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Slovakia is bucking the trend in the EU by refusing to recognise same sex marriages conducted in other EU countries. In fact it's taken a unilateral decision on this even after justice and interior ministers agreed to recognise same sex marriages conducted in other member states. But some Slovaks plan to defy their own government on the issue. Jozef Pavlovic is a former priest in the Uniate Church who wants to conduct same sex marriages in Slovakia.

Heads of state and world leaders from over 40 countries gathered at Auschwitz on Holocaust Memorial Day, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp in southern Poland. The commemoration began with the recreation of the sound of the Auschwitz train, which brought Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and others persecuted by the Nazis to the most infamous of the camps.

Hungary has taken over the Presidency of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River and will hold it through 2005. The presidency and the Commission also cover another major European river - the Tisza. It's the Hungarian Minister of Environment and Water Istvan Ori, who will chair the commission and one of his main goals is to improve flood protection without damaging the rivers' natural environment. This follows devastating floods in Central Europe in August of 2002.

More than 140 years after it was composed, Jacques Offenbach's opera Die Rhein Nixen or the Fairies of the Rhine has finally been given a fully - staged production. The Slovenian National Theatre Opera Company is giving ten performances of the work in the main hall of Ljubljana's Cultural and congress centre.

The Porrajmos, literally "the Devouring," is the term that the Roma use to describe the Nazi regime's attempt to wipe their people off the face of the Earth; for the genocidal wave of terror known to most of the world as the Holocaust. An estimated half million Roma were killed during the Second World War — only five percent of the Czech-born population survived. Nearly all who lived through internment in the Czech-run labour camps near Hodonin and Lety — now the site of a pig farm — later perished in the so-called "Gypsy family camp"

Czech and Slovak were both the official languages of Czechoslovakia; prior to the country's split in 1993, Czechs and Slovaks were regularly exposed to each other's languages and had no problems whatsoever understanding one another. Now, though, Czechs at least are no longer finding it so easy to understand their former federal brothers, and - for the first time - Czech public television has dubbed a Slovak serial.

Statesmen from some 40 countries gather at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz next week to mark the 60th anniversary of its liberation. Among them will be the German, Russian, Israeli, French and Polish presidents.

At the end of November last year, a large part of Slovakia's biggest and best known National Park was damaged by a strong wind storm. The park attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year and now Slovaks fear they might lose this important tourist trade. We went to the High Tatras to investigate the impact of the natural disaster on the economy of the region.

Hungarians have for the first time made it to the South Pole. Walking more than a hundred kilometres in strong winds Zoltan Acs and Krisztina Batori Kovalcsik - two experienced extreme athletes - were in a group of people to reach the southernmost point of the Globe. Now, telephone calls to the South Pole are a bit of a problem so Radio Budapest talked to the press coordinator of the mission, Edit Muranyi of Shannon Communications:

Last weekend Stipe Mesic won a second term as Croatia's President when he took 66 percent of the vote in a run-off election. The Mesic win has generally been welcomed in Europe. And, the re-election of Stipe Mesic has also been welcomed in neighbouring Slovenia, which has several ongoing disputes with Croatia, including a disputed border.