Tag: Europe

On July 15th 2016, a coup d’état was attempted in Turkey. The coup was badly organized, as we learned later, with units believing they were headed to an anti-terrorism exercise (hence their deployment in urban centers). And it failed badly, with soldiers getting executed by an angry mob of President Erdogan supporters. In the wake […]

The Greek supreme court decided against the extradition of the 8 turkish soldiers that were accused as coup participants by Turkey. Now all that remains to be seen is Turkey’s reaction to that decision.  Vasilis Chronopoulos  The eight men fled in a helicopter to Greece after the coup attempt but say they were not involved. Turkey has […]

Imams in Germany have informed Turkish authorities of alleged supporters of cleric Fethullah Gulen, the exiled cleric President Erdogan blames as the leader behind the thwarted coup. That move raised protests from Germany’s domestic intelligence service and the demand for answers on the alleged activities. -Vasilis Chronopoulos A state intelligence body has discovered that imams at […]

Illegal immigrants tend to discard their passports as a way to prevent authorities from confirming their identities and delay deportation. In an effort to plug that hole in the system, German police are beginning to examine how to deport people without papers. -Vasilis Chronopoulos    The President of Germany’s Federal Police, Dieter Romann, says that if a missing passport […]

Britain’s supreme court ruled that the parliament must vote on the activation of Article 50, that entails the small possibility of overruling the decision of the referendum. Vasilis Chronopoulos Parliament must vote on whether the government can start the Brexit process, the Supreme Court has ruled. The judgement means Theresa May cannot begin talks with the […]

Already under fire for the handling of the Anis Amri case that resulted in the Berlin market attack, the German government is now under added pressure because three individuals who are considered dangerous are nowhere to be found. -Vasilis Chronopoulos   Burkhard Lischka, a parliamentary spokesman for the Social Democrats, said three of the nearly 550 individuals identified […]

German authorities try to identify the errors that allowed Anis Amri to elude them until it was too late. -Vasilis Chronopoulos When German authorities announced that Anis Amri, a Tunisian national suspected of driving a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, had been on their radar for more than a year, questions arose as to […]

With a post on Facebook, a spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry anounced that Edward Snowden will have his residency permit extended. -Vasilis Chronopoulos Maria Zakharova, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, wrote on Facebook on Wednesday that Snowden’s right to stay in Russia was recently extended “by a couple of years.” Her post came in response […]

With a tactic in use since Roman times, the abatis, US and Canadian engineers try to stop tanks in Lithuania. -Vasilis Chronopoulos  Russia has lots of tanks. Lithuania has lots of trees. It’s not complicated. That’s why Canadian and American troops in Lithuania recently trained to block roads with downed trees — a useful tactic in the […]

On two separate operations, police in Spain and Hungary arrested five persons with suspected ties to Islamic extremists. -Vasilis Chronopoulos  Spain’s interior ministry said police detained a Moroccan man with Dutch identity documents in the northwestern city of Figueras suspected of belonging to IS who recently returned to Spain from Turkey. The authorities are investigating […]

In western Germany a large quantity of explosives was found in possession of persons connected with the far right. The German authorities suspect they were planning an attack on refugee centers and mosques. -Vasilis Chronopoulos  The prosecutor’s office in the western German state of Rhineland-Palatinate is investigating whether two men arrested last month for storing large amounts of explosives were […]

In 1942, prolific author Isaac Asimov published a short story called “Runaround,” in which two characters named Powell and Donovan, along with their trusty robot Speedy, are sent to Mercury to restart a mining operation on the planet that was abandoned a decade earlier.  The plot of this futuristic Sci-Fi tale (set in the very […]