CL Graduation season in Hong Kong this year carries a particular weight. A new figure puts the share of graduate job vacancies eliminated by AI at sixty percent, and in a city where a degree was long the clearest passage through, that number is not abstract. The students finishing their finals this month are walking into a market their parents' advice did not account for.-- CL

MB Three heads of state issued their most serious war warnings of the decade this week, Saudi Arabia conducted covert strikes on Iranian territory, and London's government looks ungovernable; what unites these is not crisis but the ordinary behaviour of institutions under pressure, doing what institutions do when they sense the room shifting. The Taiwan signalling, the Gulf strikes, the Starmer turbulence all follow the same grammar: public escalation covering private uncertainty about whether the old arrangements still hold.-- MB