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"If you have no work, you have no life," says sixty year-old Wieslawa who has been working as a cleaning lady in Brussels for several years now. No, she hasn't got a permit but with unemployment running high in her home town of Biala Podlaska, she says she has no choice:

Just days after Slovenia joined the EU it was obvious that traffic was a problem in need of attention - especially along the border with Croatia where long delays are common. And with traffic volume expected to increase, Slovenia is hoping that joining the EU will help clear up some of those jams. Ksenija Samardzija-Matul reports:

Wednesday 12th May sees the beginning of one of Central Europe's major classical music events - the 59th Prague Spring Festival - bringing together top orchestras, ensembles and soloists from around the world. This year the festival is special: last Saturday was the centenary of the great Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's death. Radio Prague's David Vaughan spoke to the festival director Roman Belor, for a taste of this year's special Prague Spring.

Slovakia became a member of the EU on Saturday, May 1. Despite all the celebrations she could have experienced in Bratislava, Martina Grenova from Radio Slovakia International set off for a journey to the UK instead. Travelling by coach from the Czech town of Brno, she met a group of Slovaks and Czechs leaving their countries behind to find a job in Britain. Great Britain along with Ireland and Sweden have left their labour markets open for EU newcomers. On the 21 hour journey in an overcrowded bus, Martina realized that citizens of the new EU

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

The famous novel "Fatelessness" by Hungary's Nobel-prize winning author, Imre Kertesz, is now also available in the Lovary language, the most widespread dialect among the Roma community in Hungary. The novel is about life in a World War Two concentration camp, and is translated by the renowned Romany poet and compiler of a Lovary-Hungarian dictionary, Gyorgy Rostas Farkas. The translation was launched on Holocaust Memorial Day. At around 12 million the Roma are the biggest minority in the enlarged Europe, and the Lovary dialect is so widely spoken,

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.