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.
NICOSIA – The chief of Cyprus’ central prison complex resigned on Jan. 14 following a spate of inmate suicides that has refocused attention on conditions inside the country’s lone correctional facility.
Senior police officer George Tryphonides told The Associated Press that Jan. 14 would be his last day after five years as acting prisons director.
Five inmates have committed suicide since July. But calls for immediate action reached fever pitch Tuesday when another inmate took his own life — the third suicide in 17 days.
Justice Minister Ionas Nicolaou on Jan. 13 announced a string of measures, including Tryphonides’ return to his police duties as chief superintendent, prison guard suspensions, elite police unit patrols inside the facility and setting up a wing for inmates diagnosed with psychological problems.
Nicolaou told lawmakers a day earlier that there were 50 suicide attempts by inmates last year, compared with 35 the previous year and 20 in 2011.
Compounding concern over the suicides was the alleged gang rape of a 23-year-old Romanian inmate over the weekend that prompted an angry warning by President Nicos Anastasiades of “zero tolerance” for prison staff and police who fail in their job or are implicated in wrongdoing.
Tryphonides defended his record, saying he has helped reduce the chronically overcrowded facility’s population from 720 inmates a year ago — some 270 above capacity — to 560 now.
He said prison staff isn’t to blame for the facility’s shortcomings that have accumulated over decades and which remained largely ignored by successive governments.
Tryphonides said the debt-wracked country’s economic woes have scuttled plans for additional renovations to the facility that would have further improved conditions.
Cyprus has slashed spending to meet the tough terms of a financial rescue it received last year from other euro area countries and the International Monetary Fund.
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza (AP) — An international team of doctors visiting a hospital in central Gaza was prepared for the worst.
ATHENS - The tragedy of the Tempi train collision is a much greater issue than an opportunity for parties to table a motion of censure against the government, but the opposition parties used it anyway "to turn society's pain into a tool to strike at the government and me personally," Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Thursday night in parliament.
ATHENS - PASOK-KINAL leader Nikos Androulakis, speaking at the Hellenic Parliament on Thursday, emphasized that there is "an established belief among the Greek people" that the government "operates as a well-oiled machine of corruption, cover-up, and propaganda.
ATHENS — Greece’s center-right government survived a motion of no-confidence late Thursday that was brought by opposition parties over its handling of the country’s deadliest rail disaster a year ago.
ASTORIA – Greek Minister of the Interior Niki Kerameus offered an informative presentation on postal voting in the upcoming European Union elections for Greek citizens in a well-attended event held at the St.