Mavrovo is being shot at catalogue prices

Foreign hunters pay between three and six thousand euros to shoot a Balkan chamois, a strictly protected species under the Bern Convention. The hunt is legal, and the park uses that money to pay its own ranger service. A 2004 law required every protected area to be re-designated by 2010. Mavrovo is the only one that still has not been. A new revalorisation study was finished in December 2023 and has sat there ever since, because the park's current management refuses to accept it. Meanwhile, fourteen Balkan lynx live inside its boundaries - a species down to roughly fifty animals in total.

A roadmap for four countries, and for us a sentence aimed at Sofia

Marta Kos listed the countries getting a timeline to the EU: Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, Ukraine. Macedonia is not on the list. What arrived instead was the constitutional-amendment condition repeated once more, with the second half of the sentence addressed not to Skopje but to Bulgaria, whose support is expected. Expected, not guaranteed. In the same speech von der Leyen offered Canada a seat as an associate member, and Trump answered immediately by threatening Europe with tariffs. The Union is getting more flexible with those who never queued.

The inspector acted, the system did not

At the trial of nine police officers, an inspector testified that in 2023 she asked the owner of "Puls" for his licence and never got it. She noted it. She wrote it in a report. The report travelled up the hierarchy. And then nothing. Everyone was responsible for their own box; nobody for the whole. On Wednesday the victims' families marched in Kočani, demanding the proceedings stop dragging.

Three of four sensors, and a company still to be found

The Austrian firm that built the Skopje cable car found that three of its four sensors were not working and the cables were damaged beyond the permitted minimum. A state inspection last August found nothing at all. The city is now looking for a company to assess the damage, and says responsibility is a matter for the investigators. A few kilometres up the same hill, the Centar municipality is adopting a detailed urban plan for Barutana with no analyses, despite having written in its own plan that urbanising Vodno triggers landslides.

A judiciary that does not publish itself

Two of every three verdicts in 2025 were never published, against 40 percent the year before. Hearings twice a year, proceedings running up to 33 months, and young lawyers who do not show up because there is no motivation. The same logic by which someone files a report and takes no action applies here too: the document exists, it simply never reaches anyone.

The bill for not working

Labour disputes cost the state 64.4 million euros, and almost half of that is interest for paying late. In 95 percent of cases the money was collected by force, through bailiffs. In Prespa, the industrial apple fell to 4 denars a kilo while it costs ten to produce, with subsidies unpaid for two years. Near Botun, meanwhile, they are digging 28 metres into the ground to hold up the motorway - 163 of 250 such points sit on one single stretch.

Municipalities decide what applies

From Monday, schools in Gazi Baba will sing the anthem by decision of the municipal council. The constitution applies to the whole country, yet the rule is adopted municipality by municipality. Delčevo will pay 600,000 denars for a zoned-parking study with a 12-month deadline, which means the first paid parking space will not appear within the term of the people signing the contract. In four villages near Strumica, drinking water has been banned over faecal contamination and missing residual chlorine.

What the schoolchildren did

Students in Bitola mapped where their city cannot be crossed - by wheelchair, by scooter and on foot - and ended up with data carrying exact coordinates rather than a survey. The map will later show how many of those points got fixed. That is more concrete work than several institutions with far bigger budgets managed.

Electricity, water and a yard

In Studeničani, a 35-year-old died after being electrocuted while washing a car with a pressure washer. An autopsy will establish the exact cause. But there is no regularly published statistic on household electrocutions, and no campaign explaining why earthing is not just a formality in construction paperwork. In Kavadarci and near Negotino, two men paid with bank cards they had found - about 7,400 denars across seven transactions.

From outside

Ten explosions over Kyiv left part of the city without water, and a Russian refinery burned the same night. Washington voted through tariffs of up to 100 percent on buyers of Russian oil. In Ljubljana, a police officer held a man by the throat for over a minute and six people were charged once the footage came out - there, the footage produced indictments.

Something lighter to close

Messi reached his hundredth goal for Inter Miami, and United blew a 2-0 home lead for the first time in fifty years. Vardar lost a second match by a single goal, but a fan measured a hundred decibels in the hall - a number worth as much as the score. And on the Scottish island of Bute, residents bought back the pub that closed in 2020. Somewhere, people simply solve what here waits on a study with a twelve-month deadline.

Today reads like an inventory of documents that exist and produce nothing: a study parked since 2023, an inspection report that travelled up the hierarchy, a plan warning of landslides that does not stop the urban plan, two thirds of verdicts nobody published. The paperwork is all there. The signature and the consequence are what is missing.