Overview of the week's top stories
since 15 December 2002

On Thursday, the National Assembly confirmed the new government – independent Slovenia’s seventh – with a vote of 54:25. All sixteen proposed ministers were accepted on the first try. The new ministers will serve in their posts until spring 2004, when parliamentary elections will next take place.

Slovenes will not have a representative in the Croatian parliament, the Sabor, according to the Constitutional Law on the Protection of Minorities passed on 13 December. The law provides parliamentary representation for just ten of Croatia’s 23 official national minorities.

According to the new law, minorities will be represented in the Sabor by at least five and no more than eight representatives. Serbs, the country’s largest minority by far, have been given the right to at least one and no more than three representatives, to be determined by the number of votes cast. Croatia’s Italians and Hungarians will each have a representative as well. The Czechs and Slovaks will have a single representative between them, while the Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Austrians and Jews will all share a single representative as well.

Members of minority communities will elect these representatives in special electoral districts. The law foresees the establishment of a Council of National Minorities and minority representation in local government, as well as an advisory body to deal with the rights of national minorities.

Passage of the law fulfills one of the five political conditions for Croatian entry into the European Union.

Alja Brglez, director of the government’s Office of Information, made the World Economic Forum’s annual list, "Global Leaders for Tomorrow." The list of 100 young leaders was released on 3 December. The World Economic Forum has compiled the list since 1993, but a Slovene has never been included before.

Past Global Leaders for Tomorrow include Jose Maria Aznar, Prime Minister of Spain; Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the UK; Bono, Composer and Singer; Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation; Ben Cohen, Chairman, Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc.; and Bozidar Djelic, Serbian Minister of Finance and Economy.

Although Drozg told Finance that PC Magazine was not operating at a significant loss, he said that it had no future. "With Playboy, say, the situation is different; it is not selling like we want it to, but it has a future." Playboy sells between 8,000 and 9,000 copies each month. Another Burda title, Connect, only sells between 3,000 and 4,000 copies each month, but its production costs are less than those of PC Magazine and it brings in more advertising revenue.

Two other Burda titles that premiered this year, Nova and Lisa, are selling quite well. Lisa in fact, is selling between 60,000 and 62,000 copies each week. Burda is expected to launch a third women’s weekly in March 2003. The publisher is also planning five new monthlies for next year, mostly aimed at women.

The commercial television station POP TV celebrated its seventh anniversary on 15 December. The channel hit the airwaves in 1995, with the premier of its news program "24 ur," which today has expanded into a radio show and a news internet site.

One of its first successes was securing the rights to the Mexican soap opera "Esmeralda," which is seen every day by some 300,000 viewers.

The channel has been very successful thanks to programs including an original version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," called "Lepo je biti milijonar," and an original version of the reality television show "Popstars."

• Saturday, 14 December, the cultural center Hiša Bazovszky in Budapest hosted a presentation by the Maribor multicultural center Kibla. The event featured music, a film screening, and presentations of multimedia art by Igor Štromajer, Stelarc and Simon Biggs.