EU agrees with all candidates on completion of accession talks

Leaders from the fifteen European Union states and ten mainly ex-communist candidates agreed on final entry terms late on Friday, ending years of negotiation and decades of division. The Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who steered the milestone summit to its successful conclusion despite last-minute snags and bickering over funding for future members, said that "one of the darkest and bloodiest chapters in European history" had been closed. The new members, expected to join the bloc in 2004, will be Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The new recruits will now have to quickly implement wide-ranging economic and institutional reforms to meet EU standards.