In Brief
ND LEADERSHIP
Bakoyannis calls on candidates to avoid personal attacks Dora Bakoyannis, one of the four candidates vying for the leadership of New Democracy, wrote to her three rivals yesterday to suggest there should be greater communication between them in order to prevent the election race from descending into a clash of personalities. «I think that extreme behavior, personal attacks and insulting language has to be avoided,» she said. Bakoyannis suggested that there should be «an open line of communication» between the four candidates without going into further details. FLU VACCINES Phase 1 to start November 10 The first phase of vaccinating the population against swine flu is to be carried out between November 10 and 25 with hospital staff, pregnant women and those who look after children under the age of 6 months at the top of the list. Some 1.5 million shots of the vaccine for the H1N1 virus are due to arrive in Greece next month and another 2 million in December. Frontex harassed Turkish authorities yesterday sent radar warnings to an aircraft of Frontex, the EU’s border-monitoring agency, which had been conducting a patrol in the Aegean as part of the organization’s efforts to curb the influx of illegal immigrants into Europe. The harassment of the Finnish aircraft, while it had been flying north of the island of Farmakonisi, was the seventh incident of its kind in the past six weeks. Emergency landing A Thomson Airlines aircraft that had been en route to London from the Cretan port of Iraklio early yesterday conducted an emergency landing at Athens’s International Airport. The plane landed in Athens for a preventive inspection after one of its windows was found to be cracked. Samothrace trash Large mountains of trash have sprung up on the streets and along the coastline of the island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean as a local landfill has not been operating for the past month due to residents’ protests, authorities said yesterday, expressing fears of a public health risk. The mayor of Samothrace, Yiannis Petroudas, said local authorities had appealed against the suspension of the landfill’s operation. Scooter fatalities A 38-year-old Greek man and a 25-year-old Bulgarian women were killed in separate road accidents involving scooters in the Cretan prefecture of Hania yesterday. In the first incident, the 38-year-old driver of a scooter veered off the road near Souda Bay and hit a protective barrier, suffering fatal injuries. In the second incident, a German woman driving a car collided with a scooter being driven by a Bulgarian man. The crash caused the death of the scooter driver’s 25-year-old Bulgarian wife who had been a passenger on the bike. ISAP disruption Ongoing engineering work on the Kifissia-Piraeus electric railway (ISAP) will disrupt services between Kifissia and Irini stations over the weekend. Commuters will be able to use their tickets on the X5 bus that will service the stations on the affected section today and Sunday. The Kifissia-bound platform of the Ano Patissia station is out of service.
