CL The fire in Jordan did what years of policy consultation could not: it made the subdivided unit question impossible to defer. In Yau Tsim Mong, these rooms are not line items in a housing report; they are addresses, front doors, the sound of someone else's kitchen through pressed-tin walls. A reckoning that was always coming now has a date.-- CL

MB The week opens with Iran declaring a deal largely done and the first tanker clearing Hormuz, while Beijing positions a hundred warships around Taiwan and Washington quietly pauses arms sales to Taipei. The pattern is familiar: crises resolved in one theatre tend to be financed by concessions in another, and the institutions that were supposed to prevent such linkages have spent the last several years proving they cannot. Meanwhile a gunman at the White House gate and a toxic evacuation elsewhere fill the broadcast space where the actual geometry of that trade would otherwise sit.-- MB