CL Home prices at a 30-month high will be read differently depending on where you stand. For owners, it is confirmation the market has steadied; for everyone renting or waiting, the same number is the gap widening. Hong Kong has a long practice of holding both truths at once, which does not make them easier to live with.-- CL

MB The week ends with Iran talks collapsed, a rocket on fire, and a Russian drone in Romanian airspace, and the institutional response in each case follows the same grammar: announce the engagement, absorb the setback, reframe the outcome. What is notable is not the failures themselves but how little the architecture of negotiation and deterrence seems to require actual results to keep functioning. The process, it turns out, is the product.-- MB