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While Slovakia was cheering its team in tennis, it was basketball fever that gripped neighbouring Slovenia last week, after the small country qualified for the world championships for the first time in its history. Thousands of Slovenes descended on Serbia's Belgrade to cheer and celebrate their national team. For many of them, it was a profound and patriotic experience as Belgrade used to be their capital too, before Slovenia gained independence in 1991.

Do influenza pandemics occur on a regular cycle and, more importantly, with the last outbreak a good four decades ago is the world due for another? The World Health Organisation warns that the bird flu virus in several Asian countries could unleash a human influenza pandemic; the darkest prognosis: 50 million people dead. Luckily, Asia's battle with the virus has not resulted in mass hysteria, but the world's virologists are busy preparing...just in case.

Slovak tennis players made history by making it, for the very first time, to the final of the Davis Cup. After defeating Argentina, the favourites to win the title this year, Slovakia faces Croatia in the final, scheduled to take place in Bratislava in December.

In Poland, where parliamentary elections were just held, the nation has spoken with a clear message: 'out with the left and in with the right'. But the big question now is how to put together a new government. The conservatives, the true winners of the general election, upset the liberals (their future coalition partners) by picking a little-known former chief of parliament's treasury committee as candidate for prime minister. What's more, the leaders of both parties are in the race for the presidency - the nation goes to the polls for that election

"Please sir, I want some more" - a line from a classic that needs no introduction. Many of you have read the book and others have seen its adaptation on your TV screens. The newest adaptation of Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens' classic novel of life on the streets of Victorian London, was made by one of the world's most famous film directors, Roman Polanski and has just premiered in Prague. Oliver Twist is the latest in a whole string of major movies to be filmed in the Czech capital, most of them at the city's Barrandov studios. So is it any

Slovenia gained its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and since then a good number of young Slovenes have been making the most of chances to study abroad. But they're the exception. Slovene's are among Europe's most stay-at-home people. Most don't even want to move within the country.

Ahead of this weekend's elections most Poles think the result is a foregone conclusion. The current left-wing minority cabinet has been implicated in some well publicized corruption scandals including allegations of bribes to change media laws and shady privatisation deals. So, cleaning up corruption became a central theme of the election campaign.

The famed pursuer of Nazi war criminals, Simon Wiesenthal, died in Vienna this week and was buried in Israel. He was a true Central European - born in the town of Buczacs when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - it's now in Ukraine. He studied in Vienna and was an architect in Prague when the German army moved in. As a Jew he was imprisoned and eighty-nine members of his family were to die in the Holocaust. Simon Wiesenthal survived. And he lived and worked in Austria from the war's end until his death - despite horrific experiences in

Hungary was one of a number of Central European countries which offered help to the United States in the wake of hurricane Katrina. A group of Hungarian rescue professionals has just returned from the area. By the time they got there, it was not their rescue skills that were needed but their clean-up skills. Radio Budapest spoke to David Gal, a member of the team.

Both the Czech and Polish parliaments were this week debating the controversial privatisation of the Czech oil and gas giant Unipetrol to Poland's PKN Orlen. Critics claim that PKN acquired a controlling stake in Unipetrol earlier this year only after bribes were paid to senior Czech government officials, a charge they flatly deny.