NEWS

In Brief

ROBBER IN BLACK

Trial of Yiannis Dimitrakis delayed again, until April 2010 The appeal hearing of Yiannis Dimitrakis, a 30-year-old student linked to the so-called «Robbers in Black,» was yesterday postponed for a second time, until April 18. The trial, due to be heard yesterday, was postponed last week after Dimitrakis’s lawyers requested additional time to confer with their client following his transfer from Domokos Prison in central Greece to Attica’s Korydallos. The lawyers cited the same reason for the second extension. At a first instance hearing, Dimitrakis was handed a 25-year sentence for his part in an armed robbery of a branch of National Bank in central Athens in January 2006. VET SUSPENDED Civil servant caught taking bribe A vet who worked for the Agricultural Development Ministry has been suspended after being given a suspended prison sentence for accepting a bribe, it was revealed yesterday. The ministry did not specify the circumstances of the case although it did say he had been working in Evros, northeastern Greece, at the time. A local court gave him an 18-month jail term, suspended for three years, while Agricultural Development Minister Katerina Batzeli suspended the man and ordered him to appear before a ministerial disciplinary committee. Armed heists Police in Thessaloniki yesterday reported three armed raids in the northern city. The first occurred at around 3 a.m. when two gunmen held up the receptionist at a hotel in the city center, forcing him to hand over 350 euros. The second raid involved a lone gunman who netted an unspecified sum after threatening the owner of a convenience store in the district of Evosmos. Two robbers held up a supermarket in Toumba later the same day though it was unclear how much they netted. Swine flu Health authorities yesterday reported the deaths of another patient with swine flu, a 54-year-old man with no underlying ailments, bringing the total number of fatalities in Greece from people infected with the H1N1 virus to 52. Although most of these deaths have involved people who had been suffering from serious health problems when they contracted swine flu, an increasing number of people being admitted to intensive care are otherwise healthy. Fatal rage An 85-year-old man shot dead his 84-year-old wife at their home in the village of Levidi, in the Peloponnesian prefecture of Arcadia, early yesterday, before turning the gun on himself. Doctors said that the man’s injuries were serious but not life-threatening. It was not clear what provoked the elderly man’s outburst. TV fines Antenna TV, which hosts the popular show «Greece, You’ve Got Talent,» was fined 50,000 euros yesterday by the National Council for Radio and Television (ESR), which deemed that the program breached broadcasting rules about the protection of minors. ESR also imposed a 40,000-euro fine on Alter TV station as two of its current affairs shows, «Zougla» (Jungle) and «Kitrinos Typos» (Yellow Press), hosted by investigative journalist Makis Triantafyllopoulos, were deemed to have broken rules aimed at protecting a person’s character and preventing his or her innocence being questioned without sufficient evidence.

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