There is a clear difference between the protests from both Wednesday night and those presently underway in the Hungarian capital this evening compared to previous demonstrations over the past eight years. On the surface, the current demonstrations of around three thousand protesters are about the Orbán regime’s oppressive new labour laws, reportedly adopted due to pressure on the Orbán government […]
Foreign individuals who are affiliated with various organizations can be prevented from entering the US. The FAM 302.7 directive from the US State Department lists groups considered to be “criminal organizations” as defined by the international Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Several Hungarian organizations are on the list, although most do not exist anymore. These are WWII organizations, like the Arrow […]
If it were not for lavish government subsidies transferred to pro-Orbán propaganda news outlets, not a single Hungarian right-wing newspaper or publication would survive beyond a couple of weeks. Publications like the main government daily, Magyar Idők, would almost certainly go out of business in a matter of days were it not for transfers from public coffers, mostly in the […]
Now that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has successfully made a mockery of Central European University, convincing its rector, Michael Ignatieff, to spend twenty months jumping through hoops for the government in the naive hope of good faith negotiations, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) is next in line for some penance. In an emergency assembly of the Academy on Thursday, […]
On Monday, Central European University announced that new students enrolling starting in September 2019 would begin their studies in Vienna, rather than Budapest, after Hungary’s highest ranked university was forced out of the country by the regime of Viktor Orbán. “CEU has been forced out. This is unprecedented. A U.S. institution has been driven out of a country that is a NATO […]
On December 1 Romania held a military parade to celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Great Union, the foundation of modern-day Romania. On this day in 1918 the National Assembly was held in Alba Julia (Gyulafehérvár in Hungarian), where 1,228 elected delegates adopted the union resolution. The declaration promised “full national freedom” to all minorities and was read at a […]
In an unusual move the US State Department issued the following press statement on November 27, 2018: Heather Nauert Department Spokesperson Washington, DC The United States requested the extradition of two suspected Russian arms dealers, Vladimir Lyubishin Sr. and Vladimir Lyubishin Jr., pursuant to the U.S.-Hungary Extradition Treaty. Hungary denied the U.S. request and instead extradited the suspects to Russia, […]
Last year Prime Minister Orbán declared that “Hungarians see themselves as the late descendants of Attila the Hun,” and the country’s citizens are proud of their Hun-Turkic origins and their language which is related to the Turkic languages. Orbán also reminded his audience that there was a time when it was an insult to say that Hungary was Europe’s most […]
Before I got involved with current events in Hungary, I wrote fiction and occasionally poetry. I began my post-secondary education as an undergraduate student in English literature, immersed mostly in Canadian and British literary fiction. Some fifteen years later and after writing more than one thousand articles on current affairs in my two online publications, I felt that it was […]
Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, told Romanian President Klaus Iohannis that he considers the Romanian national holiday commemorating the unification with Transylvania to also be a European celebration. Juncker said: “Romania will celebrate on December 1 of the current year its centenary, the centenary of the great union, as our Romanian friends say. I wanted to say to […]
