Sir,

Sir,
The standing joke about the recovery of luggage at Paphos airport taking half as long as the air flight time from some distant European city is wearing very thin.

IT’S A rainy Sunday afternoon. That ‘end of the weekend and back to school tomorrow’ feeling is starting to kick in, so I call my friend Mark and we decide to go for a drink and to have a good look at the papers – both the intelligent broadsheets and the trashy tabloids.

TEMPERS flared yesterday as President Tassos Papadopoulos refused to meet with leaders of farming organisations protesting outside the Presidential Palace.

Three hundred or so farmers from all districts parked their tractors outside the Palace determined to meet with Papadopoulos. At first, the President refused to see them, but in the evening he finally came out.

THE MAN accused of killing Greek Cypriot demonstrater Solomos Solomou in August 1996 has been arrested on suspicion of smuggling mobile phones into the country.

Mainland Turk Kenan Akin was ‘agriculture and forestry minister’ in the occupied areas when he was seen on camera firing the shots that killed Solomou as he climbed up a flagpole to ear down the Turkish flag in Dherynia.

THE Supreme Court yesterday gave a 20-day extension to a Turkish Cypriot man to decide whether he would be filing an objection against an interim order suspending the execution of a court decision reinstating his property in Episkopi.

Arif Mustafa last month won an appeal to return to the property he abandoned soon after the 1974 Turkish invasion.

FORMER residents of Vasilia village in the occupied north are due back in their hometown today to plant cypress trees in the village cemetery as a symbolic move to mark its repair.

Former neighbours and relatives of the community’s dead will gather at 11am to plant the trees and plan the next steps for the complete restoration of the resting place of their loved ones.

THE final report from the investigation into the 1999-2000 stock market fiasco was yesterday handed to Finance Minister Makis Keravnos by the Investigating Committee of the Cyprus Stock Exchange (CSE).

A LIMASSOL man was yesterday sentenced to 13 years in prison for the murder of his 16-year-old daughter’s boyfriend.

Forty-seven-year-old Stavros Michail from Alasa, was found guilty of the murder, around a year ago, of Andreas Charalambous, 20.

“They did their duty, I have nothing to say,” Michail said after the hearing.