Four days of white foam, and the question of who released it has no address

The river ran white with foam for four days down the Lepenec and the Vardar, the drone went up on day one, and the polluter is still unknown. Environmentalists want the facility shut and a public register of past fines, and that demand says more than the foam does. The river cleaned itself, the way it always has. When the damage disappears before the procedure ends, nobody has to answer - which is exactly why the next spill has already been paid for in advance.

In Gostivar the tap water still is not drinkable, two weeks on

The numbers out of Gostivar are not falling: 127 new examinations in a single day, 4,197 first examinations over thirteen days and 833 formal complaints. Two weeks after the contamination the tap water still cannot be drunk, and the paediatric count is rising. Who put it into the water supply, nobody will say. It is the same sentence we hear about the Lepenec, just with a different town in it.

Mickoski put the arithmetic back on the table: name changed, position unchanged

The prime minister opened the question of reciprocity and the Strasbourg rulings and said he will not allow the constitutional changes Bulgaria is demanding, because this is not a buffet. He also brought back the sum everyone can do: the name was changed seven years ago, and we are in the same place. That is not rhetoric - it is the only verifiable thing in the entire process.

A budget revision with not one vote against, and a deficit that keeps growing

The revision passed with 64 votes in favour and none against, after the opposition spent two days attacking it as proof of failed policy. The deficit rises to 4.1 percent, the grey economy to 13.3, and between January and June only 45.3 percent of planned revenue came in. When the criticism lasts two days and the vote against lasts zero, the argument was never about the budget.

Diesel, heating and one table nobody opens

Diesel reached 98.50 denars, so a full 50-litre tank costs 9.4 percent of the average wage here and 5.0 percent in Croatia. Same car, same job, roughly half the distance. The same day district heating went up 5.96 percent from 1 August, 140 denars more a month for a 60-square-metre flat, and the season has not even started. The regulator says Skopje still has the lowest price in the Balkans. If the bills are being compared to Ljubljana, the wages belong in the same table.

A fire, a lake and an interchange: three deadlines everyone saw coming

Near Prilep a fire burned for twenty hours, 25 hectares of hazel went up, and a firebreak saved the Treskavec monastery. There are fires at that same spot every year, which means the risk is known and the prevention is not. Lake Dojran is filling again, but the hydro system sat switched off for six months heading into the most critical month. And the Momin Potok interchange is 75 percent done and promised for New Year, having started construction in 2021.

Strumica, Ohrid and Ulcinj: what the police reached and what the networks sentenced

Near Strumica six people broke into a house and beat a family with children, eight family members attacked, two of them minors, and the householder fired into the air to bring help. In Ohrid, one man caught with drugs at a concert opened the door on several more. And in Ulcinj a Macedonian woman was given 30 days in detention: the court says deliberate, the defence says self-defence, and the internet handed down its sentence while the prosecution was still collecting evidence.

Veles, Struga and Krusevo: the day that did not wait for a solution from above

High-school students in Veles are going to map the institutions a person in a wheelchair cannot enter, and the list includes the Post Office, the tax authority and the municipality itself. That is work the institutions could have done themselves, for themselves, at any point in the last thirty years. Struga gave its cafes an extra hour, two on holidays, in a decision covering twenty-one dates to the end of the year. And forty riders set off for Krusevo for the 48th Ilinden march, with people from the Strumica, Gostivar and Radovis areas.

Sport: Vardar returns where it belongs

Vardar is back in the Champions League, and Cervar announced the end of his career in Bitola - an ending that deserves more than one sentence. Italy is without a manager, Stones moved to Inter, and Churlinov snatched a signature from under a Polish rival. In basketball LeBron broke the record for the largest pay cut, and Pelister signed an American with a Macedonian passport.

If the harder part of the day has anything in common, it is not the foam, the water or the budget on their own. It is that for every one of these there is an institution that knows how to announce it, and no institution that has to answer when it goes wrong. The river cleans itself, the water waits, the deficit grows, and the interchange is promised for New Year - the fifth one running.