NEWS

In Brief

ARAB SUMMIT

Saddam has one last chance, Papandreou tells leaders in Egypt Foreign Minister George Papandreou on Saturday told a summit of Arab League leaders in Egypt that Iraq had one last chance to avert a US-led war by immediately disarming according to the provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 1441. A proposal by the United Arab Emirates that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein go into exile – which was not approved – was interesting, Papandreou said. Papandreou, who last week met with US officials in Washington, told the summit that the United Nations is open to creating a separate Palestinian state but that the USA wants to resolve the Iraqi crisis first. TEACHER DIES Bus toll: 15 dead, one missing A 35-year-old schoolteacher, who had been in critical condition for eight days after an intercity coach in which she was traveling plunged into a river in northern Greece, died yesterday. Evdoxia Manikatzi had undergone three operations since the coach’s fatal plunge into the Aliakmon River, south of Thessaloniki, which caused the deaths of another 14 people. Rescue workers yesterday found a jacket identified as belonging to Thanassis Senias, 3, who has been missing since the crash in which his sister Stella, 8, died. The boy’s father said the jacket had been in a bag on the coach. The search continues today. Bajevic Dusan Bajevic, coach of Athenian soccer team AEK, claimed yesterday that he had received death threats. «If any members of my family are harmed, I will kill the leader of those who did this and then whoever did it,» Bajevic told a post-match news conference after his team beat OFI 3-0 yesterday. He did not elaborate. Kouyioumtzis dies Award-winning theater director and actor Mimis Kouyioumtzis died in Athens on Saturday at the age of 67. A key member of the Theatro Technis, Kouyioumtzis’s most recent contribution to the Athens theater scene was «One Minute and One Second.» Kouyioumtzis, who was suffering from cancer, is the third Greek actor to die in a week, following the deaths of Titos Vandis and Dimitris Potamitis. He is to be buried at a Palaio Faliron cemetery today. Anti-war protests A demonstration against a US-led war in Iraq caused traffic disruption in central Athens yesterday but there were no reports of violence. Yesterday, about 150 participated in an anti-war rally outside the US naval base at Souda Bay on Crete just before the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt docked at the port. A Communist-led protest was held also at Vouliagmeni, near a hotel where EU education ministers were meeting. Road damage It will be clear in another two months whether a detour needs to be constructed to carry traffic around a section of vital highway between the Peloponnesian towns of Tripolis and Kalamata that collapsed after subsidence and landslides last month, Environment and Public Works Minister Vasso Papandreou said on Saturday, following a visit to the highway’s junction at Tsakonas. Papandreou had said on Friday that the damage – caused after days of heavy rain – would have been fully repaired in 14 months’ time.

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