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.
ATHENS – Hidden behind a fence, the finished work to renovate the dirty, decrepit Omonia Square in the Greek capital will be revealed in February and said to bring back a fountain that had been removed more than 20 years earlier.
Ironically, the work is being done under the aegis of Mayor Kostas Bakoyiannis, undoing a previous much-criticized facelift of the area under the administration of his mother, fellow New Democracy stalwart Dora Bakoyianni, when she was Mayor from 2002-06.
The Athens City Council said the work will be done with reports indicating that it’s being accompanied by the opening of new hotels in an area that had been in decay and seen hotels and businesses close during a near decade-long economic and austerity crisis.
The square had become a hangout for criminals, drug dealers, prostitutes and unlawful refugees and immigrants, the square that’s surrounded by grimy, abandoned buildings gone to seed symbolizing the country’s fall during the crisis.
The historic Bageion and Alexandros hotels are to reopen, said Kathimerini. The four-story Bageion Hotel, on the corner of Athinas Street, was constructed between 1890 and 1894 based on plans by the architect Ernst Ziller.
Omonia is a key center of urban life for Athens and has gone through many transformations over the years and during the 1960’s had a giant fountain in the middle, around which a rotary of traffic makes access difficult between points without using the underground subway walks.
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.
NICOSIA - A meeting between the ministers of energy for Cyprus and Israel - George Papanastasiou and Eli Cohen - led to an agreement that the countries would make an underwater electric cable link a top priority, linking them to Europe.
LONDON (AP) — The British Museum on Thursday appointed National Portrait Gallery chief Nicholas Cullinan as its new director, as the 265-year-old institution grapples with the apparent theft of hundreds of artifacts and growing international scrutiny of its collection.
ATHENS - The European Union needs to get involved in the case of the two-year jail sentence given ethnic Greek Fredi Beleri who was elected Mayor of the seaside town of Himare and said the trial was a farce to get him and protect Prime Minister Edi Rama’s business friends.
Brace yourself for what could be another scorching summer in Greece as scientists are anxious that a warm winter - the warmest January recorded - and climate change will continue to bring weather anomalies.