Our fire is burning in Kosovo, and our helicopter is putting out theirs

The blaze that started in the Gračani area of Đorče Petrov is, administratively speaking, no longer our problem - it is burning on Kosovo's territory, and at Pristina's request Macedonia sent an interior ministry helicopter to fight fires near Hani i Elezit. Our machine is dousing flames on their side while our fire heads for their ground. That is regional cooperation working without a single press release about friendship, and the Balkans rarely gets that shot.

The number underneath it is heavier: 31 open-air fires in a single 24-hour period. Not all of them were forests. Landfills were burning - Kratovo, Vizbegovo behind a hotel, Ohrid's Bukovo, the stretch between Monospitovo and Borievo. A burning landfill is not a natural disaster. It is waste dumped where it should not be, set alight at an unsecured site, and every such call-out consumes a crew that could have been on a forest fire at the same hour. The appeal not to light fires in the open is repeated every summer with identical wording. The question nobody asks is how many of those illegal dumps were reported and on record before they caught fire.

First in Europe for a disease carried by a mosquito

According to the latest weekly report from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Macedonia has the highest number of West Nile fever infections and deaths per million inhabitants in Europe. Not among the highest - the highest. Serbia reported 18 cases, Croatia seven, we reported 56. Set against our own past: from 2011 to the end of 2025 a total of 54 cases were confirmed here. Eight months of this year overtook the previous fifteen years.

Seven people have died. Fifty-four of the infected live in Skopje, concentrated in Kisela Voda and Gazi Baba. So we know who is falling ill and where - which is more information than is usually available while the season is still running. The advice issued to citizens is accurate and concerns their own yards: empty containers, flowerpots, old tyres, gutters. What sits in nobody's yard - the canals, the public spaces, the illegal dumps holding standing water - is covered by something called mosquito treatment, and that appears in no advisory addressed to a citizen.

Five years of reports nobody opened

The organised crime prosecutor's office put a figure of 138,877,419 denars on paper, or 2.26 million euros in unlawfully acquired gain in the case of falsified reports on fees collected during vehicle registration. The mechanism is painfully simple: the driver pays at the counter, the money really is collected, but the report that reaches the institutions states a different figure.

The prosecution broke the damage down by address. The state roads enterprise - 48.4 million denars. Municipal budgets and utility fees - 83.3 million. The environment ministry - 5.5 million. The Red Cross - one and a half million denars siphoned from an organisation that uses that money to run first-aid training. Among the suspects is the deputy finance director at the roads enterprise, whose job was precisely to verify the submitted reports. That is the difference between an oversight and a system: if the reports went unopened for five years, the question is not only who forged them, but how many other stations are filing reports that nobody reads.

Vodno's defence was a place name, not a geological finding

At the public presentation of the draft urban plan for the Barutana site on the slopes of Vodno, former anti-corruption commission chair Biljana Ivanovska handed blank sheets of paper to the municipal planning officials and asked them to sign a statement that the plan is safe for citizens' lives. The plan foresees around 25 buildings across 29,000 square metres, and critics say that requires clearing 9,000 square metres of forest on erosion-prone terrain.

The municipality has its own argument and it is not trivial - the buildable area has been cut from the previous 43,000 square metres. But "less concrete than a plan already struck down in court" is not the same as "safe". The argument for the terrain's stability, offered by the council chair, was that the name says it all - there used to be a gunpowder store there. That somebody once kept gunpowder on a site is not a geological finding. An urban plan on erosion-prone ground requires an opinion from the state geological survey. Public review runs until 14 September.

Four days of silence in Bitola, then a denial instead of an explanation

Footage from Širok Sokak travelled the country in a day. The interior ministry answered after four days, and answered with a denial: the deceased man found in the clinical hospital's yard is not the person seen on the video dragging another man. Fine. But what happened in the hours between his hospital examination and the discovery of the body - that stayed blank.

A denial is easy work, it needs two faces compared. An explanation - who the man in the video is, why, whether a crime was committed - needs actual work. When an institution leaves a gap, somebody else fills it, and for four days social media wrote the script.

The economy: two correct sums that never meet

The argument over public debt ended with 350 million that exists in neither set of books - both sides quote accurate figures from different scopes. In 2027 the state repays nearly 1.5 billion euros, plus 1.1 billion in treasury bills, and the coupon on the new eurobond will say more than any press release.

The statistics office meanwhile reported that we export 331 million euros of food and import 656 million. A country with Pelagonija and Tikveš pays double for someone else's table, and the same report shows export growth of either 13.9 or 8.4 percent depending on which currency you read it in. One thing is finally moving the other way: after years in which 85 percent of our only gas gateway was booked by Gazprom, entry into the vertical gas corridor has been signed, with a 2027 deadline.

What it costs to get to work

A monthly Tetovo-Skopje pass now costs 6,500 denars, a quarter of a 26,000-denar salary, and from Štip and Strumica there is no monthly pass at all. The petition is not asking for lower prices - it is asking someone to say what the prices were calculated from. The same logic runs through the day's other news: Prilep says 49 percent of its residents sort waste at home, a figure worth praising, except nobody else in the country measures primary sorting, so there is nothing to compare it against.

Some measures do work. Every eighth IVF application is for an attempt the state did not previously cover - 1,883 applications in a year, 97.3 million denars disbursed, 237 families using the right immediately. That is more demographic policy than any speech from a podium. And in Ćeramidnica the diggers have finally moved in for the bridge that stood finished for years with no road to lead to.

The region: a burial with state honours and a front that has gone quiet

Serbia is burying Ratko Mladić with a state plane, a flag and military honours, a man convicted with finality of genocide in Srebrenica. That is no longer a family matter - it is a message, and Brussels read it. In the same country Vučić is ready to accept the will of the party and take the prime minister's chair, because the constitution bars him from a third presidential term: the office changes, the occupant does not.

On the Ukrainian front units have orders not to fire until 8 September, but a ceasefire is when both sides have agreed, and Moscow has signed nothing so far. Mucunski was in Kyiv under drones and said the line about borders not being changeable by force - a sentence that carries more weight in our country than almost anywhere else.

And in sport, the day the streaks broke

Škendija's five straight wins were wiped out by a Nigerian hat-trick for Tikveš, on a day when Liverpool was also buying teenagers after the window shut. Vardar opened the season 31:19, while Tomovski made 13 saves in the Bundesliga and lost anyway - a night when the goalkeeper was the best player on the floor and it still was not enough.

That is the lighter half of the day. The heavier half ties itself together: in all five domestic cases the information existed before the failure. The illegal dumps had a known address, the mosquito breeding sites are the same every summer, the vehicle inspection reports sat unopened for five years, the Bitola footage was on half the town's phones for four days. Nothing was missing but somebody whose job it is to open the file.