Parliament yesterday passed anti-terrorism legislation adopting the EU-wide arrest warrant on the strength of New Democracy’s governing majority in the plenum. PASOK, which had accepted the idea of the arrest warrant while in government, voted against the legislation, as did the small Synaspismos Left Coalition party. The Communist Party had walked out on the first day of the debate on the bill. PASOK said adopting the EU warrant did not mean that the government had to adopt it word for word without trying to make any improvements. Synaspismos said the descriptions of what constituted terrorist activity were too vague.

The government yesterday condemned the bomb attacks in Turkey which killed four people and expressed support for the Turkish government. “The Greek government condemns in the most categorical way today’s terrorist attacks in Ankara and Istanbul and expresses its revulsion at the tragic cost in human lives,” government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said. Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis is to fly to Turkey on Sunday for the NATO summit that starts on Monday.

Four killed in Istambul bomb blast ahead of NATO summit

MP and Former Culture Minister Evangelos Venizelos, one of the opposition PASOK party’s most senior officials, protested virulently yesterday at what he called “provocative acts which insult the reputation of Parliament and the whole legal regime,” following a security check conducted on him at Athens Airport. In a letter to the speaker of Parliament and the ministers of Public Order and Transport, Venizelos said he had passed security checks and had boarded Aegean Flight 530 for Thessaloniki when he was told that he could not travel unless he underwent another security check. The airport announced that it would look into Venizelos’s claims to see if necessary procedures had been followed.

A day after reducing murder charges against a truck driver involved in Greece’s worst traffic accident to a misdemeanor, the Larissa appeals court yesterday also reduced the charges of “murder with possible malice aforethought” against another five defendants, the owners and three employees of the plywood factory at which Dimitris Dollas had loaded his cargo. Twenty-one schoolchildren were killed on April 13, 2003, when the plywood came loose and sliced through their bus in the Vale of Tempe.

State hospitals in Athens and Piraeus will deal only with emergencies between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. today because of a work stoppage by doctors demanding bonuses for working through the Olympics and more funds for overtime work.

Torchbearer Christian Gobe, a handicapped basketball player from Geneva, carries the Olympic Flame over the city’s Mont Blanc Bridge yesterday. International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge also carried the torch, which is due in Paris today. Lit on March 25 in Ancient Olympia, the Olympic Flame is being carried through 27 countries before its entry, on August 13, to the main Olympic stadium in Athens.

Police on Cyprus said yesterday they were investigating claims that British and Scandinavian tourists are involved in organized sex romps in the Mediterranean during night cruises in international waters off the coast of the popular clubbing resort of Ayia Napa.