ICE - special | All stories

A visit to New York's Metropolitan is a dream of all opera fans but if you a Polish music lover, until now you had to fly there to to get a taste of a Met performance. But not any more - The Met has come to Poland - not on tour of course but as live, high-definition broadcast performances.

As the New Year began Croatia began enforcing what it calls an ecological and fisheries zone in the Adriatic Sea. The goal of the zone is to protect Adriatic Sea fishing stocks which Croatia says are being depleted by Italy's larger fishing fleet. Croatia had agreed to allow exemptions for EU countries, especially its neighbours Italy and Slovenia, but its decision to enforce the zone of the has once again upset those ever-fragile relations between Croatia and Slovenia.

At a debate on the future of Kosovo in the United Nations last week Serbia's President Boris Tadic said Belgrade could never accept a fully independent state - while Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said independence is crucial for the success of the region.

The US plans for missile defences in Central Europe were debated in Prague this week with both sides wheeling out their big guns. For the “anti” camp the secret weapon is Philip Coyle, one of America's leading experts on missile defence technology. Mr Coyle, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration and was in charge of all weapons testing at the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001, has worked on missiles and how to stop them for the last 40 years. Today he's a senior adviser to the Washington-based Center for Defence Information,

There's been a long-running public debate over the quality of University education in Slovakia. In the course of the discussion a major outbreak of plagiarism has been revealed. Students are putting forward other people's work as their own. As Michal Groch reports, Slovakia seems to have a high level of tolerance for plagiarism.

An exhibition celebrating the history of the gay and lesbian movement in the Czech Republic has just opened in Prague. It is mostly focused on gay culture over the last two decades, a time when Czech homosexuals made great strides in achieving equality. When it comes to a close in the capital, the exhibition will tour the country.

In Poland, one of the first decisions of the new government is to have Polish troops withdrawn from Iraq by the autumn. The move has been approved by the president. But 2008 will see even more difficult foreign missions for Polish soldiers.

This week, a group of 400 nongovernmental organisations from all over Slovakia submitted official requests to withdraw a proposed new law on associations. The groups fear that if the new law on associations is approved in its original version it will have substantially negative effects on the entire NGO sector.

The delicate issue of US missile defences in Central Europe was on the agenda when Poland's prime minister Donald Tusk arrived in Prague for talks with his Czech counterpart Mirek Topolanek. Washington wants to build a launching pad for ten interceptor missiles in Poland, to work in tandem with an early warning radar system across the border in the Czech Republic. But Mr Tusk is not as fervently pro-American as his predecessor Jaroslaw Kacynski, and Prague and Warsaw are beginning to look slightly out of step on missile defence.

Just a few weeks ago, the future seemed bright for the populist Slovenian opposition party the SNS. Their president, the outspoken Zmago Jelinčič, had a strong showing in presidential elections - especially in the eastern parts of the country. But a row at a party led to a sudden rift, and half of the parliamentary deputies defected.