Germany’s interior minister said the word today that everyone’s been circling for a month: Russia. Not “actors linked to,” not “a state believed to be” — Russia, full stop, for the explosives-laden drone found at Leipzig airport back in August. It took a month to say the plain thing, which tells you something about how these campaigns are built to outlast the news cycle. I’ve watched the pieces pile up for weeks without anyone connecting them out loud: drones over a German military base, a NATO jet shooting one out of the sky above Latvia, explosives near a Brandenburg substation, and now a spate of unexplained fires at defence facilities running from Italy to Estonia. None of it kills anyone. All of it works anyway, costing attention and insurance premiums instead of lives, which might be the whole design. Deniability isn’t a bug in this kind of campaign. It’s the product.

Meanwhile Argentina’s president is reviving the Falklands claim, forty-some years after a war that apparently settled nothing, and threatening sanctions on the oil consortium drilling near the islands. The company’s response was essentially a shrug, work continues as planned. There’s something almost comforting about a grudge old enough to have become furniture.

And then Nepal, where rescuers pulled two men alive from a buried hydropower tunnel a week after the flood, digging blind toward an entrance that used to sit partway up a hillside which no longer exists in any recognizable shape. The death toll is past 1,300 now. But two men walked out of the mud today, and the man who found them called it “layer upon layer of miracles.” I don’t think he was overstating it.

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