News stories by Analysis by Apostolis Fotiadis

ATHENS, Sep 06 (IPS) - ‘Mare Nostrum' – the largest search and rescue immigration operation ever carried out in the Mediterranean Sea – has become an issue of bitter brinkmanship between human rights groups and anti-immigrant lobbies.

Kosmas Bitros (29) didn’t 'believe in politics and in elections as a way of changing society'. Still, he showed up at the ballot boxes for the first time last Sunday to cast a vote against austerity in the Greek national elections.

Aggeliki Anagnostopoulou (30) sits in a corner of the huge room that volunteers from the new party, Independent Greeks, are using as a headquarters for their pre-election campaign in the lead up to polling day on May 6.

An unflattering report on Greece’s media by a former United States envoy to this country, revealed by Wikileaks, evoked little public reaction because it was taken as a faithful portrayal.

The first visit in six years of a Turkish prime minister to Greece has been widely hailed as a historical rapprochement after a long period of mutual bitterness.

In the autumn of 2006 Hungary was rocked by a series of anti-government protests triggered by the release of a tape in which then prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány confessed to his Social-Democratic Party (MSZP) having lied to win elections that year. Now it is payback time.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres has asked the European Commission to call a meeting between the agency and countries around the Mediterranean to work out a joint strategy to deal with irregular migration.

It is late at night. The city is quiet and strangely empty. Only some spooky figures appear here and there, police in civilian cloths, photojournalists looking for telling pictures.