Cypriot President Glafcos Clerides and Turkish-Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash yesterday concluded the fifth round of UN-mediated face-to-face talks aimed at reunifying their divided island, seemingly as far away from a compromise as ever. Cypriot government spokesman Michalis Papapetrou told reporters that no progress had been made. The leaders are scheduled to resume talks on August 26 before meeting UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Paris on September 6. “Expectations are still 180 degrees on opposite sides,” Denktash said.

Complaints about profiteering top the list of consumer complaints this summer, with 8,203 objections to excessive price hikes filed up until the end of July, the Institute of Consumer Protection (INKA) said yesterday. Restaurants, cafeterias appear to be the worst offenders, with gas stations, mini-markets and kiosks close behind, INKA said, adding that businesses seem to have taken advantage of the distraction of the November 17 investigation to jack up their prices.

Police on the island of Crete yesterday caught a fourth man in connection with Thursday’s botched bank robbery in the southern village of Tymbaki, and are seeking another two accomplices. Manolis Scarlatos, 27, was arrested in his father’s hotel in the nearby tourist resort of Aghia Galini, where the gang allegedly stayed before the armed robbery, which went spectacularly wrong as police, alerted by neighbours, ambushed the robbers as they exited the bank.

Turkey still considers Greece a prime threat to its national security due to possible tensions arising from the potential accession to the EU of a divided Cyprus and Turkey’s eventually joining the union, the Turkish daily Millyet reported yesterday. The article contradicts a report on CNN Turk on Thursday, which said that Turkey’s Supreme Military Council had downgraded Greece and Syria from prime threats to Turkish national security, replacing them with Iraq and Iran.

Turkey's defense

Attica taxi drivers yesterday afternoon staged a four-hour work stoppage to attend the funeral of a 61-year-old colleague, who suffered a fatal heart attack on Thursday morning after being fined and having his number plates confiscated for overcharging passengers on a trip to the Athens airport. The cabbie had been unfairly treated, according to the leaders of the taxi union.

Ongoing works to upgrade Omonia Station mean that passengers traveling from Kifissia toward Piraeus on the urban electric railway can only disembark at the station’s central platform.

The six members of the Greek rock band Ypogeia Revmata yesterday admitted to group consumption of marijuana following a police raid on their tour bus which unearthed more than 33 grams of the drug. The band were on their way to a the River Party concert at Nestorio, in northern Greece, when police stopped and searched their bus in the town of Kozani. A prosecutor released all six band members who are to appear in court in February.

A guard at a US media-monitoring station in Nicosia, who claimed to have been attacked by two Arabs, has been arrested and charged with filing a false report, local police said yesterday. Haralambos Iakovou, 63, said he had been assaulted by two knife-wielding men of Arab origin while he patrolled the compound of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. In January, Iakovou claimed that unknown individuals — again Arabs — had attempted to break into the compound. A state pathologist who examined Iakovou said his wounds were self-inflicted.