Municipal staff yesterday shut down landfills in Athens and Thessaloniki to protest reforms tabled in Parliament last week granting the right to municipal authorities to hire private firms for local waste management. Protesters have called for a response by tomorrow, threatening otherwise to intensify their protests. On Samothrace, an island in the northern Aegean, authorities on Saturday finished gathering thousands of tons of trash from the sides of roads following a 50-day strike by local street cleaners.

A large fire that broke out in a cafe in Dafni, southern Athens, on Sunday morning destroyed the two-floor wooden building but caused no injuries. The manager and several staff had been on the premises at the time but managed to escape unscathed, according to the fire service, which did not determine what had caused the blaze.

A 19-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman were killed, and three people slightly injured, after two cars veered off coastal Poseidonos Avenue near Glyfada early yesterday. One of the cars was sliced in two after smashing into a sign outside a gas station, police said. The two drivers and one passenger escaped relatively unscathed.

Two Greeks who were caught up in the terrorist attack on the Oberoi Trident Hotel in Mumbai, India, were safely transferred to Paris on Saturday aboard an airplane chartered by the French authorities. Both Greeks, a man and a woman, were said to be unharmed and in good health. They had become trapped in their hotel rooms during one of many raids by terrorists in India’s commercial capital, which has led to more than 170 deaths.

Commuters who have arranged a train journey on the network linking Athens, Thessaloniki and Alexandroupolis should contact railway authorities at telephone number 1110, as there have been changes to scheduled routes.

Unidentified intruders who opened up a hole in the wall of a National Bank branch in the northwestern district of Aghioi Anargyroi fled empty-handed after setting off the alarm, local police said. The would-be robbers removed the bank’s air-conditioning unit from one wall, opening up a large hole, which they climbed through, but as soon as they entered the bank’s basement, in the search of the safes, the alarm sounded.

A supermarket employee was in the hospital with head injuries yesterday after resisting the attempts of two would-be robbers to raid the cash registers of the store where he worked in Pendeli, north of Athens. The pair burst into the store and demanded that the cash registers be emptied but the employees refused, prompting one of the thieves to fire a gun, injuring one staff member in the head. It was unclear yesterday how serious his injuries were.