Shooting at the entrance to Aracinovo: the gunman knew the victim

Around 1:50 last night, shots were fired from a vehicle at a 48-year-old Skopje man at the entrance to Aracinovo. The wounded man is Aziz Murati, a singer of Albanian folk music, and his condition is described as stable. The detail that lifts this story out of the routine police statement is a single one: the man who fired knew him. Not a stranger, not a robbery. The Interior Ministry announced it is taking measures to clear up the case, which is the same sentence we read after every shooting in this country. The question is not whether it will be said, but how many such cases actually reach an ending.

34 fires in 24 hours, and the warning puts out none of them

Thirty-four open-air fires in a single day and night, three still burning, seven under control. The hotspots are scattered across nearly half the country - Struga, Makedonski Brod, Cucer-Sandevo, Kicevo, Gostivar, Novo Selo, Karpos, Saraj. And this in September, a month when the season is supposed to be winding down. The head of the Protection and Rescue Directorate warns that the danger remains elevated. The warning is accurate, but it is what the system does after the thing has already caught fire.

The same day, the "Istra" furniture factory in Kocani was burning too. Three fire engines and five firefighters stopped the flames before they reached the warehouse holding the "Kam" supermarket, full of stock and, during working hours, full of people. One person needed treatment for smoke inhalation. A furniture plant is a facility where the material is itself fuel, which puts it in the highest fire-risk category with the strictest obligations for detection and suppression systems. Whether those systems worked is the question the inspection has to answer, and precisely the one that usually goes unanswered in public when nobody dies.

PISA 2025: three quarters of 15-year-olds cannot understand what they read

The PISA results for 2025 are worse than the previous ones, and this is not stagnation but decline moving faster than the OECD average. 379 points in mathematics, 354 in reading, 377 in science. But points are an abstraction and percentages are not: only 26 percent reach the minimum level of reading literacy, against an OECD average of 69 percent. At the highest levels of mathematical literacy sits one percent of our students, against an eight percent average. It is not only that the floor is low - the ceiling has almost disappeared. The test covered 6,977 students from 124 schools, which means this is not a statistical fluke.

Macedonia has taken part in PISA since the very first cycle, and regularly since 2015. Every one of these reports has so far been treated as a one-day news item rather than a measurement of whether anything done actually worked. If something in the system is working, PISA is exactly the instrument that would show it. So far it does not.

The same education system shows up in 1,288 empty places at UKLO Bitola in the second enrolment round. The emptiest is the Technical Faculty with 269 places, while two of its own programmes filled their quota back in the first round. Nobody at the university explains the gap between what was planned and what showed up.

A train for 87 denars on a line that has existed for decades

A one-way ticket from Kumanovo to Skopje costs 87 denars, 140 return, 1,850 monthly. Those are the figures presented by Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Nikoloski while announcing more frequent trains. At the moment two trains a day run on the route as a pilot project. If rail really is the fastest, cheapest and greenest option, the question remains why two trains a day were all that ran between the country's first and second largest cities. The infrastructure has been there for decades. The price is not new. What was missing was a decision.

The same day Kumanovo also received five utility vehicles donated through a World Bank procurement. The vehicles are welcome, but street sweepers and tankers are a solution to a symptom, while trains are a solution to a problem.

A month of celebrations across 11 cities, organised by a firm with a frozen account

A month of celebrations across eleven cities, and the price is still a secret. The opposition estimates at least a million euros for David Guetta's appearance alone and up to five million in total. The government could knock those numbers down with a single document and has not published one. In Bitola's account of 81 projects in one year the same pattern repeats: ten kilometres of streets, 220 parking spaces, 96 million for the cinema. But 81 projects in twelve months is the pace of signing contracts, not of finishing work.

Elsewhere, Kavadarci marked 82 years since its liberation with flowers at a monument, in the same week as the caravan through eleven cities. Local history remembers quietly, with a few bouquets and one speech. State history remembers with a stage and lights.

Two serious cases in Prilep in a single day

One driver went off the Prilep-Bitola road with 1.74 per mille, almost four times over the limit. Another hit a 72-year-old pedestrian on a boulevard and kept driving. The difference between the two is worth naming: a crash can be a mistake, driving away is a decision.

The world: votes for AfD, drones over Romania and tankers near Hormuz

In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD took 43.8 percent while the CDU fell to 17.2. Merkel did not blame the voter but the way her own party speaks. Trump congratulated the AfD while the votes were still being counted, posted on a network he owns - Germany spent decades lecturing others about outside interference.

Romania has counted 25 incursions into its airspace in nine months. When the message telling people in Tulcea to get to the basement arrives for the 25th time, it is no longer an incident but a condition. Five Iranian tankers were hit in a single morning, and the retaliation did not go toward Washington - twenty missiles landed on Jordan, a country that is not a party to that fight. For Ukraine, meanwhile, the deadline now has a date: November, chosen by the American electoral calendar rather than by Donbas.

Two more things are worth noting. Kaja Kallas's expert group collapsed before its first session, brought down by one member state over a name on the list. And in New York, 170,000 pages showed the city had calculated 35,000 potential lawsuits while publicly insisting the air after September 11 was safe. It took twenty-five years and a lawsuit for what was written down in the first weeks to come to light.

Sport: Vardar returns to Europe

Vardar is back in the Champions League after five years, and sitting on the opposing bench is Roberto Garcia Parondo, the man who took the club to the European throne in 2019. The new 24-team format forgives not a single bad day. Vokap left for 2.6 million dollars, and MZT promised a run at the trophies after putting up 111 points in a friendly. And Miovski is waiting for someone else's injury to get minutes at Rangers - the most thankless position in football.

The heavier half of the day has one repeating pattern: an institution announces, warns or issues a statement, and then stops there. The Interior Ministry takes measures, the Directorate warns, the Ministry receives another report, the government promises a document. The Kumanovo-Skopje train is the only story today in which somebody actually made a decision - and that decision could have been made decades ago.