„Puls" back in the courtroom, and again nobody is guilty

The trial of the second group of police officers in the „Puls" case has begun, and as expected, all nine defendants pleaded not guilty. According to the prosecution, their signatures and positive assessments enabled the illegal operation of the club where 63 young people died, and the gain from those unauthorised approvals is measured in a few hundred thousand denars. Numbers that, set against 63 graves, sound grotesquely small. The families who buried their children sit in that same courtroom and listen as the system that was meant to protect them now defends itself. The question "who will answer for this" is as old as the tragedy, and there is still no answer.

SDSM counts millions in tenders, the firms stay the same

On the other side of the political field, the opposition opened a tab of its own: two firms, SDSM claims, won nearly 36 million euros in tenders over two years. Some hand them out, others count, and the firms stay the same no matter who holds power. The citizen who pays for those tenders with taxes deserves an answer, not another press conference where one side accuses and the other waves it off. In the Balkans, tender arithmetic has a habit of staying unsolved for exactly as long as it takes to be forgotten.

The waterfalls dry up, and no one is accountable

That same absent accountability is quietly killing the Macedonian waterfalls. The Smolare and Koleshino falls are drying up under the pressure of small hydropower plants, illegal logging and drought, and nobody steps in front of a camera to say it was their mistake. A waterfall does not protest and does not vote, which is why it slides so easily to the bottom of the priority list. When a natural rarity dies slowly, rarely does anyone end up pointing the finger at themselves.

A weekend where citizens did the public services' job

The image of the day is best told by the big cleanup: 70,688 people pulled out 685 tonnes of waste in a single weekend. The figure is impressive and moving, but it drags an uncomfortable question behind it - where were the officials who draw a salary for cleaning? Volunteer cleanups are lovely until they become a permanent replacement for the services that exist precisely for this. Residents in Saraj, Sopishte and Petrovec meanwhile lost power for almost a full working day, and the right to ask "could this be faster" was not cut off along with the voltage.

The Estakada bridge back on the table

In Gazi Baba, the repair of the Estakada bridge has begun, one of the key crossings carrying thousands of vehicles a day. Skopje's bridges have been under repair for decades, and yet every year one of them ends up on the front pages. Will this fix hold quietly, or join the line of works that last only until the next crack splits open - we'll find out on the first heavy rain.

One piece of good news: Tetovo and „Vezilka"

Not everything bears the mark of irresponsibility. Tetovo landed a promise of a 20-million-euro investment and 412 jobs, and the state announced its first artificial intelligence centre, „Vezilka", worth 6.5 million, meant to build a Macedonian language model instead of leaving us dependent on foreign tools that barely understand us. Both sound excellent on paper - and around here it is precisely on paper that projects sound their best. The Vezilka, the embroiderer of the national costume, worked with patience and thread that lasts for decades; the same will be asked of these promises - not just to be unveiled, but to last.

The war that came home

Beyond the borders, the war Moscow wants to keep far from its own citizens came home again: Ukrainian drones set the largest Moscow refinery ablaze, barely 15 kilometres from the Kremlin. The same day, a Russian strategic bomber fell like a fireball over Irkutsk due to a technical fault - a detail that says something about the fleet Moscow rolls out for its parades. And in Poland, a Russian cartoonist who mocked Putin was shot dead in broad daylight. When a critic of the regime is not safe even a thousand kilometres away, the message is not addressed only to the dead man.

To close, something lighter: basketball

To pull ourselves out of the heavier part of the day - New York is an NBA champion after half a century. Jalen Brunson stepped out of Doncic's shadow and carried the title with the Knicks, and back home the basketball players are already looking to the next challenges. Half a century of waiting for one trophy is a kind of patience of its own - but at least it is a wait that ended in celebration, and not in one more question of who will answer for this.

If anything ties the heavier part of the day together, it is the same emptiness: institutions that know how to announce, to award and to boast, but rarely how to answer. From the „Puls" courtroom to the dried-up waterfalls, the question is always the same - and the answer, as usual, is nowhere to be found.