Cyprus Mail: News Articles in English, 00-04-02

Cyprus Mail: News Articles in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article

From: The Cyprus Mail at <http://www.cyprus-mail.com/>

April 2 , 2000

CONTENTS

[01] Limassol woman escapes bombers

[02] Villagers vow to bulldoze pylons in cancer protest

[03] Greens stage 'mild and controlled' Akamas protest

[04] Larnaca port begins &gt;make over=from containers to passengers

[05] An Illustrious visitor

[06] 60 pupils debate hot topics at World Championships

[07] Did they fool you yesterday?

[01] Limassol woman escapes bombers

A LIMASSOL woman had a lucky escape yesterday when she picked up a bomb that had been primed to explode.

Police on the south coast say they are also investigating a day of serious crimes including a mysterious blast, a car bomb aimed at a Cyprus Airways employee, and an arson attack on the holiday home of a former cabaret owner.

Limassol police said they were called to a block of flats in Ayios Andreas Street just after 1am after a woman living in the building found a yellow box in the entrance.

Not knowing what it was, the unnamed woman picked it up, had a look inside -- and found she was holding a bomb set to explode on a timer.

The police were called immediately and the bomb squad deactivated the device by 5.30am.

For more than four and a half hours the area round the building was cordoned off, and fire-engines and ambulances were on stand-by in case the device detonated.

One police source yesterday said they were working on the theory that the bomb=s intended target may have been a witness in the &gt;pink slips= case in which immigration officials and police are suspected of issuing work permits to cabaret artistes and others in exchange for cash.

Soon after the bomb had been made safe, however, an explosion rocked another area of Limassol and squads of patrol cars began a search for its exact location.

Police later found two sites on open ground they believe could have been be scene of a blast, in Linopetra and Mesa Yitonia, but they still do not know what caused the explosion.

In Paphos, meanwhile, a holiday home in the village of Yiolou was completely destroyed in what police believe was an arson attack.

Residents in the village called them at approximately 8am yesterday saying that they had seen flames coming out of the house, belonging to former cabaret owner Melios Yiannakas who was at his main home in Limassol at the time.

In another incident west of Paphos, villagers in Kissonerga were wakened by an explosion just after midnight. Police say it was caused by a bomb which completely destroyed a BMW outside the home of Cyprus Airways employee Charalambos Pissaras.

Both Yiannakas and Pissaras told police they could not think of anyone with a grudge against them who might have been responsible for the attacks.

April 2 , 2000

[02] Villagers vow to bulldoze pylons in cancer protest

ABOUT 300 Pano Polemidia residents protested yesterday at state plans to string more power lines through their village, and vowed to bulldoze any more pylons the Electricity Authority (EAC) tries to put up.

"We have a problem with this very high electricity in Kato Polemidia," protest organiser Andri Gavriel told The Sunday Mail.

"We don't want these (new power lines) because we have seven children with cancer in our village. Everybody believes the cancer comes to our village from the electricity."

"Because the voltage is very high, we want the government to remove the existing power lines," Gavriel said, "and we don't want them to put more electricity" through the village.

The protesters plan another demonstration on April 16 at the same site as yesterday's, about 1,000 metres from the new village hospital.

News reports yesterday pegged the number of cancer victims in the village at 10 -- all leukaemia victims -- and said Health Minister Frixos Savvides had pledged to set up a committee in conjunction with the Karaiskakio Foundation to explore the high incidence of leukaemia there.

The Karaiskakio Foundation has spearheaded the drive to find bone- marrow matches for seven Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot children, including Andreas Vassiliou, 6, who was flown to the United States yesterday for chemotherapy in advance of a hoped-for match and transplant of bone marrow to cure his leukaemia.

Gavriel said Pano Polemidia villagers are dead against any new EAC pylons: "We said to them we will burn them. We decided, everybody here, to burn them. We won't let them fix more" through the village, she said.

If they try to erect more power lines, Awe will bring big tractors to knock them down@, she said. AWe won't let anybody build them here. We don't want any more electricity@ lines going through the village.

"Those that are already there, we asked them to try to remove them, or to reduce the voltage," she added.

The question of whether there are dangers to human health from the electro- magnetic fields generated by high-voltage power lines has not been conclusively answered.

April 2 , 2000

[03] Greens stage 'mild and controlled' Akamas protest

GREENS will protest today at the Baths of Aphrodite at 1pm to show their opposition to the recent Council of Ministers decision to allow "mild and controlled" tourism development along the pristine Akamas coast.

"This is about Mr Photos Photiades," owner of the Carlsberg Beer distributorship, who plans to build a sprawling resort complex in the Akamas, Greens Party spokesman George Perdikis told The Sunday Mailyesterday.

Photiades' complex "will be larger in area, but smaller-scale buildings," than the Anassa Hotel, the first of what could be many resort complexes following the Cabinet's decision.

Photiades "wants to create an isolated resort, like villages... about seven to 10 kilometres to the north (from Anassa) inside the Akamas," instead of the huge, monastery-scale Anassa complex, Perdikis said.

The island's environmentalists oppose further opening of the ecologically fragile peninsula to development, Perdikis said, and they hope to reverse the Cabinet's decision -- even if that means taking the matter to international tribunals.

If local protests do not bring about the required result, Perdikis said there could be an appeal to European courts. But he said he hoped that would not be necessary.

He said today's demonstration would not directly involve Greenpeace, a fervent opponent of opening the Akamas with its nesting beaches for endangered species of turtle, to development. "But we are in close contact with them and decide together what we will do," he said.

The Cabinet decision to open the Akamas to development flies in the face of a study it commissioned the World Bank to do several years ago on how the government should manage the environmentally fragile peninsula, the last pristine wilderness area on the island.

That World Bank report was adopted by the House of Representatives almost verbatim two years ago. It endorsed the government's idea of making a National Park of the Akamas, and suggested restricting tourism to within the existing boundaries of villages already within the wilderness area.

In October 1999, Jean-François Verstrynge, deputy director-general of the European Commission's Environmental Directorate, gave Cyprus poor marks in all categories of EU environmental readiness to join the European Union, according to a then-recent evaluation of the island's EU candidacy.

He declared our environment Ain pretty bad shape@ and blamed this on too few staff and too little money allocated to the Cyprus Environment Department.

After Verstrynge's visit, Margot Wallstrom, EU Commissioner for Environmental Affairs, chided Cyprus for failing to promptly comply with EU requests to designate environmentally sensitive areas -- such as the Akamas -- for special EU protection.

She said this would require Cyprus to "designate areas for inclusion" in the EU's Natura 2000 Network of ecologically endangered areas.

In a back-handed swipe at Cyprus's foot-dragging, Wallstrom noted the EU is even funding Cyprus to help it quickly "draw up a proposed list of... Special Areas of Conservation" to include in the EU's Natura 2000 network. "Thus," she said, "we are pressing for the designation of the protected areas with the minimum of delay."

The Council of Ministers decision to allow "mild and controlled" tourism development merely protects what is already protected in the Akamas -- the turtle sanctuaries at Laura and Toxeftra beaches, and the state forest land extending over most of the peninsula's heartland.

Environmentalists fear the decision could lead to an epidemic of the kind of coastal development they view as having blighted the coastal areas of Larnaca, Limassol and Paphos.

April 2 , 2000

[04] Larnaca port begins &gt;make over=from containers to passengers

LARNACA Port yesterday hosted its first large cruise ship under government plans to transform it from an industrial to a privatised passenger port. The Serenade brought 380 sightseers on a one-day visit from Haifa.

Communications and Works Minister Averof Neophytou, who said in December the government would be seeking tenders to modify and expand the port, was present as the Bahamas-flagged liner docked yesterday.

The next decade will see major alterations to Larnaca harbour, with at least 40 Cypriot and international companies interested in contributing to the changes.

Senior ministry official Christos Papadopoulos told The Sunday Mail the government plans to make Larnaca the island=s main passenger port with a harbour capable of housing the cruise ships plying the Mediterranean today and the larger vessels of tomorrow.

This will mean the end of Larnaca as a container port, he said, although cargoes such as potatoes for export and imported vehicles will continue to be handled there.

Plans for the port area include building hotels, apartments, shops and even a bowling alley, and extending the harbour to the Phinikoudes area.

"It all sounds wonderful," Papadopoulos said. "We'll just have to see how much all this would cost," adding that the figure is currently estimated at approximately ,60 million.

Because the plan covers such a large area, the changes will take place over five years, he said.

The five-year timetable will only come into affect when the work actually begins, and it will be another two to three years before this happens.

"We have been appointing advisers to set up a process asking for tenders to assign the work to an investor who will undertake the design, the construction and the running of the harbour for a number of years and then return it to the government," Papadopoulos said.

More than 40 organisations worldwide have already expressed an interest in the project, he said.

Most of these are construction companies, but the number also includes some designers and finance institutions, "including two banks in Greece".

Cypriot companies that are interested include J&P, Louis and Cybarco.

Plans to transform Larnaca port's role were first announced in February 1999 during lengthy strikes by the port workers and stevedores, complaining about a lack of work at the harbour.

They eventually called off the strike when the government committed itself to the remodelling plans and said it would compensate anyone made redundant.

April 2 , 2000

[05] An Illustrious visitor

The vessel, with a crew of 1,000, is returning to its home port in Portsmouth, after two months of duty in the Gulf.

During the brief stopover, the carrier will offload 801 Naval Air Squadron's six Harrier &gt;jump-jets= so the fighter aircraft can take part in war-games practice.

After the jets are ashore, the carrier will sail to Haifa in Israel before returning to Akrotiri on Friday to reload the Harriers, take on some water and head home.

April 2 , 2000

[06] 60 pupils debate hot topics at World Championships

Sixty high-school pupils are competing in debate, impromptu speaking, persuasive or after dinner speaking and interpretive reading in the championship, which is being hosted by the English School in Nicosia for the second time.

Yiannis Georgiou, the school's English department head and the chairman of the committee organising the Championship, said the object of the competition was not for the participants to win trophies but to improve their communication skills while meeting new people from different backgrounds.

"We have participants from countries including Canada, the United States, Argentina, Pakistan, Israel, the Czech Republic, South Africa and Britain," he said.

Representing the English School are 17-year- old Yiannis Kyriakides, Olivier Homsy and 16-year-old Lena Anastassiades, all chosen for their exceptional communications skills.

The English School last hosted the Championships in 1995, and this year's competition is part of the school's centenary celebrations.

The grand final is at 8.15pm on Tuesday, when the judges will include Disy deputy Katy Clerides and British High Commissioner Edward Clay.

Georgiou said members of the public are welcome to attend the grand final and the earlier rounds, all taking place in the school hall.

Today sees the second rounds of the impromptu speaking and debating categories, at 2.30pm and 5pm respectively, and the finals in all categories will be on Tuesday at 9am.

Foreign participants will today tour the Green Line in Nicosia and tomorrow visit the Kykko area in the Troodos mountains.

They were treated to a night of traditional Cypriot food dance and music on Friday.

April 2 , 2000

[07] Did they fool you yesterday?

Politis, Simerini and Haravghiall ran stories saying there was a question mark over the future of next month=s Miss Universe show.

Alithia reported that Nicosia district mayors planned to raise the money for the capital=s planned private desalination plant through the Stock Exchange, and Machi ran a story saying that the Anorthosis club had agreed to sell one of its star international players to arch-rival Apoel.

Radio Napa also got in on the act yesterday, reporting in its early bulletins that gold bars worth up to ,2.5 million had been found during road works on Nissi Avenue in Ayia Napa.

It said the ingots bore the royal crest of Spain and that they could have been lying there for up to 400 years.

The Cyprus Mail, meanwhile, reported a &gt;Berlin airlift=-type operation to fly water from Greece to Larnaca this summer using refitted air-to-air refuelling tankers. It said the EasyVirgin project was the brainchild of Virgin Atlantic=s Sir Richard Branson and Stelios Haji-Ioannou of easyJet.

© Copyright Cyprus Mail 2000

Cyprus Mail: News Articles in English Directory - Previous Article - Next Article