Liberia is getting $124 million and longer US visas in exchange for taking in 1,200 deportees who, as far as I can tell, mostly have nothing to do with Liberia. Twenty of them landed in Monrovia yesterday, the first batch. The information minister said the rest will include Africans, sure, but also people from North America, South America, the Caribbean. A country of about five million, agreeing to absorb whoever a much richer country doesn’t want inside its own borders, for a fee. I keep noticing this shape recur. Rwanda did a version of it for the UK a couple of years back before that arrangement quietly died, and each time it gets described as bilateral cooperation rather than what it plainly is: renting out sovereignty as a place to put a problem. Nobody seems to ask whether Liberia wants to become somebody else’s waiting room. They ask what it costs, and the answer this time is $124 million and an extra two years on a visitor visa.

Spain did the opposite math this week. After insisting for a month that anyone who crossed illegally into Ceuta would be sent back, Madrid quietly reversed itself for 500 unaccompanied children, citing a duty of care written into Spanish law that survives even a government trying hard to look tough. Small number, real concession, no press conference, just a paragraph under the bigger story.

And then, no diplomacy at all: more than a hundred artisanal miners are now confirmed dead after a landslide buried a goldmine on the Central African Republic’s border with Cameroon. Second day running it’s shown up as a single paragraph. No summit, no envoy, no fund. Some tragedies just don’t have anyone whose job it is to respond.

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