General News
Meropi Kyriacou Honored as TNH Educator of the Year
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
Their pleas to improve conditions at detention centers and camps housing more than 15,000 refugees and migrants on islands, activists said the Greek government has allowed many to pushed away.
Human Rights Watch said many who tried to unlawfully enter Greece from nearby Turkey, by a perilous sea route to the islands, or crossing a dangerous river on the northern land border, were forced back.
The group said it based its conclusions on the responses of 26 migrants in Greece as well as in Turkey, which has taken back only a relative handful under a swap deal with the European Union largely in limbo with Greece overwhelmed by asylum seekers.
The group said most of the alleged incidents occurred between April and November 2018 at the land border in northeastern Greece. It said interviewees reported hostile or violent behavior “by Greek police and unidentified forces wearing uniforms and masks.”
Greece has been repeatedly accused in recent years of so-called pushbacks — repulsing and returning to Turkey migrants entering illegally from that country. Successive governments have denied that.
The NGO said it interviewed asylum seekers and other migrants in Greece in May, and in October and November in Turkey who were from Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, and include families traveling with children. They described 24 incidents of forced deportations across the Evros River from Greece to Turkey.
“People who have not committed a crime are detained, beaten, and thrown out of Greece without any consideration for their rights or safety,” said Todor Gardos, Europe researcher at HRW.
“The Greek authorities should immediately investigate the repeated allegations of illegal pushbacks,” he said, Kathimerini reported.
According to the report, all of those interviewed reported “hostile or violent behavior” by Greek police and unidentified forces wearing uniforms and masks without recognizable insignia.
Twelve people said police or these unidentified forces accompanying the police stripped them of their possessions, including their money and personal identification, which were often destroyed.
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — More than 100 long-finned pilot whales that beached on the western Australian coast Thursday have returned to sea, while 29 died on the shore, officials said.
CALIFORNIA - The University of Southern California canceled its main graduation ceremony and dozens more college students were arrested at other campuses nationwide Thursday as protests against the Israel-Hamas war continued to spread.
NEW YORK — The third day of witness testimony in Donald Trump's hush money trial concluded Thursday after Trump's lawyers got their first chance to question a witness on the stand.
ATLANTA — As Donald Trump seeks a return to the White House, criminal charges are piling up for the people who tried to help him stay there in 2020 by promoting false theories of voter fraud.
ATHENS - Voters should see the whole picture when they go to cast their ballot in the European Parliament elections on June 9, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in an interview on Thursday.