SEZANA, Slovenia (AFP) – With just two weeks to go before Slovenia joins the European Union’s border-free Schengen area, bulldozers were already beginning to dismantle control points along the border with Italy. At Sezana, on the border with Trieste in Italy, where in the past cars could wait hours to cross during peak season, four out of five booths used by customs and police offers were dismantled. “Now we’ll be able to cross the border without even slowing down,” said Kristjan, a 32-year-old resident, while watching the booths being removed. There was a similar scene at Vrtojba, the crossing point between Nova Gorica in Slovenia and Gorizia in Italy, where most of the booths there were removed within a few hours, leaving a single unit standing there until December 21. Under an agreement, finalized by EU interior ministers in Brussels yesterday, eight Central European states – the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia – plus Malta will join the so-called Schengen area on December 21.

SARAJEVO (AP) – Four men wearing police uniforms and armed with automatic weapons stormed Sarajevo international airport’s cargo zone and stole 1.3 million euros ($1.9 million), the district attorney’s office said yesterday. A police officer guarding the four bags of money before their planned transfer to a bank was held at gunpoint, while the thieves loaded the cash into a car and drove away on Wednesday afternoon, local media reported. The money belonged to ABS Bank, a member of the Austrian Erste Bank Group. The getaway vehicle, along with the Heckler & Koch automatic weapons, was later found burned at an abandoned military base near the capital.

Polish police yesterday said they had arrested around 20 Romanians who were using forged British credit cards to withdraw cash. “Five groups of three to four Romanian citizens have been arrested in the past five months,” Polish national police spokesman Zbigniew Urbanski told AFP. The gang created cards with magnetic strips thanks to reading devices stashed in cashpoints in Britain, and used hidden cameras to record personal identification numbers (PINs) typed into the keypad by the genuine card holder. (AFP)

An equal proportion of Romanians believe former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had a positive and a negative influence on his country, a survey published yesterday by the Soros Foundation shows. The study showed that some 23 percent of Romanians saw Ceausescu as the leader “who had done the most good for his country,” while 24 percent said he had done “the most damage.” Of the 2,000 people interviewed for the survey, some 48 percent also said “life was better” before the fall of communism in 1989, while 33 percent argued the opposite and 11 percent saw no change in their lives. (AFP)