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There is a Czech proverb which says "The more languages you speak, the more you are a person." As Pavla Horakova now reports, Czech Television and Radio Prague recently carried out their own little survey: asking foreign journalists based in Prague to help them test to what extent that maxim holds true for future Czech Euro-MPs.

Can you explain qualified majority voting, horizontal measures and of course - gender mainstreaming? Talking about the EU is confusing. Chris Cummins spoke to Jackie Davis, editor of the Brussels magazine, E-Sharp.

An international train is about to arrive at the tiny railway station of Skalite, a little town of 5,000 people located on the Slovak-Polish border and not so far from the Czech one too. The station looks almost empty in the pleasant morning sunshine and looking around one could hardly imagine that one of the major pan-European transport corridors connecting Bratislava to Warsaw is supposed to cross the hilly Skalite area. Some 250 kms away in Bratislava politicians speak a lot about millions of euro pouring into such projects now Slovakia is a

At the beginning of this week the European Commissioner for External Relations Chris Patten and Enlargement Commissioner Günther Verheugen gave Croatia the go-ahead to start negotiations to gain full EU membership. What was the reaction in Croatia itself and what are expectations in neighbouring Slovenia? Ksenija Samardzija Matul from Radio Slovenia International has more:

Just fifteen years ago it would have been unthinkable for citizens of countries on one side of the Iron Curtain to vote in elections held on the other. In June this will become a reality. In a few days' time eight former communist countries will be joining the European Union, and elections to the European Parliament will follow six weeks later. EU citizens who are resident in another member country will be entitled to vote for that country's candidates, and that includes the new members. Radio Prague's David Vaughan, a British citizen and Prague

Over 6,000 young Jewish young people from around the world and 600 Poles have taken part in the 2.5 kilometre trek from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the route of the death march taken by more than one million Jews during the Holocaust. This report from Bogdan Zaryn begins with Sophie, a Jewish teenager from Canada who's come to Poland for the very first time...

Austrians vote for a new President this Sunday. The two candidates are the current Foreign Minister, Benita Ferrero-Waldner of the People's Party and senior Social Democrat Heinz Fischer. At the close of campaigning, opinion polls put Mr Fischer slightly ahead but Mrs Ferrero-Waldner was within striking distance. Genie Johnson reports.

The well-known American financier of Hungarian origin, George Soros, recently said that the ten countries joining the European Union on May 1st should try to come into the euro zone as early as possible because their economies are highly vulnerable to speculation. Judit Barta, a research fellow at the Budapest-based economic research institute GKI very much agrees. She talked to Sandor Laczko of Radio Budapest.

Last week Slovaks elected their next president. The winner Ivan Gasparovic beat his rival Vladimir Meciar by almost 20 percent. He has been in politics for more than 13 years, but for most of that time has been viewed as the second man behind his colleague and party leader Vladimir Meciar.

Only a few weeks ahead of Slovenia's EU accession, debates on the consequences for Slovenia's economy have started again. What will change and what are the expectations of Slovenia's experts in this field?