In Brief
DOCTORS EXONERATED
Four acquitted over toddler’s death A Thrace appeals court has cleared three doctors and a former director of Xanthi’s prefectural hospital charged with the «manslaughter through negligence» in 1997 of a 5-year-old boy infected with meningitis, in a decision made public on Saturday. The court cleared the four – who had been exonerated by a lower court before a prosecutor lodged an appeal – by two votes to one. The mother of Vassilis Kourtoglou claims that the defendants had not diagnosed her son as suffering from meningitis early enough and had delayed transferring him to an Alexandroupolis hospital. She is to appeal to the Supreme Court. Medicine prices A plenary session at the country’s highest court, the Council of State, has ruled that the state-imposed ceiling on medicine prices in Greece is illegal and violates the Constitution because it sets prices at below-production costs, court sources said on Saturday. The system is ill-conceived because it does not take into account the operating costs of a business before setting its prices, the court ruled. Roadworks Drivers using the Athens-Lamia and Athens-Corinth national roads will experience disruptions around key junctions from today as roadworks get under way. Athens-bound traffic will be restricted to two lanes on the section of the Athens-Lamia national road between the Markopoulo and Malakasa junctions from today until May 5. Lamia-bound traffic will be disrupted from May 6-12. And from today until June 10, drivers on the Athens-Corinth national road will have no access to the right-hand traffic lane between the Aspropyrgos distillery and Dimocratias Avenue, in both directions. Armenian genocide Government and parliamentary officials yesterday attended a ceremony in Athens to honor the memory of the estimated 1.5 million Turkish Armenians massacred by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. In Thessaloniki, hundreds of Armenians marched on the Turkish consulate to demand that Ankara recognizes the genocide. Holocaust A memorial plaque was installed yesterday at Thessaloniki’s railway station for the tens of thousands of Greek Jews who were carried away by train from the northern city to be massacred in German concentration camps during World War II.
