Thousands of Albanian immigrants pass New Year in their homeland

TIRANA, Jan. 1 – Tens of thousands of Albanian immigrants landed back home for the New Year festivities. The stream of refugees was noted especially on their return to their countries as many were stranded to the border for weather problems of for a computer glitch. The Adriatic and Ionian Seas were very rough early this week creating problems for many ferries going to neighboring Italy. Greece’s main border post with Albania was shut for more than 10 hours Tuesday due to an outage in the computer system that was used to inspect people entering Europe’s border-free Schenghen Zone, according to Greek authorities. Thousands of Albanian immigrants returning to Greece after the Christmas and New Year holidays were affected by the closure. The Kakavia border post reopened shortly after 11:00 local time after the facility was reconnected with the Schenghen Information System, a security database used by the 15 countries which have implemented the agreement. As many as 70,000 people were waiting at the border post during the outage, blamed by border post officials on telephone connection problems. Active members of the Schenghen Agreement are Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Finland and Sweden, as well as non-European Union members Norway and Iceland.