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In Slovenia, the ancient Pust festival happens each year before Easter to mark the end of winter. Locals wear masks and costumes to chase away winter and celebrate the coming of spring. Images of the festival captured by photographer Ciril Jazbec offer a glimpse into a ritual that has great significance for the community. The Little-Known Ancient Festival to Chase Away Winter | 3:10 BBC Global | 717K subscribers | 95,245 views | March 5, 2025

For thousands of years, the rugged limestone highlands of Slovenia's Karst Plateau have kept a stunning secret buried beneath forests and rocky sinkholes.Now, new research has revealed that this landscape once hosted massive, purpose-built stone megastructures that appear to have guided and trapped wild herds in one of Europe's earliest examples of large-scale communal hunting.This discovery not only sheds light on prehistoric hunting practices but also challenges our understanding of early European societies and their capabilities.The discovery, led by archaeologists from the University of Ljubljana, was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Using airborne laser...

Slovenia has become the first country in the European Union to ban all weapons trade with Israel over its war on Gaza. The move by the government comes two weeks after the Central European nation declared Israeli ministers persona non grata. The arms embargo was announced by Prime Minister Robert Golob after a government session on Thursday. *** Amid the devastating war in Gaza, where “people … are dying because humanitarian aid is systematically denied them”, it was the “duty of every responsible state to take action, even if it means taking a step ahead of others”, the statement said....

President Zelensky has an unlikely ally in the White House: Melania Trump. The first lady, who grew up in the former Yugoslavia, has been reminding her husband of the deadly toll of Russian airstrikes on Ukrainian cities and is thought to have played a role in convincing the president to sign off the delivery of Patriot air defence missiles to Kyiv this week. -snip- Her interest in the Ukraine war can be explained by her background. Born behind the Iron Curtain in 1970, in the former Yugoslavia, Melania has previously described her admiration for Ronald Reagan, the president who helped...

SummarySanctions target ICC judges over Afghanistan, Israel cases ICC condemns sanctions as undermining judicial independence Sanctions complicate financial transactions for targeted judges WASHINGTON/THE HAGUE, June 5 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's administration on Thursday imposed sanctions on four judges at the International Criminal Court, an unprecedented retaliation over the war tribunal's cases regarding alleged war crimes by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and over the court's issuance of an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Washington designated Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, Luz del Carmen Ibanez Carranza of Peru, Reine Adelaide Sophie Alapini Gansou of Benin, and Beti Hohler...

The democratic will of the Hungarian people to clamp down on the proliferation of LGBTQ+ ideology should be punished by the European Commission, a group of 16 EU countries demanded on Wednesday. In response to recent legislation passed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s conservative government to ban Pride parades in Hungary, over half of fellow European Union member states signed an open letter demanding that Budapest reverse course or face punishment from Brussels. The “declaration” was signed by the countries of Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, and Sweden. […]...

A bronze statue of First Lady Melania Trump has apparently disappeared from her hometown of Sevnica, Slovenia. Local media said the statue was sawed off at the ankles and carried away from the area, the Associated Press (AP) reported on Friday, noting police are investigating and trying to find those responsible. “The original wooden statue was torched in July 2020. The rustic figure was cut from the trunk of a linden tree, showing her in a pale blue dress like the one she wore at Trump’s presidential inauguration in 2017. The replica bronze statue has no obvious resemblance with the...

In yet another attack on President Donald Trump, some Democrats have targeted his immigration policies by calling for the deportation of his wife, Melania Trump. This outrageous and politically driven statement not only defies common sense but also reveals the left’s obsession with politicizing every aspect of Trump’s life, no matter how absurd. Although Melania Trump is a naturalized American citizen who followed the legal immigration process, left-wing critics are now exploiting her status to advance their anti-Trump, anti-immigrant agenda. These calls for her deportation serve no real purpose other than to further the left’s desperate attempts to undermine Trump’s...

The shocking minutes relating to President Putin’s meeting this past week with US Secretary of State John Kerry reveal the Russian leaders “extreme outrage” over the Obama regimes continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war. According to these minutes, released in the Kremlin today by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation (MNRE), Putin was so incensed over the Obama regimes refusal to discuss this grave matter that he refused for three...

Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson 🚨BREAKING: President Trump has called on Elon Musk to launch a SpaceX mission to save stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from space. Elon Musk has given the green light to the rescue operation. 8:19 PM · Jan 28, 2025

The Harris-Biden administration is a boon to Putin. A Trump presidency will destroy all that. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelen, both of whom have been languishing in the Soviet, I mean, Russian prisons for years on trumped-up espionage charges, have been released. It appears that their release is part of a larger, multi-nation prisoner swap that includes the exchange of prisoners from Germany, Great Britain, the US, and Slovenia on the one side and Russia and Belarus on the other. The basis for the suspicion about the multi-national, multi-prisoner release is the sudden...

Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, who was shot earlier this week in an assassination attempt, predicted that the ‘New World Order’ would attempt to kill him just last month.Fico warned that his opposition towards the World Economic Forum could result in his own murder.During a recorded message, The prime minister blamed the mainstream media for also wanting him dead.“I am not exaggerating by a millimeter,” Fico said in the video.Modernity.news reports: The Slovakian government has blasted the opposition and left-wing media, with Ľuboš Blaha, the deputy speaker of the Slovak parliament urging “You have made us all targets.”“You have spread...

Ireland, Spain, Malta and Slovenia standing ready to recognize the Palestine state has given Palestinians “hope,” its ambassador has said. Earlier, in a joint-statement, the four countries’ prime ministers said they were ready to recognize the Palestine state when the “circumstances are right”. The Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, Dr. Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid, welcomed the statement, describing it as “promising news”. She said it might only be a few EU countries, but that Ireland is “leading” the way and she expressed thanks for “all the Irish efforts”. …

On this date in 1943, Slovenian student Lojze Grozde was executed by communist partisans. An ardent young Catholic, the 19-year-old Grozde was on his way from boarding school in Ljubljana in Italian-occupied Slovenia* to visit some relatives when he was stopped at a roadblock. Partisans who found the devotional book The Imitation of Christ on his person were a mite hostile, since the Holy See was not exactly at loggerheads with fascism. All of Yugoslavia had become one gigantic dirty war, and though individual Catholics might fall anywhere on the political spectrum, the institutional church did not shy from working...

The government revoked a decree that served as the legal basis for the commemoration just hours before Slovenia was due to mark National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communist Violence on Wednesday, triggering sharp criticism from the right and talk of a ‘new civil war’. In a brief statement after a correspondence session, the Robert Golob government said that the memorial day had been declared without a “public and expert debate”. The national memorial day was declared by the Janez Janša government by decree on 12 May 2022, just days before its term ended, with the reasoning being...

Despite costing €9 million, the campaign has been slammed by art critics and government officials.For many, Botticelli’s Venus embodies the Renaissance ideal of beauty, but have you ever wondered what that might look like today? Italy’s ministry of tourism has launched a campaign that reimagines the iconic figure as an influencer—and it has been swiftly ridiculed on social media. “Hi there, everybody. My name is Venus,” the ad’s digitally altered protagonist announced on her Instagram. “But that’s something you probably already know. I’m 30, ok maybe just a wee bit more than that… And I am a virtual influencer. What...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEFriday, January 27, 2023 Members of Eastern European Organized Crime Group Allegedly Plotted to Murder a U.S. Citizen of Iranian Origin in New York City Who Has Publicly Opposed the Iranian GovernmentA federal court in New York today unsealed murder-for-hire and money laundering charges against three members of an Eastern European criminal organization for plotting the murder of a U.S. citizen who has been targeted by the Government of Iran for speaking out against the regime’s human rights abuses.According to court documents, Rafat Amirov, aka Farkhaddin Mirzoev, aka Pᴎᴍ, aka Rome, 43, of Iran; Polad Omarov, aka Araz...

A New York federal court on Friday unveiled an indictment charging three men on murder-for-hire and money laundering charges for plotting the assassination of a U.S. citizen targeted by the Iranian government. All three men, associated with an Eastern European criminal organization, are in custody and will stand trial in the U.S., Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed. The Department of Defense has not named the victim, though Fox News confirmed the individual is Masih Alinejad, who was the target of a 2021 kidnapping plot that was foiled by the FBI.

Vladimir Putin has approved a 31-page "humanitarian policy" which says Russia should "protect, safeguard and advance the traditions and ideals of the Russian World". The foreign policy concept of a "Russian World" is a notion that hardliners have used to justify intervening abroad to support Russian speakers, such as in parts of Ukraine. It means that the idea is now enshrined in official policy, though it was presented as a soft power strategy. The new policy stated that Moscow should further deepen its ties with the self-styled Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic - two breakaway entities in...

NEW YORK (AP) — As winter nears, European nations, desperate to replace the natural gas they once bought from Russia, have embraced a short-term fix: A series of roughly 20 floating terminals that would receive liquefied natural gas from other countries and convert it into heating fuel. Yet the plan, with the first floating terminals set to deliver natural gas by year’s end, has raised alarms among scientists who fear the long-term consequences for the environment. Some scientists say they worry that the floating terminals will end up becoming a long-term supplier of Europe’s vast energy needs that could last...