Gostivar is in its fourth week without drinking water

For twenty-two days the pumps were feeding water contaminated with faecal matter into the town's mains. The ban on drinking it has been in force since 17 July, and today Gostivar entered its fourth week in which the tap delivers a liquid fit only for mopping floors. The number nobody mentions is the one that matters most: 40 to 50 people a day are turning up at the Gostivar hospital. The Health Ministry says the situation is normalising. When fifty people a day are asking for help, that word needs explaining.

The official analyses are scheduled for 20 August. That means another two weeks of waiting without a clear answer, while the parties argue over whose fault it is - SDSM with the confirmation of a dangerous bacterium, VMRO-DPMNE with documents from the previous government's time. If findings of unsafe water existed before as well, then the question is not which party is guiltier, but why those findings led to nothing. The only strand in this whole story that is not a political statement is the prosecutor's investigation into the director of the public utility „Komunalec" and two of its managers.

The tender closed in May, the therapy was late all summer

Cancer patients stood outside the Health Ministry and said they were not asking for privileges - they were asking for their therapy to arrive on time. The drugs that went missing were fulvestrant and Zoladex, treatments for breast cancer patients, plus some of the cytostatics on the approved list. The sentence that explains everything is this: the tender was completed in May, and the interruptions ran all summer. Between a signed tender and a drug in a patient's hand sits an entire administration that spent the summer on a break.

In parallel, the country's only public PET/CT scanner is out of service again. Patients wait two to three months for the scan that shows whether their therapy is working at all. Those who can afford it pay around 1,300 euros privately or go abroad. The clinic insists continuity of treatment was never broken; patient testimony describes delays of a month each. Both sentences cannot be true at once.

Ten years since the Skopje floods

On 6 August 2016, 92.9 litres of water per square metre fell in 24 hours, and more than 800 lightning strikes hit in the first two hours. Twenty-two people died in Singeliḱ, Stajkovci, Smilkovci and Aračinovo. The youngest victim was a two-year-old child. The municipality of Gazi Baba marked the tenth anniversary today, and mayor Boban Stefkovski added the sentence that matters more than all the rest: institutions have a duty in prevention, infrastructure and safety.

That is the point where every commemorative speech in this country ends. What has actually been built in those catchment areas over ten years, which canals have been cleared, what state the drainage infrastructure in Singeliḱ and Stajkovci is in as of August 2026 - there is still no answer. A commemoration honours the people. A cleared canal protects the next ones.

The Danube is at its lowest in a century, and the prime minister promises a stable price

Reduced flow means the nuclear plants in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania do not have enough cooling water, while hydro output in Serbia and Bulgaria is falling. When baseload leaves the system, the price jumps. Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski says Macedonia is watching that scene from the outside - reservoirs are around 70 per cent full, the system holds 500 gigawatt hours, and there will be no calls to save power.

Seventy per cent full reservoirs in August is a good number. But reservoirs empty, and the Danube has just shown how fast the arithmetic can change for the whole of Europe. When the price spikes next door, the pressure on the Macedonian system does not arrive through a cable - it arrives through export demand. The question left standing is what baseload actually means in the Macedonian system in 2036, when the Bitola coal plant will no longer be an option.

25 denars for a kilo of ajvar peppers

That is the price the processing plants are offering the market gardeners of Strumica, while peppers destined for export fetch 35 to 45 denars. The growers of Murtino went out to protest today and announced they would block the road to the Novo Selo border crossing. This year's buying prices are 20 per cent lower than last year's, in a year when production costs have fallen 20 per cent absolutely nowhere. These are the same people who spent this season saving their crop from spring floods, then rebuilding greenhouses wrecked by wind.

They are not asking for a subsidy or a guaranteed price by decree. They are asking the agriculture minister to come and get the buyers around one table. The Strumica region is the country's market-garden heartland - if growing stops paying there, the pepper will not vanish from the shelves, it will simply arrive as an import.

Municipalities promise presentations, the donation comes from Urdorf

„Kozara" street in Bitola is finished - 230 metres for 4 million denars, with the municipality admitting a slowed pace due to „objective reasons" it declines to name. In Skopje, 800 residents are demanding a geological survey at the „Limak" site - the presentation promised for 20 July still has not happened, and twelve million euros is more than enough to pay one geologist willing to stand in front of the people. And in Struga, 41 sets of fire-resistant kit for the fire brigade came from a volunteer firefighter in Urdorf, not from the budget. A nice story, and a question for the budget line that was supposed to cover it.

On the same day the crisis centre counted twenty fires in a single day and night, from Struga to Strumica, from Delčevo to Kratovo. The appeal repeats every summer; the fines collected are never published. And one item that runs against everything else: trees felled by the storm are becoming a motor-skills park on Vodno instead of landfill waste. It is rare here for anyone to look at waste and see material.

A school-leaving average of 3.66, and 3.18 in English

226 annulled tests, 805 appeals, three types of exam. The lowest average is in English - a subject that stopped being an advantage on the job market long ago and became a condition. The figure 3.18 is not a grade for the students. It is a grade for how the subject is taught.

At the other end of the age range, frontotemporal dementia gets mistaken for personality for years - the symptoms do not look like an illness, they look like a person who has turned rude and careless, which is why families reach a neurologist last.

Belgrade has to pick a side

Zelensky is coming to Serbia for the first time - the first bilateral visit by a Ukrainian president, with a three-point agenda on which sanctions are not one of the points. Belgrade has spent decades walking a wire strung between Moscow and the West, and on 8 August that wire gets pulled tight on camera. In the same week Vučić announced he would resign before the elections - a resignation no law requires, after nine and a half years in power, with a date that is still a secret. The office is vacated; the party stays.

Further east, not a single foreign cargo ship has entered the Odesa ports in three weeks, and the Danube delta is next on the list. And Russia has launched twelve of its own satellites at 550 kilometres with four passes over Ukraine a day - an admission that comes not from the Kremlin but from a former adviser in Kyiv.

An algorithm wrote a complete genome

Out of 302 designs, 16 functional viruses - the first time an algorithm has written a complete genome. The question is no longer whether it can be done, but who repeats it next. The same day, Tesla and SpaceX announced a 16.8-billion-dollar chip plant - nine million square metres, the largest building in the world. The day before the announcement, hundreds of people turned up at the county meeting, not to applaud but to ask about the tax breaks.

And gold reached 4,300 dollars while still sitting 20 per cent below its January record. The reason is not gold - the American labour market is slipping, and Japan sold 60 billion dollars in bonds to defend the yen.

And something lighter

The cadets fought their way to the World Championship with a 34:32 win over the Faroe Islands, playing with two men sent off and one with a broken finger, leaving Sweden and Norway behind them. In Gevgelija a sixteen-year-old put up 37 points and 10 rebounds in one game against Cyprus. Names worth remembering later.

Less worth remembering: the Vardar - Škendija derby is scheduled for 5pm in mid-August, the hottest afternoon of the week. Somebody wrote that decision in an air-conditioned office.