Free Republic

The Greeks who represent the last vestiges of Christian Byzantium and the Roman Empire are heading towards their final extinction in Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, with their numbers dwindling to a mere handful under his Islamist government. What is now Turkey only began to be colonised in by the Turkic peoples in earnest from around 1071, after their Seljuk ancestors had arrived from Central Asia and vanquished the Greek-speaking Christian ruler Romanos IV Diogenes’s forces at the Battle of Manzikert. The last vestiges of the Byzantine state where finally snuffed out with the brutal conquest of Constantinople, widely regarded as...

A 20-year-old Pakistani migrant has been charged with raping an 8-year-old boy in a field near a migrant reception centre on the Greek island of Kos. The Pakistani migrant is expected to stand trial in January for the sex attack, which took place on the 19th of July last year. The man is accused of driving the child to a field near a migrant reception centre and threatening to kill him while overpowering the boy and then sexually abusing him, newspaper Proto Thema reports. Another rape case involving a Pakistani migrant on Kos is scheduled to start in January as...

He was arrested on Thursday night in Didymoteicho - The deputy leader is wanted The Pakistani leader of the gang of knife- wielding men who broke into the apartment in Kaminia last Saturday , slaughtered a 29-year-old man and brutally beat two other compatriots fell into the hands of the Police . The leader of the group that commands the trafficking of smuggled cigarettes and drugs in the squares of the center of Athens, was arrested late on Thursday night , in Didymoteicho. Authorities had focused their investigations there as intelligence from OPKE and Piraeus Security, who managed to handcuff...

Greek police in Athens undertook a manhunt this week for a migrant who is said to have attempted to rape a local woman while wrapping a chain around her neck. The manhunt comes after the migrant, believed to be possibly Pakistani, approached a local 54-year-old woman in the Kaminia area of the Greek capital and is said to have taken a thick chain and wrapped it around his victim’s neck as he attempted to rape her. Local police say they are actively hunting for the suspect, saying that the case is extremely serious and that they want to prevent the...

A Pakistani migrant drug dealer in Athens has been accused of taking two teenaged girls prisoner before drugging them both and raping one in his apartment. Police stated the girls, Greeks aged 16 and 17, had claimed that the man had held them captive in his fifth-floor apartment and had threatened them with violence, saying he would kill them if they tried to leave. According to a report from Greek newspaper Proto Thema, the migrant raped one of the girls, while violently assaulting the other. Eventually, the pair managed to escape and ran down a street shouting for help in...

The Greek government officially requested an urgent purchase of Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fifth generation aircraft for the Hellenic Air Force. According to the Greek newspaper Proto Thema, the Director General of Armaments and Investments for the Ministry of National Defense, Theodoros Lagios, sent a formal Letter of Request (LOR) to the U.S. Department of Defense on November 6, 2020.

The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is finalizing a plan to become a citizen of the island of Cyprus, Recode has learned, becoming one of the highest-profile Americans to take advantage of one of the world’s most controversial “passport-for-sale” programs. Schmidt, one of America’s wealthiest people, and his family have won approval to become citizens of the Mediterranean nation, according to a previously unreported notice in a Cypriot publication in October. While it is not clear why exactly Schmidt has pursued this foreign citizenship, the new passport gives him the ability to travel to the European Union, along with...

A curfew in Philadelphia tonight from 9pm to 6am. Streets in the downtown area closed. Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard deployed... A federal judge in Portland granting a preliminary injunction saying that federal officers denied First Amendment rights to peaceful protesters... Walmart removing firearms and ammunition from display floors...Today Walmart reversing course... The country with the highest coronavirus infection rate in Europe moving to a national lockdown. Belgium shutting down... In Canada Winnipeg the largest city in Manitoba moving to a Code Red coronavirus lockdown... An earthquake measuring 7.0 struck off the coast of Turkey today... The current UK...

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit the Aegean Sea off Greece and Turkey on Friday, according to the United States Geological Survey. At least 4 people were killed in the quake, according to Turkey’s health minister. The city of Izmir in Turkey has been particularly badly hit with reports of at least 20 building destroyed, cars being crushed and people in the streets following the quake. The earthquake has also caused damage on the Greek island of Samos in the Aegean sea.

A powerful earthquake has struck off Turkey's Aegean coast, north of the Greek island of Samos, officials said. The 7.0 magnitude tremor, about 17km (11 miles) off the coast of western Izmir province, was felt as far away as Athens and Istanbul, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. There was no word on casualties but images from the Turkish city of Izmir showed buildings that had collapsed. An earthquake that struck Izmir in 1999 killed about 17,000 people. Reports said Friday's quake was also felt on the Greek island of Crete. Video on social media showed people searching through the...

The French cyber authority has announced that many government ministries, media outlets and financial institutions have been hit by a mysterious attack. In recent days, there has been an escalation in French-Turkish relations. According to reports published in the last hours of tonight (Sunday), it appears that a major and significant cyber attack has hit France. It is not yet clear the size of the attack and whether it has ended, but it has been reported that many government ministries, media outlets and financial institutions have been affected. The National Cyber Authority in France issued an official statement in which...

The electronic warfare system is known as “Belladonna”, a poisonous plant that gets its name from Renaissance women who used its extract for tinctures to dilate the pupils of their eyes, ostensibly to make them more attractive. While Belladonna translates to “beautiful woman” in English, in Russian it has a second meaning: it is the name of a Russian electronic jamming system now credited with knocking out at least nine Turkish Bayraktar armed drones used by Azerbaijan to target Armenia. If true – and no one has denied it – the system is now operating around the sensitive Russian military...

As forces mass in Europe, the biggest stumbling block to EuropeÂ’s future strategic independence as well as American grand strategy is once again Germany. North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies Turkey and Greece are embroiled in a dispute over Turkish oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean, and Greece is backed by the French navy. After the French military conducted training exercises with Greek forces in the region on Thursday, Turkey warned France to retreat. Within a day, three things happened in rapid succession.First, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed a treaty to relocate troops out of Germany to...

Tension is running high between Greece and Turkey. The cause? Turkish Chief of the General Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar paid a visit to Imia, a pair of two small, uninhabited Greek islets in the Aegean Sea, on January 29. He was accompanied by the commanders of the Turkish land, naval and air forces.Imia – which Turkey calls “Kardak” – was a subject of yet another crisis in 1996 that brought Greece and Turkey to the brink of war. Although armed conflict was ultimately averted, Turkey still claims that the islands are Turkish, even though the islands in the Aegean are...

The power shift in the Middle East over the past several years has reshaped the political challenges facing several of its constituent countries, and has led them to consider a possible expansion of their framework of relations. Considering Turkey’s repeated interventions in the affairs of more than one state and the potential threat its ambitions pose to the region’s future, the strategic interests of Israel and many Arab countries—especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia—necessitate a strengthening of relations among countries that can offset Ankara’s aggression. Advertisement Greece is perhaps uniquely suited to assist in this cooperation. Jerusalem boosted its ties...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: ISIS was so successful in 2014 in part because President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan of Turkey is a vocal supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. Any distance ErdoÄŸan has placed between himself and ISIS is attributable to pressure from Russia, the US, and Europe, not to his rejection of the groupÂ’s Islamist ideology. In view of TurkeyÂ’s increasingly divisive and destabilizing influence in the Middle East, the regionÂ’s biggest concern for the West could be President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸanÂ’s burgeoning Islamist tendencies. In order to understand the Turkish role in the threat of ISIS, borne from the Muslim Brotherhood, it...

Greece’s government says it has finalized plans to build a wall along its northeast border with Turkey, over concerns that migrants may try to stage mass crossings into the European Union country. Government spokesman Stelios Petsas said Monday that 26 kilometers (16 miles) of wall would be added to an existing 10-kilometer (six-mile) section of fence in a 63-million-euro ($74 million) project due to be completed by the end of April... Police officials on Monday told The Associated Press that a surveillance camera network was also planned to cover the entire 192-kilometer (120-mile) Greek-Turkish border, while police have already started...

A poster at a shop in Madinah announces its boycott of all Turkish products. RIYADH/JEDDAH: The popular campaign boycotting Turkish products in Saudi Arabia has gained further momentum over the past few days, attracting the support of commentators and businesses. “Turkish political mess-ups and interference in countries of the Middle East is the real reason behind this popular boycott of Turkish products,” said Dr. Hamdan Al-Shehri, a political analyst and international relations scholar. “Turkish President Erdogan changed his previous policy of minimizing Turkish problems and instead exported it to the outside. Turkey has been threatening the region just as Iran...

A Russian fighter jet on Sunday reportedly came dangerously close to an Israeli passenger aircraft while on route from the Greek island of Rhodes to Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport. The incident occurred when the Israir flight entered Cypriot air space. No casualties or damage were reported. The Russian Sukhoi Su-27 came to within a mile from the Israir Airbus A320, a distance considered unsafe, for several minutes before air traffic controllers in Cyprus warned it away. Russia has fighter aircraft stationed in nearby Syria, where it is assisting the Assad regime in the civil war, leading to crowded skies in...

Archaeologists working in the ancient Greek city of Soli Pompeipolis in the southern Mersin province in Turkey have unveiled the memorial tomb of the Greek poet and astronomer Aratus, who was born in 315 BC. The city, located in the ancient region of Paphlagonia, was still prominent during Roman times but was only rediscovered in the 1800s with the unearthing of the ruins of Zimbilli Tepe in the Black Sea region of the country. Soli Pompeipolis, lying just across the river from Tasköprü, in the Gökirmak (Greek: Amnias) Valley, in ancient times stretched as far as the Küre and ilgaz...