Dear DC Slovenia readers,
A day after … USA elections 2024
While these words are being written and later read by you, dear readers, America is “shouting” “All eyes on me!” like a teacher in a classroom full of restless school teenagers trying to get them to focus and “restart” their attention.
Last night, looking from a satellite, for example, one could see that the lights were on during the whole previous day&night in the offices of all media outlets, and as results were coming in, all eyes were on the seven “swing states” that are believed to have been essential for this election having in mind that they could be won by either candidate. In multiple swing states, a string of reported bomb threats was received.
At approximately 07:50 am CET Fox News announced first the breaking News that Donald Trump is the 47th President of the USA. Shortly after I heard his speech on my Swedish radio. He sounded happy but tired. So-called MAGA messages dominated. At that moment, half of the country was celebrating and the other half was mourning. Good luck to us all!
The fact that Europe and the rest of the world depend on the events happening “across the pond”, confuses me. Not to mention the humongous costs of election campaigns and political gatherings, while, at the same time there are so many people affected and hundreds of lives lost due to the extreme weather such as hurricanes which have devastated Florida, floods and landslides in Spain, Bosnia, and the Czech Republic, just to mention few.
Imagine how puzzled an objective and not previously briefed observer e.g. an alien would be looking at the planet Earth these last couple of days; so many ongoing conflicts and the high level of man-caused destruction in the Middle East and Ukraine, the atmosphere of “Panem et circenses” in USA, the groups of volunteers in rubber boots cleaning the mud of the streets of Valencia and the sadness and disbelief in the eyes of the inhabitants of the Serbian town of Novi Sad and their grief after 14 people were crushed to death last week by a falling canopy at a railway station.
The song that goes through my mind is the one by the Croatian band “Prljavo kazaliste” – Zaustavite zemlju, silazim” (Stop the planet, I am getting off ”) popular in the 80s but is so actual today so many years after.
This Wednesday DC Slovenia brings you the announcement of the 8th Winter Edition of Festival Ljubljana. We give you a photo “sneak peek” of the reception organized last week by the Embassy of Türkiye in Ljubljana as Türkiye celebrated the 101st anniversary of the Republic Day. You can read about the impressive number of visitors, as many as 300 000 during 2024, who visited one of the natural gems of Slovenia namely Vintgar Gorge and the story about a VIP tour organized for distinguished guests a week before the closing of this year’s season in this breathtaking Slovenian Gorge.
Save the date for the Game Changer Conference on November 11th in Ljubljana and the SEMPL conference in Portoroz on the 14th and 15th of November.
Stay tuned for the interviews with H.E. Ambassador of the Czech Republic to Slovenia Mr. Jiri Kudela and Mr. Darko Brlek, the general and artistic director of Festival Ljubljana.