Taxi charges are to increase from Sunday with the fare charged per kilometer rising to 0.60 euros from 0.48 euros. Another hike is due in May 2010 when the rate will reach 0.72 euros per kilometer. From Sunday, the fare after midnight will rise from 0.84 euros to 1.05 euros. These incremental increases followed a gentleman’s agreement reached in April between unionists representing taxi drivers and then Transport Minister Evripidis Stylianidis.

New Democracy’s organizing committee yesterday rejected calls from two of the four leadership candidates, Dimitris Avramopoulos and Panayiotis Psomiadis, to change the rules so that people who are not party members can vote in December’s election. The two candidates suggested that people should be allowed to register as “friends” of the party, not fully fledged members, so that they can cast a ballot for the party’s next leader. On November 7, an extraordinary party congress is due to approve a change to ND’s constitution so that all party members can take part in the election.

The Public Power Corporation yesterday reminded customers who have paid to have a reduced nighttime electricity rate that from November 1 to 30 April 2010, it will be in effect between the hours of 3.30 p.m. and 5.30 p.m. and between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m.

Two hooded gunmen broke into a tax office in Ano Liosia, northwest of Athens, early yesterday afternoon and forced clerks working there to empty all the cash registers. As they were leaving, the gunmen fired their weapons in the air to deter office workers from following them. They fled on a stolen motorcycle which police later found abandoned a couple of blocks away from the tax office.

Police on the Dodecanese island of Kos yesterday were questioning a 24-year-old Dutch student who arrived on the island from the Turkish port of Bodrum on Sunday after discovering 4.6 kilograms of heroin in her suitcase. The student claimed not to have known about the drugs which had been hidden in specially concealed compartment in her suitcase. Customs officials on Kos and Rhodes have seized more than 18 kilograms of heroin in searches of young travellers coming from Turkey in the past three months.

A secondary school in the northeastern city of Alexandroupoli was temporarily closed yesterday after several pupils with flu symptoms tested positive for the H1N1 virus. The move followed the closure earlier this month of schools in Metamorphosi, northern Athens, in the Thessaloniki district of Panorama and in Hania, Crete. Similar outbreaks led to the closure of four schools in Attica, two state institutions and two private ones.