In Brief
CHILD PORN
PPC technician held for supplying obscene photos over Internet A 33-year-old computer technician for the Public Power Corporation, who allegedly supplied pictures of nude children to a Norwegian porn site from his office in Athens, has been arrested following a tip-off from police in Norway, officers from Attica’s child protection unit said yesterday. Officers confiscated a computer, cameras and CD-ROMs containing 12,000 pornographic pictures of children and babies from the office and home of the unnamed man. POWER PLANT BLAZE Court orders PPC to pay 9,000 euros in damages to two firemen A Kozani court yesterday ordered the Public Power Corporation to pay 9,000 euros in damages to two firemen involved in extinguishing a large blaze at the Aghios Dimitrios power plant in December 2001 which provoked emissions of toxic chemicals. The two firefighters lodged appeals one month after the fire when it was revealed that there had been toxic emissions. Another 23 firemen have lodged similar appeals. COURT RAID Burglars take computer hard drives Unidentified burglars broke into the court houses of the northern Peloponnesian town of Aigion early yesterday morning and removed the hard drives of two computers containing files with details of various legal cases, police said. The computers that were tampered with were in the lower court service and bar association offices. The closed-circuit television network had been disabled. Factory fire A total of 45 of the 80 barrels of pesticides outside a disused factory in Thessaloniki were «affected» by last Saturday’s fire but the emissions released during the blaze have caused neither long-term pollution to the atmosphere nor created a threat to citizens’ health, officials of Thessaloniki’s prefectural authority said following a meeting yesterday. «Dangerous (chemicals) for man and for the environment, such as dioxins and clophen were not produced,» the officials said. Food safety The National Food Inspection Agency (EFET) has «issued recommendations» to four out of 10 restaurants checked for health and safety standards in pre-Olympics inspections last year, officials said yesterday. Of the 1,710 state inspections conducted on restaurants last year, basic health and safety regulations were violated in 632 cases (37.6 percent), according to statistics released by EFET. The agency also issued warnings to hotels after 390 inspections conducted last year revealed 167 violations (42.8 percent). OA strike Unionists representing Olympic Airlines’ striking flight attendants were expected late yesterday to end their 75-day strike. OA has been using replacement crews. Gyms Consumer organization EKPOIZO said yesterday that it will file a collective suit against gym chains Universal and Dynamic Life for violation of the rights of consumers following a spate of complaints. EKPOIZO claims that the two companies issue credit cards to clients and debit them with fees for three years in installments, after inducing them with often false promises to sign ambiguously worded contracts in fine print, which they refuse to cancel even when the branches are shut down. Falcon accident The pilot of a government jet involved in a freak accident over Romania in 1999, which caused the deaths of a deputy minister and six other people, appeared in court yesterday for the hearing of his appeal against a five-year suspended jail sentence he received last summer. But the trial was postponed due to the absence of a key witness, civil aviation expert Akrivos Tsolakis. After the accident, Tsolakis had prepared a report attributing the accident partly to pilot error. In July 2002, a court found pilot Yiannis Androulakis guilty of multiple manslaughter and grievous bodily harm. Gas stations Synaspismos Left Coalition Euro MP Michalis Papayiannakis yesterday asked the European Commission to determine whether Greece has made any progress in curbing the operation of gas stations on the ground floor and basement levels of apartment blocks and lowering the levels of benzine – a carcinogen – in fuel, stressing the health risk faced by citizens.
