International Romani Day was first declared in 1990 to celebrate Roma culture and raise awareness of the issues facing Roma people and draw attention to discrimination directed at communities globally. Roma people were targeted for extermination by the Nazis in Europe, at least 200,000 were killed in concentration camps between 1939 and 1945. It is estimated that about a quarter […]
In 2008, Péter Árvai, Ádám Somlai-Fischer and Péter Halácsy founded Prezi, an innovative software company in Budapest. They wanted to create a new type of presentation software that people could use to share and tell their stories in a memorable and engaging way. They succeeded, and today Prezi is a competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint. Seven years ago* the Budapest-based company […]
Although Hungary is a NATO ally of the United States, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has never been invited to the White House. Two years ago in Berlin, President Barack Obama announced that the US would host the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit on March 31, 2016, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. This Summit […]
Hungarian government propagandists have a new strategy – they plant fake, “feel-good” stories about the economy in the media. Recently articles appeared that Hungary’s debt upgrade is “imminent” and would be well-deserved. Keeping the country’s debt in “junk” is unfair. Portfolio.hu published an elaborate story about the government’s efforts to attract Tesla Motors, quoting Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs, […]
When I was growing up in Hungary my parents wanted me to learn German and I took lessons from a nice older lady. I learned much later that she had been a nun before 1950 and gave private lessons to survive after losing her teaching job at a Catholic school. On August 30, 1950, Hungary’s Stalinist government closed 23 male […]
My wife was watching the TV-news when she cried out – Andy Grove died! He was 79. He is widely considered as one of the tech pioneers who built California’s Silicon Valley. I met Andy several times at work, at meetings. I didn’t know him well, he was the legendary CEO of tech giant Intel where I worked as a […]
It seems that historical monuments have more to say about the time in which they are built than the time they commemorate. On March 15, 1928, a large crowd gathered at Riverside Drive, New York, among them the 520-member delegation of the Horthy regime, to dedicate a monument of Lajos Kossuth, the hero of the 1848 Revolution. Progressive Hungarian-Americans boycotted […]
Few have heard about Elek Bacsik, the great Hungarian-American jazz musician who died in 1993 in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He was 73 years old. In 1964, Bacsik made jazz history, when at the Antibes-Juan les Pins (France) festival he collaborated with Dizzy Gillespie, who honored his Roma heritage with a piece entitled For the Gypsies. The […]
Franz “Señor Tihany” Czeisler was 99 years old when he died on March 2 in Las Vegas, Nevada. A legendary magician and circus performer, he was the founder of Circo Tihany, the great circus troupe of South America. Franz (Ferenc in Hungarian) was also probably the last living survivor of the 1942 murderous pogrom in Újvidék (today Novi Sad, Serbia) […]
Last October US Ambassador Colleen Bell was invited to speak at Budapest Corvinus University on the topic of US-Hungarian relations. Her speech didn’t go down well with Mr. Frank Koszorus, Jr. In his “open letter” Mr. Koszorus calls the speech “unwarranted and unproductive lecturing,” which may “humiliate and alienate many democratic-minded Hungarians.” He described Ambassador Bell’s “double standard” and concludes […]
