Dodecanese

An earthquake measuring 4.8 on the Richter scale hit a sea area located 57 kilometers northeast of the Dodecanese island of Kasos on Sunday afternoon, according to the Athens Geodynamic Institute.

The tremor's epicenter was located at a depth of 10 kilometers under the seabed, the institute added.

Greek-Turkish relations are in a particularly sensitive phase right now, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become unpredictable and the country is becoming increasingly destabilized. Every front is open, and Turkey appears to be flirting with civil strife and chaos. The risk that this domestic crisis will spill over across the Aegean and into Cyprus is not at all negligible.

Port authorities on Kos in the southeastern Aegean said on Tuesday they found nothing suspicious or incriminating on the Alcatras, a Turkish-flagged ship than ran aground on Monday 100 meters off the island's coast, raising suspicion among locals. Authorities also said that the papers of the five-member crew were in order.

Greek lawmakers approved Wednesday a delay in hiking sales tax on islands struggling with an influx of migrants, a measure that has triggered a row with the debt-ridden nation's creditors.

All 259 MPs present voted for the measure, which keeps until 2018 the maximum sales tax threshold at 17 percent, compared to 24 percent in the rest of the country.

A Turkish cargo ship ran aground on a tiny rocky island in the Aegean Sea in December 1995. But a dispute between Turkey and Greece over who owned the island sovereignty almost brought the two nations to war. Agreement still hasn’t been reached over the territory called Kardak by the Turks and Imia by the Greeks.

A Turkish military transport plane on Tuesday morning descended to an altitude of just 110 feet over a Greek island in the eastern Aegean in a second day of overflights.

The Turkish CN235 was captured on Greek radars flying some 30 meters above the islet of Panagia, which is part of the Oinousses island cluster east of Chios.

The islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos and the Dodecanese (excluding Rhodes and Karpathos) will retain their special 30 percent discount on value-added tax rates for one more year, according to an amendment tabled by the government in Parliament on Monday.

The Greek government submitted an amendment concerning the suspension of a VAT hike in Aegean islands, Monday morning. However, despite Greek PM Alexis Tsipras’s promises that the measure would remain active on the islands as long as the refugee crisis lasted, the amendment itself shows it will actually have a one-year effect until December 31 2017.

Kerry Needham, the mother of a British toddler who disappeared in 1991 on Kos, says that villagers on the Greek island know what happened to her missing son.

"We know for a fact that there are people on Kos that know what happened to Ben that day," Needham said in a recent interview with Britain's Mirror newspaper.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday announced a series of measures regarding eastern Aegean Greek islands during an address from the island of Nisyros.