Just a few hours before abandoning the “green zone” and heading for Kabul airport Panagiotis Koumoutsakos and the executives of the multinational security firm he was working with received a visit from the local Taliban chief.
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Rhodes ferry operator Paris Kakas cannot afford another summer lost to the pandemic if he is ever to repay the millions of euros he owes: “When the bank comes asking, we say: sorry.”
More than 4.7 million patients are estimated to visit the emergency departments of Greece’s understaffed and cash-strapped public hospitals every year, with doctors arguing that 60 to 70 percent of that intake could be avoided if the primary healthcare sector were better organized.
Six years after musician and rapper Pavlos Fyssas was murdered by a self-professed member of Golden Dawn and over four years after the trial into the neo-Nazi party got under way, the time is nearing for its 18 former lawmakers to take the stand.
With the increasing expansion of automation and artificial intelligence, the issue is how the nature of work itself is changing in a constantly developing digital world, demanding constant adaptation.
In mid-July, just days after New Democracy was elected to power, the government held a meeting on the immigration crisis with officials from the Greek Police, Coast Guard, Armed Forces and the Reception and Identification Service.
The unassuming freight train rumbles across the countryside in northern Greece, but a moving shadow cast on the ground reveals human figures hiding between its wagons.
With migrants only allowed one backpack each on the smugglers’ boats that carry them from Turkey to Greece, Ahmed, his wife Hanin and her family packed a few possessions and sent the rest of their belongings to friends.
After two meetings in Athens with a US agent who was posing as a weapons dealer, Rami Ghanem returned to the Greek capital in December 2015 to check on his order.
“It’s a story of blood and aircraft wreckage strewn across fields.” A poet could not have offered a better description of Captain Akrivos Tsolakis’ career in the Hellenic Air Force and as an air accident investigator.
Panagiotis Pikrammenos can surely savor a macaron or two with greater ease today than during that incredibly tense month seven years ago when as president of the Council of State he was tasked with forming a caretaker government during the frenetic early days of the crisis.
It was 1988 when “Cinema Paradiso,” Giuseppe Tornatore’s elegiac tribute to the movie theater culture, hit European screens. Angelos Semelas was 13 when he saw the film in 1988, but remembers it as though it were yesterday.
The phone rang at the Avlona juvenile detention facility, north of Athens, on Friday, July 24, 2015, with the announcement from a high-ranking Justice Ministry official that Koufodinas was going to be transferred there. “Koufodinas who?” inquired the perturbed clerk. “The one you’re thinking about.”
Crew members abandoned their posts, fire emergency plans were mistakenly activated for Deck 3 instead of Deck 4 where the blaze had broken out, and a lifeboat was released into the sea before the evacuation order had been issued or any safety measures taken.
Greece is trying to revive some of its more material ghosts: Dozens of long-abandoned state properties in the heart of Athens are up for development, to improve public finances and revive the recession-battered capital’s grimier parts.
Perched halfway up a cragged mountain range, limestone outcrops frame the small village of mostly single-story homes where Nicholas Skourides was born, and where he says he simply wants to live out the rest of his days.
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