Vasilis Chronopoulos

June 6, is the date on which one of the biggest operations in the history of human warfare took place. Operation Overlord was a massive undertaking. Logistics, training, planning, war material production; every man and woman participating in it was on high gear. The significance of the landing was such that tomes upon tomes have […]

When Jack Murphy tagged me in an article posted on Facebook about the increase of piracy incidents in the Caribbean, my initial thought was, “Is there a possibility of maritime security gigs there?” — a couple of days waiting for a ship on St. Kitts and Nevis is not exactly my idea of a bad time. According […]

The latest school shooting in Texas and the details about the perpetrator that filled the media prompted a flashback to April 20th, 1999. On that date, two students of the Columbine high school in Colorado, Eric Harris and Dylan Clebold, entered the school and shot and killed 13 and injured 21 people. Their original plan […]

This January I made a big change: I left sunny (and financially ruined) Greece to live in the U.K., specifically, the city of Cambridge. The city is beautiful and very different to what I’ve been use to. Nature surrounds you here: ten minutes outside of the city center and you see foxes and deer. In the […]

On April 22nd, Keziah Daum, an American teenager, shared pictures from her prom in which she was wearing a Chinese qipao dress on Twitter. PROM pic.twitter.com/gsJ0LtsCmP — Keziah (@daumkeziah) April 22, 2018 The legions of easily offended people arrived a tad later with pitchforks and torches to put a teenager on internet trial for “cultural […]

Turkey, and more specifically President Erdogan, has a long-standing feud with social media. From banning access to Twitter and Facebook during the Gezi Park protests in 2013, where 11 people were killed in the four months of the unrest, to continuous protests of the Turkish government against social media companies. Interestingly, the protests in Gezi started […]

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced snap presidential and parliamentary elections that will be held on June 24, 18 months sooner than the scheduled election date. The reasons for this are multiple. The difficulties the Turkish economy faces have probably made Erdogan unsure of how popular he’ll be in November 2019. So, he decided […]

On the 12th of April the Hellenic Air Force lost another pilot. Captain Georgios Baltadoros was killed while returning from a 45 minute flight over the Aegean, when his Mirage 2000-5 crashed at sea. For the better part of the flight he was in a dogfight against Turkish aircraft that violated Greek airspace. Captain Baltadoros was […]

Turkey’s relationship with Russia has had its fair share of ups and downs lately. And as disconcerting as it may be for its allies in the West, the latest rekindling is not at all unexpected. After a loaded geopolitical couple of years, with a common battle ground in Syria, it makes sense for the two […]

What is a hero? By the literal meaning of the word,  a hero is the protector or defender; by the ancient Greek definition it is the one who lives and dies in the pursuit of honor. Today we apply the word way too often and undeservedly, diluting its meaning. But we do indeed have different […]

Information plays a key role in human behaviour on an individual and societal level, as it can inform any decision that is being made, from the trivial to the important. The invention of the press was a key milestone for the flow of information with the dramatic reduction of the effort needed for a copy […]

I would like to talk about the loss of a personal hero. Unlike most of the people I find exemplary, Professor Hawking never carried a rifle or participated in any kind of action. Nonetheless, he was one of the bravest people to be written down in history. Against all odds, not only did he survive […]