In Brief
SKIN CANCER
Help line offers advice for protection from the sun The National Anti-Cancer Society has set up a help line to advise sunbathers on the best forms of protection against skin cancer. Expert advice is available daily from 8.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. and from 4.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. on tel 010.641.2000. DROWNINGS Coast guard officers recover seven bodies in 48 hours Coast guard officers have recovered the bodies of five drowned men from different coastal regions across the country in the last 48 hours, the Merchant Marine Ministry said yesterday. On Thursday, the bodies of five men aged between 38 and 58 were recovered off the coast of the southern city of Kalamata and the Ionian islands of Cephalonia and Corfu. Yesterday, another two bodies, of elderly men, washed up onto Saronic Gulf beaches in Argolis and at Varkiza near Athens, according to the Macedonian Press Agency. CYPRUS Refugees appeal to ECHR A group of 88 Cypriot refugees have lodged an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, demanding compensation for being forbidden access to their properties in Aghios Memnonas, near Famagusta in Cyprus’s Turkish-occupied north, the Athens News Agency said yesterday. The lawyer representing all 88 landowners said his clients have the same case as Tina Loizidou, who in 1998 won a landmark ruling obliging Turkey to pay her $900,000 in damages but has yet to receive the money, the ANA reported. Greenpeace Turkish coast guard officials early yesterday ended a 10-hour protest aboard a Greek-registered oil tanker in the Black Sea, detaining about a dozen Greenpeace activists who had chained themselves aboard the vessel to protest against oil industry pollution. The protesters, who occupied the Crude Dio as it approached the Bosporus Strait on Thursday afternoon, were taken for police questioning while the Crude Dio continued its voyage to Italy, crossing the Bosporus Strait as planned. Pontic propaganda? Omer Asan, a Greek-speaking writer from Of in Trebizond, northeastern Turkey, faces a Turkish court on Wednesday charged with allegedly disseminating «disruptive propaganda» via his book «The Culture of the Pontus,» reports said yesterday. Greek Euro MPs and groups representing Greeks from the Black Sea region have reportedly appealed to Turkish authorities against the trial of Asan, who was indicted for «insulting the person of Kemal (Ataturk)» and whose controversial book was confiscated from bookstore shelves by Turkish police in January, seven years after it was published. Migrant smuggling Police in the northwestern province of Florina yesterday arrested a Greek man they believe is part of a ring smuggling illegal immigrants into Greece via the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Petros Pappas, 38, had four Albanians in his car when he was stopped near the village of Ethniki, said police, adding that the would-be migrants had paid 600 euros each to an unidentified individual to be taken to an unguarded spot on the Greek-FYROM border where Pappas had picked them up. Also yesterday, port authorities on Evia detained 50 immigrants – of undetermined nationality – and the Polish captain of the sailing boat which had carried them to the island. Teenage dealer Police confiscated just under 100 grams of heroin late on Thursday night and detained a 17-year-old Albanian youth in Omonia Square, central Athens, as he was preparing to hand it over to an unidentified man who disappeared before police could stop him. Bogus tickets Police in Thessaloniki yesterday warned citizens to be wary of unidentified fraudsters selling forged tickets for non-existent theatrical productions, at the cost of 30 euros each, under the pretense that they are fund-raising for the Panhellenic Union of Pensioners and Veterans of the Greek Police.
