hostile to Trump covered the unverified report — Buzzfeed even published it in full — to suggest that Russia helped get Trump elected. Trump and the GOP-friendly media blasted it as part of a liberal "witch hunt" to undermine his election victory. Well, in the past few days the dossier itself has been skewered after Igor Danchenko, the source of the report's most juicy claim — that Trump got Russian prostitutes to defile a bed Barack Obama slept on in a Moscow hotel — was indicted for lying to the FBI about it. The charges against Danchenko subsequently led the Washington Post to correct two old articles that cited the dossier, the basis for FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign now being probed by US attorney John Durham. Expect the scandal to dominate the US political conversation for weeks, and drive an even bigger media trust wedge between Democrats and Republicans.

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