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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.

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.

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.

As the current holder of the EU presidency Slovenia is responsible for steering the EU's package on energy and climate change through the various stages of decision making. The European Commission this week spoke of "historic" plans to make Europe "the first economy for the low-carbon age". In Slovenia the need to do this is being driven home by some alarming observations of changes already occurring in Slovenia's climate and the impact that's having on water and agriculture.

The Czech president Vaclav Klaus is notorious for outspoken views on climate change. He calls global warming a "false myth" and ambitious environmentalism "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity". He takes particular offence at those he believes are making political milage out of global warming and is involved in an ongoing feud with the Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. But do Czechs really share their president's opinions on global warming? And if they don't, then does it matter?

In Poland climate change is yet to become a hot topic of debate. But as winters become shorter and warmer, and summers bring more rain and erratic weather, there's a growing realisation that that global warming is having an effect. In the southern city of Kraków, John Beauchamp of Polish Radio reports on how Poland is becoming aware of climate change, and how some people make a living as eco-warriors.

Slovakia is seeing the effects of global warming in an unusual, and for some people, frightening way. The country has a relatively large population of brown bears and due to unseasonally warm winter temperatures they've been waking early from their hibernation. As Christopher George reports from Bratislava neither bears nor humans are happy about it.