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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.

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.

With just over a week to go before the European Union begins membership talks with Turkey, the campaign against Turkey has been stepped up in Slovakia. But a new report from the London-based Centre for European Reform, a pro-Europe think tank, says Turkey is more likely to be an asset than a burden if it joins the European Union.

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.

Brown Bears once roamed across much of Europe but in many parts today they are either threatened or extinct. In fact, the total population is put at only 15,000. But Slovenia remains a quiet refuge for some of those brown bears. And the small Alpine country is now helping repatriate bears back into parts of the Alps from which they have disappeared.