Cyprus

Funeral plans are being made for Theophanis "Phanos" Dymiotis, a violinist, composer and adjunct music professor at McDaniel College who died in a Delaware car crash Saturday night. Mr. Dymiotis was returning from Wilmington after a performance with the Delaware Symphony Orchestra when he was killed, officials at the college in Westminster said yesterday. Police said the driver of a northbound car crossed the center line in attempting to pass a tractor-trailer and that the resulting collision killed Mr. Dymiotis and the two occupants of the other car. The 41-year-old Lutherville resident had taught violin at McDaniel since 2004 and was a faculty member in the college's Summer Orchestra Camp.

AGIOS GEORGIOS, Cyprus -- In a bucolic valley, the ghosts of Agios Georgios roam among the village's crumbling, war-ravaged houses. Red poppies and yellow crown daisies flower amid collapsed roofs, shattered windows and the mined cemetery.Among the remnants of the people who once lived here are a child's composition book, a rusty bed frame, a broken clay pot perched in a window.Here, the refugees of Kosovo might see their past and their future if they depend on peacemakers to restore them to their homes.

PHOENIX -- Phelps Dodge Corp., moving to create the world's No. 1 copper producer, yesterday raised its offer to buy Cyprus Amax Minerals Co. and Asarco Inc. to $2.66 billion in stock the day after the companies rejected a bid valued at $2.56 billion.Cyprus Amax and Asarco agreed last month to their own $2.2 billion merger to form the No. 2 producer. Phelps said it is now willing to pay a 29 percent premium for Cyprus and a 30 percent premium for Asarco.If the companies don't agree to negotiations, Phelps said, it is "determined to take all necessary steps" to acquire them.

ISTANBUL, Turkey -- With Greece and Turkey suddenly seeming ready to end generations of hostility, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit of Turkey is due in Washington today for talks this week with President Clinton and congressional leaders.Clinton is expected to raise a series of issues with his guest, from trade to human rights. But the prospect of finally bringing peace to the volatile eastern Mediterranean will be at the top of his agenda.Ecevit was prime minister when Turkey sent troops to Cyprus in 1974 and has been a hero to nationalists.

WHILE THE Monica Lewinsky affair has slowed the wheels of government in Washington, it has had much more dangerous effect on American policy in the Middle East. Not only has President Clinton not been able to prevent the deployment of surface-to-air missiles which Russia sold to the Greek Cypriot side of the divided island of Cyprus, a development that threatens to lead to war between two NATO allies of the United States, Greece and Turkey.The Greek-Turkish conflict on Cyprus has been simmering since the 1970s, when Turkish troops landed in northern Cyprus to protect the Turkish community of the island, which felt threatened by a right-wing Greek Cypriot plan to unite Cyprus with Greece.

LARNACA, Cyprus -- A portrait of the late Cypriot Archbishop Makarios hangs on the wall. The marriage officer is wearing a brass medallion of the city seal -- a picture of a Greek philosopher and a palm tree. Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" plays on a boombox.So what's a nice Jewish couple doing getting married in a place like this?Aviv Censor and Efrat Sher are getting married on this island less than an hour's flight from their country for the same reason as a lot of other Israelis: The rabbis have no say here.

Cyprus and South Africa. Remember those two countries. Cyprus and South Africa.You've heard the news by now. Recently the Third International Mathematics and Science Study released the results of a general math and science test taken three years ago. American students, seniors in elite high schools who had taken advanced courses in physics and calculus, took the test along with students from 20 other countries.To put it kindly, our guys and gals got creamed. Students from every other country taking the test did better than our students, except for two countries.

On an island where every promontory seems to shoulder a romantic ruin from an ancient age, a vast courtyard of Roman columns and crumbling baths sprawls improbably across 16 centuries to a shore where modern beachgoers bob like corks in the buoyant Mediterranean.It's the single most dramatic spot on Cyprus. And most of the island's population has been barred from it for 20 years.Clambering over Cyprus' stones of past millenniums in the Bronze Age city of Salamis is an adventure denied to the Greek Cypriots of the island's southwestern half, just as access to nearly as glorious relics -- the arches of Kourion, the tombs of the Kings in Paphos, the Byzantine-frescoed churches of the Troodos Mountains -- are off-limits to the Turks of the northeastern half.

NICOSIA, Cyprus -- The children on the Countess M hung on the rails of the ferry ship this week watching bright parasails lift from resort beaches, part of a world that did not want them.They are among the latest outcasts in a history of Palestinian statelessness, set adrift this time by an unpredictable, self-proclaimed Arab nationalist. The Palestinians aboard the ship were evicted from Libya by Col. Muammar el Kadafi. They were shoved back on the boat in Syria and refused permission to dock in Cyprus, an island off the Mediterranean coast of Syria.

Nothing could take the U.S. out of the superpower business sooner than the measure to limit U.S. contributions to United Nations peacekeeping that the House International Relations Committee approved Tuesday on a partisan vote of 23 to 18.By charging the cost of U.S. voluntary peacekeeping to the U.N., it would effectively curtail what the U.N. and the U.S. could do.It flows from the plank in the Republican campaign proposals against putting U.S. troops under...

ROBERT CHANDLER, 80 Creator of '60 Minutes' format Robert Chandler, a former CBS executive who played a crucial role in creating the highly rated and critically acclaimed weekly newsmagazine 60 Minutes, died Thursday of heart failure at his home in Pittsfield, Mass. Mr. Chandler was a producer and director of documentaries and election coverage in 1966 when his colleague Don Hewitt proposed a new format: a newsmagazine with several segments rather than the standard hourlong documentary.

Funeral plans are being made for Theophanis "Phanos" Dymiotis, a violinist, composer and adjunct music professor at McDaniel College who died in a Delaware car crash Saturday night. Mr. Dymiotis was returning from Wilmington after a performance with the Delaware Symphony Orchestra when he was killed, officials at the college in Westminster said yesterday. Police said the driver of a northbound car crossed the center line in attempting to pass a tractor-trailer and that the resulting collision killed Mr. Dymiotis and the two occupants of the other car. The 41-year-old Lutherville resident had taught violin at McDaniel since 2004 and was a faculty member in the college's Summer Orchestra Camp.

It wasn't the violence in Lebanon that bothered Virginia Radford so much as the trip home. "Yeah, you heard bombs falling, but I felt fine. Lebanon didn't feel like a war zone at all," the Marymount University sophomore said yesterday, moments after landing at Baltimore's airport along with hundreds of other U.S. citizens fleeing the fighting in Lebanon. "The only time I was uncomfortable was when we had to leave." With her mother looking on disapprovingly, the 18-year-old criticized the evacuation as disorganized and chaotic.

WASHINGTON -- In what could become the largest evacuation by sea in modern history, about 10,000 Americans and tens of thousands of European and other civilians are expected to begin boarding ships from Beirut today amid the escalating fighting between Israel and Hezbollah forces. The American evacuees are to be ferried to the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus on charter ships, watched over by U.S. Marine and Navy jets and warships that will escort the vessels through an Israeli blockade of Lebanon and guard against other threats, according to U.S. military and civilian officials.

A five-minute walk from where a bunker manned by soldiers divides the Turkish north and Greek south sides of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, Starbucks manager Faye Avraamidou serves iced lattes to customers relaxing on a sidewalk patio. The signs above the cash register are in Greek and English; the coffee prices are in Cypriot pounds. When Avraamidou finds out that my husband and I are from Seattle, Starbucks' headquarters, she offers us drinks on the house. "Welcome to Cyprus," she says, extending her hand.

A 25-year-old Baltimore-area native and graduate of the Institute of Notre Dame was among those killed when a Cypriot plane crashed into a mountainside north of Athens Sunday, family members said yesterday. Meropi "Popi" Sofocleous had been a crew member aboard Helios Airlines flight ZU522, a spokeswoman from the Cyprus Embassy in Washington confirmed. The flight, which departed from Larnaca, a city in southern Cyprus, was bound for Prague, Czech Republic, after a stop in Athens. All 115 passengers and six crew members were killed in the crash.

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY DAVID MANNING From: Matthew Rycroft Date: 23 July 2002 S 195 /02 cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq. This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

On this day 30 years ago, I was in Nicosia, Cyprus, the fatally troubled Mediterranean island where I had arrived with a gaggle of about 30 news correspondents aboard a rusty freighter chartered from Beirut for the princely sum of $10,000. We had to charter the freighter because it was the only way to get to Cyprus. A bunch of Greek Cypriot thugs, urged on by the military junta in Athens, had overthrown the elected government and its leader, the Cypriot president, Archbishop Makarios. The Nicosia airport was closed.

Plan for Cyprus was a recipe for instability The Sun's editorial "Missed opportunity" (May 3) casts an unfair, divisive and counterproductive light on what we hope will be the ongoing pursuit of a workable settlement for lasting peace on Cyprus. The government of Cyprus and the Greek Cypriot community very much want a unified Cyprus, but they want a viable plan that makes sense for both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. The Greek Cypriots strongly favor reunification and have worked very hard for years to end the forcible division of their country.

NICOSIA, Cyprus - The latest effort to reunify this divided island became a historical footnote yesterday as Greek Cypriot voters turned down a U.N. plan proposed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan. It mattered little that voters on the Turkish side said "yes." The plan required the approval of both sides to go forward. According to official results, the Turkish Cypriots voted in favor of the plan by 64.9 percent to 35.1 percent. But the Greek side of the island voted resoundingly against reunification.