Athens

Greek health and fire authorities on Friday braced for a three-day heatwave expected to set in over the weekend, with temperatures scheduled to hit 42 degrees Celsius over parts of mainland Greece. In Athens, municipal and prefectural officers warned residents to avoid unnecessary travel during daylight hours.

Cramped housing conditions and air pollution in Athens have given rise to a "super breed" of mosquito that is larger, faster and more adept at locating human prey, a Greek daily reported on Tuesday. Athens-based mosquitoes can detect humans at a distance of 25m to 30m, unlike their colour-blind counterparts, <i>Ta Nea</i> daily reported.

Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis is to sign an accord with Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul establishing a crisis management hotline between the two countries’ air forces, the Greek Foreign Ministry said on Thursday. ”The agreement has been elaborated, now it is a matter of signing it,” Greek Foreign Ministry spokesperson George Koumoutsakos said.

A Greek inquiry into a mid-air collision between Greek and Turkish fighter planes this week blamed Turkish pilot error, a Greek official said on Friday, as the country confirmed the death of its pilot. The Turkish plane ”rammed into the Greek aircraft overhead following a wrong manoeuvre by the Turkish pilot”, a top defence ministry official said.

Anti-poverty campaigner and Live 8 organiser Sir Bob Geldof accused China on Monday of being responsible for the continuing civil war in Sudan’s Darfur region. The Irish rock star said China was protecting the Sudanese government because it provides 6% of China’s oil.

The Orthodox Church of Greece has decided to keep on public display the corpse of a monk found partially decomposed after 15 years of burial, a discovery that has drawn hundreds of believers to a monastery in central Greece, the church said on Wednesday.

A strong undersea earthquake measuring 6,9 on the Richter scale rocked southern Greece on Sunday, according to the Athens observatory, causing at least two injuries and property damage. The quake struck at 1.34pm local time between the islands of Kythira and Crete about 215km south of Athens.

Athens’s main Syntagma Square was rocked by a makeshift explosive device early on Monday that sprayed shattered glass and debris over a wide area, a police source said. The Eleftherotypia daily had received an anonymous phone call about a bomb 30 minutes earlier, the source said.

A restaurant owner in the western Greek port of Patras on Monday began efforts to grill his way into the <i>Guinness World Records</i> book by making the world’s largest kebab. Costas Dasios early on Monday began roasting a pork kebab weighing about 1&nbsp;850kg on a 1,73m steel skewer.

A Cypriot plane that crashed in Greece killing all 121 people on board likely suffered a catastrophic air-pressure problem before running out of fuel, the head of the Greek investigation team said on Monday. Akrivos Tsolakis also said that someone tried to land the stricken aircraft after its pilots were incapacitated.

All 121 people aboard a Cypriot airliner died on Sunday after it smashed into a wooded hillside near Athens after air-force pilots said the crew of the Boeing 737 appeared ”doubled up” in the cabin. Greek television broadcast footage of the smouldering wreckage of the plane, with its tail fin sticking out of the earth, as firefighters searched for bodies among the smoking wreckage.

To become a cleric in the Orthodox Church in Greece, it’s necessary to be a man, single or married — but not, heaven forbid, a politician, an actor or a gynaecologist. The church’s ruling synod says that people from certain professions will make most unsuitable clergymen.

If she runs away from her life of prostitution, her parents will become sick and die. At least that’s what this Nigerian woman believes. The threatened curse, she claims, is part of a voodoo rite performed in her homeland just weeks before she was brought to Greece by a prostitution ring.

Greek landlords are demanding the withdrawal of a television advert campaign for bank mortgages, complaining they are being depicted as anti-social, racist, rude, or "simply pathetic". The campaign is aimed at luring renters to buy property instead.

Seven months after a scandal that shook the Athens Olympics, Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou were cleared of evading drug tests in a surprise decision that could be challenged by the International Association of Athletics Federations. A Greek sporting tribunal voted 4-1 to clear the runners on Friday.

South African President Thabo Mbeki called on the European Union on Thursday to do more to help African countries fight poverty, stressing that hunger remains a ”serious problem” for the continent. Mbeki, in Athens on a two-day official visit, said hunger, poverty and underdevelopment are the central challenges facing his country and the rest of Africa.

A tense 18-hour hostage drama in an Athens suburb ended without casualties on Wednesday night when two men who had hijacked a bus and threatened to blow it up surrendered to the police. The men, identified as Albanians, left the bus shortly after midnight with their hands on their heads after throwing shotguns out of the door.

Two more hostages have been released by two men who hijacked a Greek bus with 25 passengers on board early on Wednesday, Greek television reported. The armed hijackers had earlier released two men and three women, one of whom told the private Greek radio station Skai that a ransom demand of one million euros had been made.