On 5 September, we celebrate International Day of Charity, which aims to raise awareness and encourage people to volunteer to help those in need. The fact that Slovenians are a nation ready to lend a hand was thoroughly demonstrated in August, when our country was hit by floods.

Today, a 3-day informal meeting of EU Agriculture Ministers, including Mrs Irena Šinko, the Slovenian Agriculture Minister, concluded in Cordoba/Spain. Focus of this meeting was on new technologies to stimulate transition to a more sustainable and productive model adapted to the challenges of climate change. In the margins of the meeting, Minister Šinko met with the European Commissioner for Agriculture, Mr Janusz Wojciechowski, and presented to him the damages in agriculture in the aftermath of the catastrophic floods that affected Slovenia this August.

The Minister of Finance Klemen Boštjančič on the basis of the third paragraph of Article 40 of the Slovenian Sovereign Holding Act, issued a Decision on the appointment and tasks of the Expert Commission for the preparation of the candidate proposal for the member of the Slovenian Sovereign Holding (SSH) Supervisory Board.

At a correspondence session, the Government adopted a new version of the Guidelines for Innovative Public Procurement and issued an opinion on the petition of Vzajemna, d.v.z., Ljubljana, to initiate a procedure to review the constitutionality of the Decree on the setting of the maximum price of the supplementary health insurance premium, the Decree amending the Decree laying down the list of goods and services subject to price control measures, and the Price Control Act.

The Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in Tirana will be closed on 5 September 2023 on the occasion of Mother Teresa Canonisation Day.

Join evening Slovene language courses starting at UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies

The signing of the Working Agreement between the Slovenian Intellectual Property Office and the European Patent Organisation on search co-operation will enable applicants to obtain quality information more quickly in patent grant procedures. Applicants for European and international patent applications will be able to obtain additional financial benefits for an invention that has been pre-examined by the European Patent Office.

Prime Minister Robert Golob received a delegation of ten members of the United States Congress, nine senators and one member of the House of Representatives.

Summer holidays are almost over and on Friday schools will open doors for about 275,000 basic and upper secondary school pupils.

Although the underground waters of Hermann's Cave are now a home to seven olms, which today are considered to be the cave's main attraction, these aquatic salamanders actually originate from Postojna Cave and were only introduced to their new habitat in Hermann's Cave artificially. At the end of 1956, the removal of thirteen olms from Postojna Cave caused a major scandal that reverberated across the former Yugoslavia and the East and West Germany. Some of the preserved archival records on this story is presented here as this month's archivalia.

Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Tanja Fajon attended the informal meeting of EU foreign ministers (Gymnich) in Toledo, where the ministers addressed current foreign and security policy issues. They discussed Russia's aggression on Ukraine and the situation in the Sahel, focusing on Niger after the military coup.

“It is the enormous scale of the damage that requires us to tackle these floods and their consequences, not only with a new act, but with a completely renewed approach,” the Prime Minister explained in the National Assembly when discussing the draft act on intervention measures to address the consequences of floods and landslides.

On Tuesday, 29th of August, the Bled Strategic Forum hosted a panel titled Ukraine: the Power of Solidarity. The panellists included Dr Damir Črnčec, State Secretary at the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Slovenia, Krsto Perović, State Secretary at the Ministry of Defence of Montenegro, Andrii Taran, Ambassador of Ukraine to the Republic of Slovenia, Krzysztof Jan Olendzki, Ambassador of Poland to the Republic of Slovenia, and Holger Haibach from the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung for Croatia and Slovenia. The panel was moderated by Katja Geršak.

Presenting the draft revised state budget for this year in the National Assembly, Prime Minister Robert Golob stressed that the Government would give priority to helping the most affected people and business sectors before dealing with the rest.

The Government has approved an indicative list of areas for additional loans under the Recovery and Resilience Facility.

At today's session, the Government adopted a decision on the use of additional loans under the Recovery and Resilience Facility. It also adopted several other decisions and resolutions.

Today, the State Secretary of the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Slovenia, Dr Damir Črnčec, and the State Secretary of the Ministry of Defence of Montenegro, Dr Krsto Perović, signed an Agreement between the Ministries of Defence of the Republic of Slovenia and Montenegro on cooperation in the field of military reconnaissance and aerial surveillance and monitoring based on the joint procurement of Belin unmanned aerial systems.

The 18th Bled Strategic Forum, which has hosted 32 discussions and brought together nearly 3000 participants, 188 speakers and around 100 representatives of Slovenian and foreign media, is coming to an end. It has once again proven not only to be a hub of ideas and a platform for the most pressing issues of modern society, but also a trademark that is becoming more and more established at the global level.

Meteorologist Branko Gregorčič and hydrologist Janez Polajnar from the Slovenian Environment Agency (ARSO), Neža Kodre, the director of the Slovenian Water Agency, Miloš Bavec, the director of the Geological Survey of Slovenia, and Srečko Šestan, the commander of the Civil Protection Service, participated in a press conference about the extraordinary meteorological and hydrological conditions in Slovenia, at which a weather and hydrological warning with updated data was also presented.

State Secretaries Samuel Žbogar and Marko Štucin held bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the 18th Bled Strategic Forum. State Secretary Štucin participated in the panel on the EU’s decision-making role.