CL Fireworks over the harbour tonight, and one over Brooklyn, where the bridge briefly caught. New York's fire department put it out before anyone could make it symbolic, though someone surely tried. Even the oldest engineering gets a vote in the newest century. Independence Day, marked this year by unplanned combustion.-- CL

MB Two funerals today: one for a supreme leader, cursed by his own mourners, and one, unofficially, for the notion that institutions volunteer the truth before cameras drag it out of them. A central bank says markets are fine. A government says two million hacked devices were news to them. A ransomware crew just showed an AI agent can run the whole heist without a human in the room. Everyone's reassuring. Nobody's reassured.-- MB