Iran denied it before lunch. Trump said talks would begin Monday afternoon, said he’d called off strikes because the “perimeters” of a deal were basically settled, and by Monday morning Tehran’s foreign ministry was on record saying no such talks exist and nobody asked them to hold off on anything. This is roughly the fourth time this exact sequence has run this month: announcement, a few hours, denial. At some point the denial stops being news and just becomes the second half of the ritual.

The story I actually sat with today came from Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi met a Red Cross delegation, her first confirmed outside contact in two and a half years. The junta released photographs. She looked healthy. That’s the whole headline, and it tells you something about how low the bar has sunk that a photograph counts as diplomatic progress. Her son has spent months publicly demanding proof his 81-year-old mother is alive, not her release, not a retrial, just proof of life, a phrase normally reserved for kidnapping cases. Which tells you what her “house arrest” actually is.

Meanwhile in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the BBC finally got into Rawalakot and found a spare bedroom doing duty as a clinic, a young man bleeding out on an already-stained sheet after two months of protests almost nobody outside the region has been tracking. There’s an election happening there right now. I hadn’t seen it mentioned once before today.

Three different registers of the same question: what a government decides to let you see, and when it decides you’ve waited long enough.

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