Zsolt Semjén, Hungary’s Deputy Prime Minister, was present at an exhibit abbreviated as Fehova (Fegyver-Horgász-Vadász, or in English Weapon-Fisher-Hunter), which celebrates Hungary’s hunting traditions and is attracting an estimated 60,000 visitors. Mr. Semjén is himself an avid hunter and this past week voiced his opposition to a European Union initiative aimed at restricting the possession of firearms for the purposes […]
I had hoped that I wouldn’t need to write any more stories about the Budapest Airport but the latest news from Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport are disturbing. After arriving to the Budapest Airport a couple of years ago, I noticed a large muscled man grabbing our suitcases from the carousel. He packed them onto a cart and was quickly […]
Pastor Steven Anderson of Arizona’s Faithful Word Baptist Church often claims to have a monopoly on “true,” undiluted “Bible-believing” Christianity. In his mind, Christ’s message is not of redemption and forgiveness, but of visceral rage and damnation for a wide range of people on his hate list. Mr. Anderson has declared that homosexuals are better dead than alive and has […]
I just returned from an enjoyable visit to my birth country. Winter travel has its challenges and living in California made me forget Hungary’s often freezing winter weather. I was also annoyed with Budapest airport transportation, specifically the lack of comfortable and reasonably priced transportation between Budapest Airport and downtown. The airport recently reported that passenger numbers exceeded 12 million […]
Hungarians are more accustomed to the disappearance of major print publications than Canadians, particularly after the ruling party’s shuttering by proxy of the nation’s largest circulation daily, Népszabadság. Canadians have also been more avid readers of news in print than Hungarians, where even the nation’s largest national daily, the conservative Magyar Nemzet, has less than 22,000 subscribers and readers of the […]
While the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Hungary strongly oppose the European Union to settle thousands of migrants from the third world, quite a few Arab, Afghan and Black African people live continually or settled permanently in Hungary. How do they feel like in our country, how do they see us, and what they think about the migration crisis? […]
The Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH) published figures from a micro-census conducted in 2016 that present an alarming reality: there are only 1.4 million people in the country under 15 years of age and only 6.6 million active, working age adults. To place this into context: in 1960, there were 2.5 million Hungarians under the age of 15. This large number […]
We would be loath to draw sweeping parallels between Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s 37-year rule, now on the brink of collapse, and the much younger “System of National Cooperation” regime established by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary in 2010. After all, Mr. Mugabe truly did rise to power as the consequence of a political revolution (and a protracted guerrilla […]
Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian Prime Minister, is angry. He says those who accuse his energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, of being a dual Australian-Hungarian citizen just do not understand the history of the Hungarian Holocaust. Josh Frydenberg’s mother Erica Strauss was born in 1943 in the Budapest ghetto. That is where the fascists had pushed all the Jews in together, as […]
The Honourable Bob Rae, former Premier of Ontario and currently special envoy to Myanmar, spoke at Saint Paul University on October 23rd, 2017, the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Chantal Beauvais, the rector of Saint Paul University, opened this day of the conference entitled Flight to Freedom: The Canadian Refugee Experience Since 1957 by noting the University’s strong commitment to […]
