IT APPEARS that convicted murderer and rapist Antonis Prokopiou Kitas, a.k.a. Al Capone, has made the humiliation of the police and the Central Prison authorities his life’s mission.
Two suspects were remanded in custody by the police yesterday, in connection with theft of Tassos Papadopoulos’ remains last December, with the third suspect in the case being Kitas, who allegedly masterminded the operation... 4 comments

THE DUTCH army has been operating as part of NATO in a remote and unruly part of Afghanistan since 2006. Fighting against the Taliban has been heavy at times. Twenty-one Dutch lives have been lost out of about 1,800 men and women.
The Dutch were supposed to have been relieved by troops from a NATO partner in 2008. No one volunteered. So their mission was extended for another two years. But now the Social Democrats in the Dutch coalition government have declared that enough is enough. The Dutch troops will have to come home. Since the Christian Democrats do not agree, the government has fallen... 1 comment

WHY DO we expect violence to be eliminated from our football grounds when the people who are in charge of the clubs find it almost impossible to condemn thuggish behaviour involving their fans? When we cannot take a united stand against violence, as a society, sending out mixed signals to the hooligans instead, there is next to no hope of stopping the aggressive behaviour... 1 comment

EVERYBODY IN the business knows that the Atlantic population of bluefin tuna is in worse trouble than the Pacific population, but how much worse? Well, here’s one measure: Stanford University’s Tag-a-Giant programme is now paying $1,000 per tag to fishermen in the Atlantic and Mediterranean who return the tags after they have caught the tuna, whereas fishermen in the Pacific only get $500 for a tag. Trust the market to tell you the truth... Read on

AKEL spokesman Stavros Evagorou was quite right to highlight the hypocrisy of the political parties which expressed strong objections to the government’s distribution of a pamphlet explaining how a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation works. Surely the government has an obligation to help people understand the form of government they would have in the event of a settlement.
This should have been done a long time ago, but successive governments avoided the issue, for fear that the demagogues would exploit it. The result was that when the Annan plan appeared, most Greek Cypriots were greatly surprised by the provisions on governance, because nobody ever took the trouble to explain the workings and principles of a federal system of government... 6 comments

THIS WEEK, the British House of Lords voted to give its blessing to same-sex weddings taking place in a church. Many in Cyprus are still wondering whether civil same-sex marriages should be allowed at all, this might seem a step too far but I disagree.
Gay couples, like heterosexuals, have the right to be respectable and romantic, to be as sensibly suburban as the next couple trying to afford the deposit for a house and having their moment of union recorded for posterity amongst family and friends and, if they are religious, in front of their God... 3 comments

ANOTHER big myth, peddled by our ultra-smart, bash-patriotic lawyers and politicians collapsed on Friday when the European Court of Human Rights recognised the pseudo Immovable Property Commission (IPC) in the pseudo-state.
This means that the 1000-plus applications made to the ECHR, by Greek Cypriot refugees would have to be submitted to the pseudo-IPC and if the compensation is deemed inadequate an appeal would have to be made to the pseudo High Administrative Court. Only after these domestic remedies have been exhausted would the ECHR have to examine a case.
In short, the big myth about the European solution, based on respect of human rights that could be secured through the courts has been exposed as big sham... 13 comments

 
HUMAN rights lawyer Achilleas Demetriades sought to find crumbs of comfort in the decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recognising the Immovable Property Commission in the occupied areas as an effective domestic remedy to which refugees making property claims would have to apply before bringing their cases to the ECHR.
The decision marked a “de-recognition” of the ‘TRNC’ by Turkey, he claimed, saying Ankara had for the first time acknowledged the rights of Greek Cypriot property owners. The Court’s decision, the lawyer said, “clearly repeats that the TRNC does not exist. And now only Turkey is in the occupied areas... 54 comments

THE property aspect of the Cyprus dispute currently stands as one of the most intractable issues arguably rivalling only the topic on military guarantees... 5 comments

FOR THOSE of us who cannot afford to brief a lawyer, the Ombudswoman can be a cost-free alternative recourse to justice; view last Sunday’s articles ‘Used as pawns in ransom scam’ by Charlie Charalambous and ‘Children adopted over 18 have no legal right to stay’ by Stefanos Evripidou... 1 comment