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It's taken a little time but Reality Television has reached Slovakia. In fact wherever you go on public transport, in offices and bars, everyone seems to be talking about it. We take a loser look at the television genre that's taken Slovakia by storm...

In the Czech Republic, the Roman Catholic Church is suffering from an acute shortage of priests, as the older generation near the end of their careers and few young Czech priests are ordained. But the Church has found a solution - "importing" priests from neighbouring Poland.

Not too many countries have a national anthem, which is at once a drinking song - and a call for peace. Slovenia does. On Tuesday, Slovenia celebrates "Preseren Day" in honor of its great national poet, France Preseren.

Norfolk and part of Suffolk in the UK, which have been competing for the title of "dental desert" among National Health Service patients have decided to remedy the situation by specialist imports from new EU member countries. Poland is to be the source of 200 such dental specialists in the nearest months thanks to an extra 1.8 million pound budget, spread across the U.K's Primary Care Trusts in greatest need of expanding the services to cut long waits for appointments.

The outbreak of the deadly respiratory disease known as SARS in Asia in 2003 showed how infectious diseases can spread across borders with alarming speed. In the United States, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention responds to such outbreaks but in Europe there is no continent wide response. Now, partly as a reaction to the SARS scare, the EU is setting up its Centre for Disease Control in Stockholm, Sweden.

The European Commission has told Slovakia it must lower its carbon dioxide emissions by 14 percent. This is required under the Kyoto protocol. But if Slovakia complies it will anger a number of local companies. The subsidiary of the US Steel company has already filed a legal challenge with a European court.

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"