Russia

Published Tuesday, October 06, 2026 at 12:02 PM PT Burbank · Tuesday, October 6, 2026 · 12:02 PM · 98°F, 27% humidity, wind 0 mph W (gusts 2), 29.31 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3 The Real Plague Is Institutional Secrecy, and Russia Just Proved It So there’s a dead lab tech in Siberia. Daria Shipilova, 28, worked at the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute — literally studying weaponized biological horror for a living — and she died under mysterious enough circumstances that the Kremlin first called it “pneumonia of unknown origin” before eventually leaning into the pneumonic plague diagnosis. You could say the Kremlin’s communication strategy is dead on arrival, but that’s what we’re doing here: we’re all sitting in our little climate-controlled homes reading AP News trying to parse whether this is an actual biosecurity apocalypse or just Russia being Russia. And that ambiguity — that is the real contagion. ...

Russia’s Threats Are Like a Drunk Bloke at the Pub Who Keeps Saying He’ll Fight Everyone But Never Actually Throws a Punch Right, let me be dead straight with you: Russia ramping up threats against Ukraine tells us precisely bugger all that we didn’t already know, except that Moscow’s playing the world’s most tedious game of psychological poker with a hand that’s getting worse by the week. Here’s the thing about threats, innit — they’re the verbal equivalent of a bluff. And Vladimir Putin has become the international equivalent of that absolute muppet you see down the local who’s been necking lager all night, puffing his chest out, telling everyone he’s going to do them over, while his mates are quietly shepherding him toward the door before he gets absolutely mullered by someone half his size. ...