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Somehow Slovenia seems to be a mecca for long distance swimmers. There's Slovenian Martin Strel who's swum the Danube, the Amazon, the Mississippi and the Yangtze. Now the American swimmer Mimi Pettersen Hughes has swum the entire length of the Drava river which runs through Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary to its end in the Danube. On her way through Maribor in Slovenia, Radio Slovenia International's Tamara Cucnik caught up with Mimi Pettersen Hughes and asked her; why is she swimming the Drava?

EU leaders in Brussels have reached agreement on what has become known as the Reform Treaty - the successor to the draft European constitution. There were lots of demands by individual nations - there are after all 27 of them now - but it was a compromise over a new voting system, demanded by Poland, which in the early hours of Saturday morning finally facilitated the breakthrough.

It's not so many years since young westerners were moving to central and eastern European cities like Prague in order to live on the cheap. Today, however, prices in the region are starting to catch up on western European cities. Bratislava this year jumped from 48th to 31st most expensive city in the World Cost of Living Survey run by the consulting firm Mercer. Radio Prague's Dita Asiedu spoke to Mercer's Jana Kurtinova, and asked: how are prices in the Czech capital?

Bratislava is buzzing with the story of the tram driver who lost his tram. Ivan Petoprsty stopped his tram for a toilet break and when he came back the tram was nowhere to be seen. It had been stolen from right outside the terminal station. There would seem to be limited opportunities for a getaway in a tram.

Vodka is the drink of choice for many in northern, central and eastern Europe. It has a long tradition and that tradition stipulates it's made a certain way and from certain raw materials. The Poles prefer potatoes while the Fins and Swedes like grain. And they wanted the EU to ban anything else from carrying the Vodka name. The European parliament saw it differently. Even after many samples of real Polish vodka they voted to allow spirits made from other sources - including bananas and grapes - to carry the vodka label. That's given the traditional

Hungary is trying to bring down its energy consumption. Partly for the obvious reasons; consumers will save money and Hungarians will be doing their bit to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But it's also because the EU is insisting that all of its member states have a plan for improving their energy efficiency.

Just days from a European Union summit which is meant to re-launch Europe's much delayed constitutional treaty, Poland is threatening to spoil the party. Warsaw is insisting voting rights be revisited. It wants a system based on the square root of member states' populations. This would mean less power for countries such as France and Germany and Poland retaining more of the influence granted to it under the Treaty of Nice. Poland is prepared use its veto to get its way.

Czechs fear that in a few years they will face great trouble finding a dentist. Currently there are about 1500 patients per one dentist, which puts the Czech Republic somewhere in the average within the European Union. However, the prognosis looks dim for future years. The age map of Czech dentists clearly shows that a strong majority of them are between 50 and 54. Czech medical schools, however, do not produce enough graduates to replace the soon to be retired specialists.

Hungary is famous for turning out scientists and scholars and now it's about to dedicate a whole television channel to science and technology. "Knowledge TV" or 'Think TV' goes on air in the autumn and will produced by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences with support from private investors.

Slovenia has one of the lowest rates of foreign direct investment among central and eastern European countries - something the government has been trying to change. But when a Russian firm entered the Slovenian steel market, it fired up a whole furnace full of problems.