The OECD published PISA 2025 on 8 September — the largest assessment it has ever run, and the worst results it has ever recorded. Estonia is sixth in the world and first in Europe. Latvia lost 45 points in reading in a single cycle. Denmark's minister called it a learning crisis. And the one domain where the North did well is the one nobody expected.

The government fell in May over a drone incursion and a timber contract. Fourteen lists and 1,428 candidates are on the ballot. A third of the Rīga constituency lives abroad — and in 2022 only about one in eight of them voted. A guide to the 15th Saeima election for readers in North America.

In May the EU, the UK and Iceland moved to cap Russia's mackerel catch in international waters. The Faroe Islands were the only party that declined to support it. A look at why a self-governing territory of 56,000 people has spent four years being the Nordic region's outlier on Russia — and why the usual explanation is wrong.

Finland is in NATO. Sweden is in NATO. And in the middle of the northern Baltic sits an archipelago of 30,952 people that no armed force may fortify, garrison or land on — under four overlapping treaties, the oldest signed in 1856, none of which contains a way out. Finland's own legal review concluded there is no clean exit even from the Russian consulate clause.

Helsinki shut all eight road crossings into Russia in December 2023 as a temporary measure. Three days ago the government moved to extend the legal machinery behind it by another two years — and the emergency law parliament passed for the same crisis has still never been used.

Harald V died on 28 August, aged 89, after thirty-five years on the throne. Fourteen months earlier he stood in Stavanger and watched a replica of the sloop Restauration sail for New York on the two-hundredth anniversary of Norwegian emigration. His son met that ship at the pier in Manhattan, and is now King Haakon VIII. A look at what the old king saw off, and at the Norwegian America waiting on the other side.

On 27 August the Helsinki Court of Appeal overturned a ruling that had let the crew of the tanker Eagle S walk away from the Estlink 2 cable cut on jurisdictional grounds. It is the most consequential legal development yet in a three-year pattern of damage to Baltic Sea cables and pipelines — and the question it turns on is not who did it, but whether anyone can be tried for it.

Sweden elects its Riksdag on 13 September. Swedish citizens abroad could vote by post from 30 July and in person at missions from 20 August — but the embassy in Ottawa stopped taking votes on 4 September, and a ballot posted from North America now is unlikely to arrive in time. A look at how out-of-country voting quietly fails, and what is still possible.

Latvia elects its 15th Saeima on 3 October. Citizens in North America can vote in person at twenty-two polling stations across the United States and Canada, or by post — but postal registration closes on 25 September and cannot be extended. Here is what to do, and by when.

On 29 August, Iceland voted 52.8 to 47.2 against reopening European Union accession talks, on a turnout of 82.5 per cent. The practical answer to what changes tomorrow is: nothing. The more interesting questions are what the vote settles, what it leaves open, and what the 47 per cent were actually voting for.