THERE is nothing to fall back on if Kofi Annan’s reunification plan is rejected by the Greek or Turkish Cypriots in separate referenda ahead of EU accession on May 1, UN Special Envoy Alvaro de Soto warned yesterday. “We do not have a plan B, nor are we thinking about scenarios about what will happen,” De Soto said.
POTATO farmers have not always been such an aggressively militant group. In the 1980s and early ’90s, when the Cyprus potato was highly popular in European markets and they were making large amounts of money, they bothered nobody. Their only complaint against the state was probably the excess tax they had to pay.
ALITHIA: “Horror as niece burns her aunt alive”. A 22-year-old woman is said to have confessed to burning her 48-year-old aunt to death, the paper reports. Despina Nicolaou’s charred remains were found in a field on Sunday by hunters, just 200 metres from her house in Potamia village.
THE CHAIRMAN of the Cyprus Olympic Committee (COC) yesterday denied allegations that financial interests were behind the exclusion of the Famagusta district from the planned Olympic flame route in July.
POTATO growers have decided to suspend their planned blockades for one week to give the government a chance to meet their demand for payoffs to leave the profession. The government has refused to accept the potato growers’ demands and ruled them out as unjustifiable and unreasonable. They said they would not accept to negotiate under threat.
VANS and minibuses will be forced to curb their speeds on European roads as the EU proposes to install speed limiters on smaller vehicles. At present, passenger-carrying vehicles weighing over 10 tonnes have to have limiters set at 100km/h, while goods carrying vehicles over 12 tonnes have to restrict their speed to 90km/h.
OMBUDSWOMAN Eliana Nicolaou yesterday told the House Human Rights Committee that Turkish Cypriots had started filing complaints involving the violation of their human rights. During her presentation of her annual report, Nicolaou said she had received more than 1,600 complaints during 2002, out of which the Ombudswoman’s office had responded to 1,459, while 404 were classed as groundless.
FACT OF THE DAY: Europe is coming to a shore near you. Or at least that’s the Cyprus accession theme announced by Irish Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism John O’Donoghue yesterday. As you all know, the EU Council has a rotating presidency and Ireland (the EU’s model of rags to riches) currently holds the spot.
UNION members at the CyBC are up in arms about the public channel’s decision to hire new presenters and producers for Turkish programmes. Representatives of the union met with the House Interior Committee on Monday, when they were informed of CyBC vice president Andreas Chrysanthou’s decision regarding Turkish programmes.
NEVER before has there been such a concerted international consensus on the content and procedure for a solution to the Cyprus issue. It is therefore with good reason that people are saying this is the first time that the Cyprus issue stands a very good chance of being solved.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
