ICE - special | All stories

Fox hunting in the Czech Republic may not come with all of the red coats and horses that you might expect to see elsewhere - often it's more a case of one man and his dog in the woods. But the issue is just as controversial as elsewhere. The Czech parliament has just approved a law which allows hunters to train their dogs through direct contact with foxes. Previously, foxes and dogs had to be kept apart by a cage during training, so that neither suffered injury. Animal rights groups are dismayed by the move.

In Poland, a heated debate is under way in most of the country's media following the publication of a book on Polish-Jewish relations after World War Two. It is by a Polish-born US sociologist who claims that anti-Semitism found fertile ground in Poland after the Holocaust.

The Slovak public broadcaster STV is under fire. Not only is it facing a campaign which wants to cancel compulsory fees which form the broadcaster's funding base, it also received a challenge from documentary film makers questioning the quality of STV's programming.

A no-confidence motion against Slovenia's interior minister was rebuffed last week after a marathon session that ended in the early morning hours. The no-confidence vote came from two leftwing parties in parliament: the Liberal Democrats (LDS) and its offshoot, Zares. Slovenia's government has suffered turmoil over the past year.

Austria's government is to set up a commission to investigate allegations of police negligence in the case of Natascha Kampusch - the young woman who spent 8 years in a tiny cellar after being kidnapped at the age of 10. Her story made headlines around the world in 2006. The commission will also investigate allegations of abuse of office by officials in the interior ministry.

In Poland, cinema buffs and the film-making community are in jubilant mood. The list of Oscar nominations includes several Polish names, with the nation's most acclaimed director Andrzej Wajda leading the field. Michał Kubicki of Polish Radio's External Service reports on the pre-Oscar euphoria.

Privatisation of publicly owned utilities such as power, post and telecommunications rarely seem to run smoothly in Central Europe. Apart from a reluctance by many political players to see national icons fall into foreign hands, corruption allegations are all too common. And Slovenia, which holds the EU presidency is no exception. Plans to sell a large part of Telekom Slovenia are threatening to split the coalition government.

The recent conflict in Kenya has caught the attention of the Slovak media. More than 800 Kenyans have died and tens of thousands have fled their homes since a disputed election in December. The brutal nature of the crisis is leading Slovak non-governmental organizations to work together to help. They've come up with a novel idea; an auction of paintings by Kenyan artists.

There’s a rather unusual film festival underway at a Prague cinema at the moment. Called “The Magic Eights”, it examines the strange significance of the number "8" in modern Czech history. The festival features around a dozen films either made in or about the crucial moments in the country’s recent past, most of which occurred in a year ending in "8".

Austrian prosecutors are investigating new allegations against a former Nazi concentration camp guard whom it is alleged beat a man to death at the Majdanek camp in Poland. The person named by prosecutors is a woman, now 85 years old, and believed to be living in Vienna. The new material has come from sources in Poland.