Hungary began evacuating villages and reinforced leaking dykes along the rising Danube River on Saturday, as central Europe's worst floods in over a decade headed toward Budapest.
Known mainly for its steelworks, the gritty industrial hub of Kosice in east Slovakia is hard at work reforging itself as a centre of creativity and the arts as it enters 2013 with the tag "European Capital of Culture".
The eurozone is unlikely to survive in its current form and one or more countries will probably have to leave the 17-nation single currency bloc, Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico said Sunday.