Like, I imagine, pretty much all Italians, this column is at a loss as to how to make sense of the case that has been unsettling and worrying the country for the past two days: the bomb scares at schools. What are we to make of it? The threats from “Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan” are objectively ridiculous as well as delusional. And yet they have also reached schools in Scotland and Ireland, which would suggest some form of international coordination. And yet in those countries the alarm was much less widespread, and very few schools were evacuated. And yet there have been bomb scares on aeroplanes, and the case of the hacked fridges. And yet they could all be red herrings. And yet, and yet....
In short, this is certainly not the place to look for clues to solve the case: for updates and developments, you can of course follow repubblica.it. What I can do here is explore its more marginal – and, if possible, even more surreal – aspects. For example, you may have read that, in order to send his threatening emails, the mysterious Andropov allegedly hacked into the accounts of a number of unsuspecting people plucked from the four corners of the globe, all linked to educational institutions (perhaps because school and university servers are easier to breach). These included a former student at Dayeh University in Taiwan (see the location in the screenshot above), a professor at a university in Islamabad, Pakistan, a teacher from Batangas City and two Filipino teachers, one from Batangas City and one from Lupon Vocational High School. Here it is below, on the Google Maps screenshot, this vocational school (which is more or less the translation of vocational), with its pupils who, even today, will have walked into their classrooms completely unaware of the chaos unleashed more than 11,000 kilometres away by an email sent from a hacked account at their school.
Just as I was completely unaware of the existence of Lupon, a town of 60,000 inhabitants in the province of Davao Oriental, on the island of Mindanao, in the far south-west of the archipelago. And yet, at first glance, it seems quite an interesting place. The English Wikipedia page, clearly written by a local contributor, contains a sort of outpouring: the area, once inhabited by the Mandaya people, was gradually colonised by Christian and Muslim populations from the northernmost islands of the Philippines, who took possession of the land and other resources. Even today, the descendants of the settlers discriminate against and insult the Mandaya.
But it is from the sparse ‘Lupon’ entry on the Italian Wikipedia that the most literary piece of news emerges: ‘Lord James Brooke, Raja of Sarawak and Governor of Labuan, purchased it in April 1861 from the Sultan of Brunei, Saifuddin II, incorporating it into his own realm of Sarawak’. Now, James Brooke is a historical figure but also Sandokan’s arch-enemy in Salgari’s novels and the series adapted from them (in the 1976 version, he was played by Adolfo Celi). And so the utterly villainous but non-existent Brooke is superimposed onto the utterly villainous and who-knows-how-real Mikhail Andropov, the real Lupon onto the bogus Misoginistan, and the confusion between reality and hoax – a toxic by-product of these days and these years of hybrid warfare or the strategy of digital tension – becomes even more pervasive.
From the ‘Finally, it’s Friday’ newsletter of 13 November 2026. Click here to subscribe – it’s free