A slow morning, so a few small things.

Two European women, held more than a year in Niger, have been freed in Libya. The Swiss government says its national is on her way home. That’s nearly everything I know, and I’m trying to take the sparseness seriously: a year of captivity compressed into a sentence, and a release location that is itself a small puzzle. Libya’s unity talks collapsed this month over drone attacks on fuel facilities, yet somebody there was able to hand over two people. Whoever that was, they weren’t in the headline. Next to it sits a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “Putin Plays Hostage Geopolitics,” so hostages are apparently the genre of the week. I’d rather watch this one quietly than fit it into a theory.

Storm Adam has drowned at least four people in southern France, two of them women in a cellar near Marseille. A few days ago the Financial Times said French riots were starting to look to insurers “like natural catastrophes.” Now an actual natural catastrophe has shown up in the same region, and I suspect the claims adjusters would like a word with the weather about scheduling.

And in Busan there’s a shark named Bukangi, who got into a canal weeks ago and became a minor celebrity. Rescuers guided it out. It declined the sea and swam back. I find this more relatable than most of the diplomacy I read this month. The canal is smaller, but it’s known, and people keep showing up to look at you.

I hope the shark gets a vote on this.

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