Hírek 1.0
A snapshot of a budding bromance: Putin called Musk a genius
According to Vladimir Putin, Russia closely cooperates with its American space industry partners, including Elon Musk, despite political disagreements, whom he called "a brilliant man". The Russian president praised the SpaceX founder at an exhibition in Moscow, just one day after Musk justified restricting Starlink's military use in Ukraine by citing the risk of Russian destruction of satellites.
First the election, then Iran: Washington may be preparing new strikes
The United States has warned several Gulf Arab states, through diplomatic and military channels, to prepare for a "short but intense" campaign against Iran after the November 3 U.S. midterm elections. According to the Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump has not yet made a final decision, but is leaning toward a large-scale strike that would also target Iranian infrastructure and nuclear facilities.
Trump would reconnect Europe to Russian gas
In 2018, he was still scolding Germany for relying on American military protection against Russia while funneling billions to Moscow through its energy purchases, but now his negotiators have raised the idea of reviving Russian gas sales to Europe, and even restoring Nord Stream, as an economic incentive for a war settlement.
Fontos
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Hunor will protect us — he just hasn't discussed it with anyone yet
Today Hunor Kelemen finally spoke out on the territorial-administrative reform, and what he said hardly reassures us. The chairman of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) ran through the obligatory points about consulting the communities, thorough preparation and the protection of minority rights, then delivered the politically most relevant piece of information: that no talks o
Szeklerland is being redrawn too, and RMDSZ will protect us afterward
And so this moment has arrived too, while the entire Hungarian press quietly accepted that once again we have nothing to say about a political idea that will probably rewrite the relations and everyday life of Transylvanian Hungarians for decades to come. Grindeanu announced the other day that the government would push the territorial-administrative reform through by assuming responsibility before
Democrats seek independent prosecutor to investigate Trump's ties to Epstein
Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee are pushing for the appointment of an independent special counsel to investigate President Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, as well as how the Department of Justice handled the allegations raised in the case. The 53-page report, released eight days before the November 3 midterm elections, was met with outright rejection from
Republican defeat on the horizon: America votes in one week
In the House of Representatives, the Democrats are the favorites, and they could also win a majority in the Senate in the November 3 U.S. midterm elections. A week before the vote, Republicans have reason for concern in both chambers: if they lose control of Congress, Donald Trump will have a much harder time pushing through his agenda in the next two years of his presidency.
Hírek 2.0
Trumpiad for today: solar panels are frying animals
Donald Trump has identified yet another threat to American wildlife: solar panels, which he claims are a hundred times hotter than a stove and fry any animal that jumps on them. The president of the United States shared this peculiar energy discovery at a campaign rally in Texas, declaring that the black panels “kill all the animals.” The story so far has not explained why America's entire fauna w
Moldova shows once again what it means to take the country's defense seriously
Moldova keeps adopting measures that one would rightly expect from a NATO member state if it took its own security seriously. When it had to defend its elections from Russian interference, Chișinău uncovered networks, tracked money flows and strengthened its defenses with foreign partners; now it wants to draw on Ukraine's wartime experience to protect its airspace. On October 26, the two countrie
Radev says the problem is that we call the Russian attacker by name
Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev has drawn a peculiar security-policy lesson from the drone attacks in the Black Sea: in his view, Romania was hit by further attacks because Bucharest named Russia as responsible. According to his remarks at Monday's economic forum in Sofia, one of the secrets to calm in the region could be for the attacked countries to show enough tact to keep quiet about who
Five thousand dollars if we win, a million if you find fraud – Trump's price list for the election
In September he was still promising five thousand dollars to every adult American if the Republicans kept control of both houses of Congress, and now he has put a million-dollar reward on the table for anyone who provides information about election fraud that leads to an arrest and then a conviction. Ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, Donald Trump is trying to use promises of money to make
Putin is already sending the diesel, Trump can prepare the victory flag
Behold the floating result of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin's joint deal: the first tanker has already left Russian territorial waters and is heading for New York, carrying nearly 300,000 barrels of diesel on board. Moscow, of course, isn't wasting any time on discretion — Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak announced on Tuesday that three ships are already on their way to the United States, a
Winter is coming, and Putin feels sorry for us again
Winter is coming, and Putin has pulled out his well-worn weapon of gas-scaremongering, loading it with the usual rounds: Europe will freeze, businesses will go under, families will weep over their heating bills if they still refuse to buy from Moscow. At Tuesday's gas forum in Moscow, the Russian president once again cast a worried eye on the future of European households, since he evidently finds
Szemnek
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István, the King in America – the Incubator generation between two homelands
I have never seen anyone love their homeland so beautifully. Réka Pigniczky's 2009 documentary, Incubator, offers a glimpse into the lives of the children of Hungarians who fled to America after 1956: how their parents created a Hungarian world for them on the other side of the ocean, and what it was like to grow up belonging to two cultures and two homelands at once. At the heart of the story is
Orbán is resting in Paris, Toroczkai is building a monument to himself
What does political satire do after Orbán's fall? According to the video, there was no need to worry: the former prime minister's lounging in Paris, the 1,848-metre flag brought out for the commemoration of '56, and the stories surrounding the reckoning with the Matolcsy family provide more than enough material. Meanwhile, Mária Schmidt talks of revenge, and the author probes why people are so eag
Cost-of-living anger and street violence in France – a report from Lyon
Launched by students, the wave of protests in France has by now broadened into a demonstration against the cost-of-living crisis, with the video's description describing events accompanied by arson, looting and mass arrests.
“Orbán's fall gave us hope” – from Vojvodina to Belgrade
Lines in Subotica, volunteers in Čantavir watching for suspected vote-buying, conflicts escalating to the point of calling the police, and groups in black circling the polling stations in Belgrade: this report offers a close-up view of the atmosphere surrounding Serbia's election. Among those who spoke, some expect change to come from the student movement, others say they are missing a foreign-po
Hírek 3.0
The “Islamic NATO” held talks in Tehran
Leading military and security officials from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey held talks with the Iranian leadership in Tehran on Monday, as Houthi attacks from Yemen put growing pressure on Saudi Arabia, while Washington and Tehran threaten each other with further strikes. According to Iranian state media, the parties agreed to continue security consultations, though the three guest countries di
British government to reveal on Wednesday where the money will come from
Britain's defense industry has been waiting for months for the government to attach funding and deadlines to its defense commitments. According to Prime Minister Andy Burnham's Monday announcement, Chancellor John Healey will show in Wednesday's budget how the already approved force-development plan will be financed, and at what pace the commitments made to NATO through 2035 will be fulfilled.
EU may restrict imports of Chinese furniture, machinery and chemical products
After electric and hybrid vehicles, Brussels is looking to narrow the European market's gates to further Chinese products. According to Bloomberg, the European Commission is preparing to restrict imports of chemical products, furniture and machinery, and could present its first proposals as early as the first quarter of 2027. For now, discussions are focused on which products would be affected and
More than twenty countries urge: artificial intelligence must remain under human control. The US and China are left out
Leaders of more than twenty countries urged stricter oversight of artificial intelligence in a joint declaration on Monday: according to the signatories, the technology could develop faster than governments are able to manage the risks that come with it.
Long flag, short patience: Fidesz event ends in a scuffle
There was no Peace March and Viktor Orbán gave no speech, but there was a very long flag by the Danube, followed by Mária Schmidt, János Áder and János Bóka for those interested.
Világháló
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Radu Hossu: Trump would blame Ukraine for the oil price explosion, while it was actually the Iran war that pushed prices up
According to Radu Hossu, Donald Trump is trying to blame Ukrainian strikes on refineries for the rise in American fuel prices because he fears he will have to pay the political price for the war with Iran in the November elections. Hossu believes the American president is attempting a communication trick to swap cause and effect: he suggests that Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries are driving
Zelensky also commemorated 1956
Seventy years ago, Europe and the entire world reached an extremely important, in many respects decisive crossroads, when the people of Hungary rose up for freedom, against the Soviet system. The courage and love of freedom of the Hungarians were shown with extraordinary force, and to this day they fill us with admiration throughout Europe.
Szabolcs Panyi on the Hungarian link to the GRU assassination attempt
In October 2014, two Czech employees lost their lives when a munitions depot exploded in Vrbětice, in southeastern Czechia. A few weeks later, another explosion occurred at the same site. What initially looked like an industrial accident later turned out to be a sabotage operation by Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, aimed at preventing arms shipments to Ukraine and other conflict zo
Shoddy Gang
The Harghita County Council and its bosom buddy, the Harghita County waste collection company, couldn't even manage to translate into Hungarian the contract that residents are made to sign. And yet - at least as far as we know - the overwhelming majority of Harghita County's population is Hungarian-speaking.
Hírek 4.0
Twenty thousand forints a vote: vote-buying in Serbia
This year's elections in Hungary and Serbia had many similarities, and one of the most striking was vote-buying. Many considered this the biggest obstacle to the "change of system" in Hungary. In Serbia, too, attempts were made to bribe people in the poorest villages, and according to reports, a vote there also cost around twenty thousand forints' worth of dinars.
Breaking free from strongmen: Serbia on election days
On Sunday evening, Aleksandar Vučić's regime in Serbia collapsed: according to estimates by Ipsos and CeSID, the list of the student movement that formed after the Novi Sad tragedy won more than half of the votes and will receive 140 seats in the 250-member parliament. Vučić's party, the Serbian Progressive Party, will go into opposition after nearly fourteen years. The winning list does not need
Trump: "Norway is a shithole"
Norway has gone through a severe civilizational decline: it didn't award the Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. The American president therefore drew the necessary foreign policy conclusion on October 25, at his campaign rally in Port Huron, Michigan, and declared: "Norway has basically become a shithole country." In the speech delivered ahead of the midterm elections, he also said he doesn't want
The Americans are lying, and they'll pay for it yet
On Saturday, October 24, Ukraine's Ministry of Defense announced that Starlink and the military-grade Starshield were once again operating at pre-restriction speeds. The connection is now stable even above 400 kilometers per hour, whereas during the restriction it had been cutting out at speeds as low as 160 kilometers per hour. The more than week-long throttling has ended, but the real dispute is
A message dropped from a drone showed the way to survival
Over half a day, Serhiy Vivsanyuk crawled three hundred meters across a field, repeatedly losing consciousness and, each time he came to, trying to move on. Shrapnel had pierced his lung, his arm and leg were injured, and his thirst became increasingly unbearable. The Russian positions were only a hundred to a hundred and fifty meters away, and a message dropped from a Ukrainian drone let him know
Trump would rename the Atlantic Ocean, Google resists
Donald Trump recounted how he tried to persuade Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, to finally give the Atlantic Ocean a name worthy of it too — preferably his own, or at least America's — because apparently there are still too many labels on the world map that don't make people think of the American president. According to the story he told at a campaign rally in South Carolina on October 21, he persona
Mondd el fiaidnak!
All in section →They didn't ask for a Russian passport, so they were killed
They were incredibly beautiful. Young and in love. Their lives were cut short for one reason alone, but cruelly: Anastasia and Valerii Saksahanskyi refused to serve the occupiers.
One-year-old girl and her mother killed in Russian drone attack
Six people, including two little girls, lost their lives when a Russian Shahed drone struck the center of Nova Vodolaha, in Kharkiv region, near a park not far from a café, on October 19. A further fourteen people were injured in the attack, including six children.
Surrounded for five months, the Ukrainian soldier made it out from behind Russian lines in six days
Viktor Svystun, a 37-year-old Ukrainian soldier with the call sign "Bumer," spent five months surrounded in Zaporizhzhia region, where he and his comrades sometimes fought the Russians from as little as five to seven meters away. When it became clear to him that they had been encircled, he decided to resist to the very end: "If things have come to the point where they're going to kill me anyway, t
“No one will walk in my place” – a mother who lost both legs to a Russian air bomb is learning to walk again
Karina Ardeeva, who lives in Sumy, lost both her legs on July 3 when a Russian guided air bomb struck Shevchenko Avenue. Her husband, Denys, was also injured in the attack, while their nine-month-old son, Artem, waited for them at home.
Tágító
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Fault lines at the Brussels EU summit, and yesterday's world's financial plan
At the EU summit held in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, heads of state and government failed to agree on the Union's next seven-year budget, while a new €70 billion hole opened up in Ukraine's financing. There was an open clash over energy prices and migration, and the leaders showed striking unity on only one issue: they stood by Volodymyr Zelensky in the dispute that erupted with the Trump adm
It started in schools, spread across the whole country: the French are protesting
France took to the streets again on Saturday. From Paris to Marseille, from Lyon to Rennes, students, union members and yellow-vest activists marched to protest against rising living costs, social inequality and the deteriorating state of public education. By evening, authorities had already detained nearly three hundred people, a tourist information office was on fire in Lyon, and protesters vand
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V: Niculescu pieced together his program from his failed predecessors' plans
Literally identical paragraphs, the same figures, deadlines and lists: according to an analysis by news.ro, the government program backed by the PSD and attributed to Luca Niculescu – submitted to parliament on Thursday – copied, in several chapters, passages from the program published a month earlier by the PNL–USR–UDMR coalition led by Siegfried Mureșan, as well as from the document submitted by
EU summit in Brussels: budget dispute, NATO meeting on the Black Sea, while the EU court condemns Hungary
The European Council's two-day summit began in Brussels on Thursday, with its agenda including competitiveness, Ukraine, the next long-term EU budget, the Middle East, European defense and security, migration, as well as enlargement and institutional reforms. The summit officially started at 10 a.m. local time, and António Costa, President of the European Council, will close it with a working lunc