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/ 7 December 2008
Hundreds of demonstrators threw fire bombs at police, smashed shop windows and burned vehicles in Greece’s two main cities on Sunday.
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/ 29 September 2008
Two planes were forced to circle over a Greek island awaiting permission to land on Monday after an air-traffic controller overslept.
Athens’s new museum is spectacular, even without its star exhibits. Kevin Rushby gets a sneak preview.
A court has ruled a gay rights group can use the name "lesbian", saying people from the Aegean island of Lesbos did not have sole claim to the name.
A Greek Catholic bishop on Monday said tourists can no longer be married in some of Greece’s top Aegean island destinations.
Nine British women were facing prostitution charges after being arrested at the weekend for taking part in an oral sex competition.
From its dangerously empty coffers in the late 1970s to the multibillion-dollar revenues from the Beijing 2008 Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has managed a remarkable commercial transformation of its prime product, the Olympic Games.
Pro-Tibet demonstrators tried to hijack the Beijing Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in ancient Olympia on Monday. In a globally televised ceremony to mark the start of a five-month torch relay, the actress Maria Nafpliotou, playing the high priestess, used a break in the clouds to light the torch in front of the Temple of Hera.
One way or another, Beijing will get its Olympic flame. At Sunday’s final rehearsal, clouds over the ancient Games’ ruined birthplace prevented organisers from kindling the torch for the 2008 Olympics in the traditional way — using the sun’s rays harnessed in a convex mirror.
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/ 14 February 2008
Two powerful earthquakes jolted southern Greece on Thursday, sparking a rush for safety by panicked residents, but Europe’s seismic capital appeared to escape major damage. The main quake measured at least 6,5 on the Richter scale with its epicentre just off the southern coast, according to Greek experts.
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/ 14 February 2008
An earthquake shook southern Greece just after noon (10am GMT) on Thursday and was felt as far away as the Egyptian capital, Cairo. The Athens Geodynamic Institute said it was off the southern tip of the Peloponnese and measured 6,5 on the Richter scale.
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/ 13 February 2008
A 24-hour nationwide strike against the Greek government’s economic and pension reforms crippled transport on Wednesday and shut down public services. Thousands of people also gathered in Athens to protest against reforms the ruling conservatives say will make Greece’s economy more competitive and rescue the ailing pension system.
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/ 31 January 2008
The head of the Orthodox Church of Greece, Archbishop Christodoulos, who died on January 28 aged 69 after a seven-month battle with liver cancer, was a charismatic orator who captivated and divided Greek society with his strong views on nationalism and church-state relations.
A powerful earthquake measuring 6,5 on the Richter Scale hit the Peloponnese region of southern Greece early on Sunday, the geodynamics institute of the Athens observatory reported. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Greece is the European country most prone to earthquakes, with seismic activity accounting for half of the continent’s tremors.
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/ 19 December 2007
A pedestrian has been charged with damaging property after walking over a car that was parked illegally on the sidewalk in Greece’s congested capital. ”I could not get past the vehicle, a four-wheel drive, which had been parked right on the pavement so I got angry and just walked over it, slightly denting its hood,” said Tasos Pouliasis.
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/ 4 December 2007
A Greek Orthodox nunnery was turned into a marijuana plantation by two men posing as gardeners for elderly nuns, police said on Tuesday. Acting on a tip-off, officers raided the nunnery in the village of Filiro, near the northern port city of Thessaloniki, and found more than 30 large cannabis plants in the enclosed garden.
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/ 27 October 2007
An earthquake measuring five on the Richter scale on Saturday shook the Greek island of Zakynthos, though no damage was immediately reported, the Geodynamic Observatory Institute in Athens said. The epicentre of the quake, which struck at 8.32am local time was in the Ionian Sea about 330km south-west of Athens, the institute said.
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/ 17 September 2007
Greece’s conservatives on Monday faced the tough task of tackling reforms needed to catch up with euro zone countries after winning a second mandate with only a narrow majority in Sunday’s election. Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, praised by Brussels for his economic record, vowed to push on with reforms.
Forest fires that have devastated southern Greece and claimed 63 lives in eight days died down on Friday, but emergency services feared a new heatwave could rekindle some blazes. ”Things are going well,” a fire-service spokesperson said, adding that the fires were no longer threatening populated areas.
More wildfires have broken out in Greece and others rekindled as anger rose over the government’s handling of catastrophic blazes that have laid waste to vast stretches of the Greek countryside and killed at least 64 people. The fires are dominating political debate before parliamentary elections set for September 16.
Forest fires that have killed at least 63 people in Greece raged for a fifth day on Tuesday, although they were not threatening any villages, a firefighters’ spokesperson said. ”At the moment there is no threat to the villages, but the direction of the wind is impossible to predict,” the spokesperson said.
The mother of four must have agonised as the wall of flames swept through the heavily forested mountain toward her holiday home in southern Greece — should she flee the approaching fire or not? If she had stayed at home, neighbours say the family would have survived. Her single-storey house was virtually unscathed by the fires.
Thousands of Greeks threatened by towering walls of fire fled their homes on Monday as strong winds fanned blazes that have devastated the country and killed 63 people in four days. Greek authorities dispatched helicopters to winch trapped people out of blazing hamlets, impossible to reach by land.
Firefighting planes took off at first light on Monday, targeting dozens of fires blazing across Greece, a day after a massive effort prevented the birthplace of the Olympics from being devastated by the flames. Sixty-three people have been killed by the country’s worst wildfires in living memory. New blazes broke out faster than others could be brought under control.
Fires tore through parched forests and swallowed villages across Greece, bearing down on villages near Ancient Olympia in the south a day after the government declared a nationwide state of emergency. More than 50 people were dead. ”We’re going to burn alive here,” one woman told Greek television from the village of Lambeti.
At least 44 people have died in two violent fires raging in the Peloponnese peninsula of southern Greece, officials said on Saturday, warning that the death toll could climb. Among the latest victims were a mother and her four children, aged five to 15, who were engulfed by the fire on the road near the village of Mahista, along with seven other victims, police said.
At least six people died and thousands of hectares of forest were consumed in fires racing through Greece’s southerly Peloponnese peninsula on Friday, officials said. Four people were found dead near a hotel north of the town of Areopolis, about 300km south of Athens, and two firefighters also died, the fire brigade and police said.
Firefighters continued to battle dozens of fires on Tuesday in north-western Greece that have been raging for a ninth consecutive day as scorching temperatures hit the country. Meanwhile, Spain was on Tuesday sending more firefighters and helicopters to combat huge wildfires on the Canary Islands.
Massive forest fires continued to rage out of control across Greece on Friday, burning through forests and entire towns in dozens of areas across the country. Hundreds of firefighters, soldiers and volunteers were still tackling more than 100 fires, 15 of which were still burning out of control in various areas of the country.
Wildfires swept through Greece on Thursday, killing two people and destroying homes after days of record high temperatures that led to at least nine heatstroke deaths and extensive power cuts. An explosion in a power substation in Thessaloniki caused power failures of up to six hours.
A Greek police officer in the northern city of Salonika has been arrested for shooting a motorist who double parked his car to grab breakfast, a police source said on Monday. The incident happened early on Sunday morning in Oreokastro, a quiet suburb of Greece’s northern capital.
AC Milan beat Liverpool 2-1 with two goals from Filippo Inzaghi to win the European Cup for the seventh time on Wednesday and avenge their defeat on penalties by the English team in the final two years ago. Liverpool, who looked down and out, pulled a goal back in the 89th minute with a Dirk Kuyt header but could not repeat their famous Istanbul fight-back.