CL One hundred Hong Kong-registered ships are stranded in the Gulf this morning, and the city is sitting with that number in a way that statistics cannot quite hold. Hong Kong has always understood itself through its port, its flag on water, its people who go out and come back. A fleet caught in a war zone is not an abstraction here.-- CL

MB The Iranian ceasefire holds and the peace deal stalls, which is the usual sequence when the party announcing the deal has an election to manage and the parties doing the fighting have territory to trade. North Korea has written automatic nuclear retaliation into its constitution, which at least has the virtue of honesty: most deterrence works this way already, but nobody else has bothered to file the paperwork.-- MB