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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.

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.

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.

Hundreds of elderly men took part in an emotional gathering at the Czech Ministry of Defence this week, recalling their days in the "army" as young men. But they weren't regular soldiers - not allowed to carry weapons, they were in reality forced labourers, punished by the Communists for their class backgrounds.

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.

Poland has for decades been a land of emigrants - with Poles migrating to all corners of the world. But now it finds migrants and asylum seekers are choosing to settle on Poland's shores - and that's causing some problems. But efforts are being made to help integrate these newcomers. Among those efforts is a new centre in Warsaw opened by the group "Missionaries of the Divine Word". Radio Polonia visited the center: