BUCHAREST (AP) – Romania has evacuated another 61 of its citizens from the Gaza Strip, Foreign Minister Adrian Cioroianu said yesterday. The Romanian Embassy in Israel chartered two buses which took the Romanians, mostly women and children, to Jordan where they were scheduled to later board a flight chartered by the government, said Cioroianu. “I decided to leave. I left my house there, what I had and my husband,” Denisa El Hato, one of the evacuees, told news television Realitatea TV. Last week, authorities repatriated 31 Romanians from Gaza.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – The World Trade Organization has told Serbia it can join by the end of next year and Belgrade plans a series of reforms to meet membership requirements, Economy Minister Mladjan Dinkic said yesterday. “Our delegation was told today that Serbia could become a WTO member by the end of 2008,” Dinkic told Reuters after meeting WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy in Geneva. “We have agreed a timetable of activities that need to be completed... These include regulatory changes and a revised list of goods.” Serbia must improve hygiene standards at border crossings where goods leave the country, strengthen food safety regulations, lift non-customs protection and reduce customs protection from the current average of 6.5 percent.

A bomb derailed seven cars of a freight train in eastern Turkey, a news agency reported yesterday. No injuries were reported. Kurdish rebels are active in the area and have carried out similar strikes in the past. The bomb was planted on a railroad connecting the eastern provinces of Erzincan and Tunceli, the Anatolia news agency reported. It did not say when the attack occurred. The train was not carrying any cargo at the time. (AP)

Croatia hosted a record number of tourists, heading mainly to the country’s Adriatic coast, during the first six months of the year, the national tourist board said yesterday. Since January more than 3.1 million tourists have visited the former Yugoslav republic, an increase of 10 percent from the same period last year, a board statement said. Tourists were mainly Germans and Austrians, followed by Slovenians, Italians, Czechs, French, British and Hungarians. Croatia’s tourism sector has been gradually recovering since the country’s 1991-1995 war of independence from the former Yugoslavia, which inflicted a heavy blow on the industry. (AFP)