In Brief
Weather chaos – State of emergency in Patras after floods The government yesterday declared a state of emergency in the Achaia prefecture of the north-western Peloponnese and urged citizens to use caution after heavy rain caused damage and chaos in and around the town of Patras. Patras fire services, called out more than 300 times to flooded homes and shops this weekend, were yesterday searching for a father and his son who disappeared after heavy rain swept their car into the Diakonari stream in Patras’s Eglykada district. The car was found but Alexios Antonopoulos, 53, and his son Ioannis, nine, were still missing late yesterday. Meanwhile, heavy snow and sleet isolated many towns in Macedonia and Thrace and forced the closure of Thessaloniki’s airport. And drivers using the national road at Larissa suffered major delays yesterday as trucks plowed through the snow. Schools in most parts of central and western Macedonia, Thrace and Thessaly will remain closed today. Police-station bomb. An explosion in the early hours of Saturday damaged the police station at Paramythia, a small town southwest of Ioannina in Epiros, as well as several nearby shops and parked cars. No one was injured in what police believe was an attack by a local smuggling gang trafficking drugs or guns. No one claimed responsibility for the predawn attack. New Panathinaikos coach. Sergio Marcarian is the new coach of Panathinaikos as of today, the football club announced yesterday. Marcarian, 57, fired last month as coach of the Paraguay national team, has signed an 18-month contract worth 520 million drachmas to manage the Greek First Division team. Pirate-CD arrests. Athens police this weekend arrested three people who allegedly sought to profit by reproducing pirate CDs using sophisticated equipment kept at one of their homes. Thomas Michopoulos and Thodoros Sepetzis, both 33, and Eleni Maryioli, 28, face charges of forgery and violation of the intellectual copyright law after police raided Michopoulos’s home in the Athenian suburb of Haidari and confiscated a system capable of reproducing 250 digital CDs per hour as well as 3,500 pirate digital CDs, more than 1000 pirate digital CD-ROM games, blank CDs, cases and a list of handwritten orders. A raid on Maryioli’s home in Athens’s Aegaleo district unearthed over 8,000 pirate digital CDs.
