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About a year ago, Hungary was among eight countries that signed a letter, supporting the United States operations in Iraq. They offered troops for the stabilisation force. Now as the handover of power in Iraq from a US to an Iraqi led government approaches, a different letter has been sent by Hungarian Foreign Minister László Kovács to the American Secretary of State and to the United Nations Security Council. It calls for a more active role for the United Nations in Iraq. We asked Foreign Ministry spokesman, Tamás Tóth, if this marks a shift in

During EU negotiations in 1995, Slovenia agreed to open its real estate market to foreigners earlier than any other candidate country, in an agreement known as the "Spanish Compromise." Named after then EU president Spain, it settled a dispute over property rights between Slovenia and Italy. However, it caused concern among many Slovenes.

Three weeks before an EU summit ending the Irish presidency in the bloc, the constitutional marathon is still under way. No compromise has been agreed on the voting strengths of the EU's newly enlarged membership. It also seems that the bloc's religious-secular divide is as strong as ever. The advocates of enshrining Europe's Christian roots in the Constitutional Treaty seem to be losing their battle:

Slovakia has been accused of tax dumping by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and the former French European Commissioner Michel Barnier. It happened just as Slovakia was becoming a member of the EU. The charge is that Slovakia lowered its corporate taxes to levels that attract foreign investors to the detriment of older EU members, like Germany. Slovakia now has a flat rate tax of 19 percent. But the tax dumping charge has been rejected by Bratislava.

All this week Prague has been playing host to the Khamoro festival of Romani culture. While the serious side of the festival addresses issues affecting Europe's 12 million Roma, Khamoro is mostly about music. The highlight of Khamoro is a procession by gypsy musicians and dancers through the centre of Prague.

Sports fans will no doubt be aware that the final of football's Champions League is on Wednesday. What you may not know is that Europe's first such international competition was formed in this part of the world, way back in the late 1920s.

The sound of a school yard isn't very familiar to many Roma children in Slovakia simply because many of them do not spend much time in school. Social assistants involved in different projects in Roma communities say that many families are so poor that buying clothes or textbooks for school will never be among their priorities. Under these circumstances the recent statements of the EU Ambassador to Slovakia, Erik van der Linden, who said that Roma children should be sent to boarding schools, provoked mixed reactions.

Poland's Solidarity hero Lech Walesa made history again, this time by lending his name to the airport in the Baltic port city of Gdansk:

The Freising Manuscripts are the earliest text in any Slavic language written in Roman as opposed to Cyrillic script. They consist of three texts in old Slovene, bound into a Latin codex from Freising in Bavaria which was once the centre of a diocese. The precise date of the Freising Manuscripts cannot be exactly determined; the original text was probably written between 972 and 1093. For the first time these manuscripts are on display in Slovenia - a historic moment not only for Lenart Setinc, director of the National and University Library in

To find ways of escaping isolation, representatives of Central Europe's Roma communities met in the Czech Republic this week to exchange ideas and experiences. The two-day conference, which was held in the Moravian capital Brno, was part of a four-year programme in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, aimed at increasing Roma integration and participation in all levels of civil society, such as access to health, justice, education, and business opportunities.