分类： politics

NICOSIA, Cyprus — Six months after launching a new anti-establishment political party built on his massive social media following, 26-year-old Cypriot content creator Fidias Panayiotou has announced he will retain his seat in the European Parliament instead of taking the newly won seat he earned in Cyprus’ national House of Representatives. The announcement came Monday, just one day after his upstart Direct Democracy party defied all political expectations to claim 5.4% of the national vote and four of the 56 seats in the Cypriot parliament.

Fidias, who is universally known to his online audience by just his first name, confirmed his decision to reporters ahead of the official proclamation ceremony for newly elected lawmakers. “I’ll stay in the European Parliament because it would be good for the Direct Democracy party to have a European Parliament member,” he said. “We could’ve done better but we’re happy with what has happened, this is a small victory.”

The result marks a stunning rise for a political outsider who parlayed viral internet fame into electoral success in under a year. For months leading up to Sunday’s vote, Fidias kept the public guessing about his future plans, fueling widespread speculation across Cypriot political circles. What makes the outcome even more notable is that Fidias founded Direct Democracy only half a year ago, building the party around a core promise to upend Cyprus’ decades-old, establishment political order. The party’s unique model lets ordinary citizens shape policy directly and register as candidates through an open online platform, a sharp break from traditional top-down party structures.

In Sunday’s election, Fidias earned more individual votes than any other candidate running for Direct Democracy, but he has already agreed to cede his parliamentary seat to the party’s runner-up in his district, Yiannis Laouris, clearing the way for him to remain in Brussels.

While the four-seat result is already a historic win for a brand-new political movement, it fell short of Fidias’ own high expectations. That high bar was set by his astonishing performance in the June 2024 European Parliament election, where he captured nearly 20% of the national vote — an outcome he achieved without releasing a formal policy platform, making campaign promises, or taking clear stances on key issues. After that election, Fidias argued that his broad support reflected a deep hunger among voters for authenticity over conventional politics. “It seems now that people are hungry not for political positions, but for true people that are not lying, (but) saying the truth,” he told the Associated Press shortly after the June poll.

Fidias first built his global audience of millions on YouTube and TikTok through a series of outrageous, viral stunts: videos of him spending large sums of cash while traveling in Vietnam, living for a full week inside an airport without paying, and even surviving a 10-day burial while buried alive. His big mainstream breakthrough came when he spent months campaigning to meet and get a hug from Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk — a stunt that succeeded, and earned him a new fan in the billionaire entrepreneur.

The influencer-turned-politician has openly acknowledged that his rapid political growth has been fueled by widespread anger among Cypriot voters, who have grown deeply disenchanted with the country’s traditional party system, which is widely perceived as corrupt and built on a decades-old culture of quid pro quo favors for supporters. For Fidias, his candidature and new party have become a vessel for that widespread public frustration.

As an MEP, Fidias has leaned heavily on social media to connect with his base, regularly posting content explaining the inner workings of the European Parliament, breaking down his reasoning on key votes, and responding to his growing cohort of critics. Many of those detractors dismiss Fidias and his trial-by-error approach to policy as politically inexperienced and unfit for office. He has also sparked significant controversy for his foreign policy stances: he has expressed support for opening negotiations with Russia amid its ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and has questioned the International Criminal Court’s finding that the mass deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia is unlawful.

Sunday’s national election also saw another notable shift in Cypriot politics, with the ultranationalist National Popular Front, commonly known as ELAM, making major gains. The party increased its vote share to nearly 11%, up from just under 7% in the previous election, growing its representation from four seats to eight in the 56-member parliament.

EDINBURGH, Scotland — In a landmark development that has rocked Scottish politics more than two years after the start of a sweeping financial probe, the former chief executive of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and estranged husband of ex-Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon has entered a guilty plea to charges of embezzling over £400,000 ($540,000) from the pro-independence party.

Sixty-two-year-old Peter Murrell was remanded into custody immediately following his admission of guilt at the High Court in Edinburgh on Monday. Court documents outline that Murrell diverted party funds for personal use between 2012 and 2016, acquiring a recreational motorhome, two private vehicles, and a range of high-end luxury goods with the misappropriated funds.

Murrell’s legal process stretches back to April 2023, when he was first taken into custody as part of the investigation into the SNP’s opaque financial records. Formal charges against him were not filed until April 2024. The investigation itself was triggered by questions surrounding the expenditure of more than £600,000 ($810,000) that had been earmarked specifically for a grassroots campaign pushing for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom. For nearly two years, the probe hung over Scottish public life, casting uncertainty over both the SNP’s leadership and the legacy of its long-serving leader, Nicola Sturgeon.

Sturgeon, who led the SNP and Scotland’s semi-autonomous devolved government for eight years before stepping down unexpectedly in 2022, was officially cleared of any wrongdoing in the case last year. The former first minister, who dominated Scottish political discourse for nearly a decade, overhauled the SNP during her tenure, transforming the once-single-issue independence party into a formidable liberal governing force that won repeated electoral victories. She steered the country through the global COVID-19 pandemic, earning widespread public acclaim for her calm, consistent communication style, and led the party through three UK-wide general elections and two devolved Scottish parliamentary contests. Sturgeon’s political exit came amid deep internal divisions within the SNP, however, and she left office without achieving her core policy goal of securing independence for Scotland’s 5.5 million residents.

Former SNP treasurer Colin Beattie, who was also arrested and questioned as part of the investigation three years ago before being released on bail, has likewise been cleared of all wrongdoing. In the wake of Murrell’s arrest in 2023, Sturgeon and Murrell announced they would end their 15-year marriage, and their divorce was finalized last year.

The guilty plea closes one chapter of the SNP’s financial scandal, but it is expected to reignite debates over internal party governance and transparency, as the current SNP leadership continues to grapple with fallout from the probe and ongoing divisions over the strategy for advancing Scottish independence.

On a watershed Monday for the global Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV — the first pontiff born in the United States, with a documented family tree that includes both enslaved people and slave owners — delivered a groundbreaking apology for the Holy See’s own centuries-long role in legitimizing chattel slavery, an act of atonement decades in the making for Black Catholics, scholars and activists worldwide.

While prior popes have offered general apologies for Christian participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, no pontiff has ever publicly acknowledged, let alone sought forgiveness for, the explicit authorizations past Vatican leaders granted to European colonial powers to subjugate and enslave non-Christian peoples. This historic admission was included as a core section of Pope Leo’s first encyclical, titled *Magnifica Humanitas* (Magnificent Humanity), a wide-ranging pastoral manifesto focused on protecting human dignity amid the rapid expansion of unregulated artificial intelligence.

In the document, Pope Leo drew a direct line between the colonial-era exploitation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and what he frames as new forms of dehumanizing enslavement and neocolonialism emerging from the digital revolution, pointing in particular to the abusive, unregulated working conditions faced by miners extracting the rare earth minerals critical for manufacturing AI chips.

“It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”

The apology confronts a long-unaddressed chapter of Vatican history. For decades, the Holy See has maintained that it has always upheld the inherent dignity of all people as children of God. But historical records show that a series of 15th-century papal bulls directly authorized Portuguese monarchs to conquer African and Indigenous American territories and enslave non-Christian peoples. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued *Dum Diversas*, a papal edict that granted the Portuguese crown and its successors the right to “invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” across the globe, and explicitly permitted “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

That edict, followed three years later by a second bull *Romanus Pontifex*, formed the foundational legal and ideological basis for the Doctrine of Discovery, the framework that legitimized colonial powers’ seizure of Indigenous land across Africa and the Americas. According to Jesuit scholar and author Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, the permissions granted to Portugal were reaffirmed by subsequent popes: Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481, and Pope Leo X in 1514, with similar rights later extended to Spanish monarchs for their American holdings.

In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally revoked or rejected the original 15th-century papal bulls that underpinned the doctrine. The Holy See has previously pointed to a 1537 edict, *Sublimis Deus*, which affirmed that Indigenous peoples should not be stripped of their liberty or property or enslaved, as evidence of the Church’s long-held position.

In his encyclical, Pope Leo acknowledged that it was not until 1888 that Pope Leo XIII, his namesake, became the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery — a step that came long after many nations had already abolished the trans-Atlantic trade. Centuries earlier, even Church institutions themselves owned enslaved people during antiquity and the Middle Ages.

“Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels,’” Leo wrote. He noted that it would be unfair to judge medieval decisions by modern moral standards, but added: “Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.”

While the Church has long rooted its doctrine in the affirmation of universal human dignity, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized,” Leo wrote. “This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached.”

Extending this lesson to the present, the pontiff warned that the Church must today firmly condemn all forms of human trafficking and exploitation emerging from the digital technology revolution “if we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith.”

The apology answers decades of persistent calls from Black American Catholics, social justice activists and academic researchers for the Vatican to take formal responsibility for its own role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, rather than only acknowledging general Christian complicity. Prior popes had broached the topic: in 1985, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness from Africans for the slave trade on behalf of participating Christians, but did not name the Vatican or past popes’ role. During a 1992 visit to Senegal’s Goree Island, the largest West African slave trading hub, he denounced slavery as a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian” but stopped short of a formal apology for the Holy See’s specific role.

Genealogical research conducted by prominent scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. confirms the unique personal context of Pope Leo’s apology: 17 of the pontiff’s American ancestors were Black, recorded in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole or free people of color, and his family tree includes both slaveholders and enslaved people. Just one month before issuing the encyclical, Leo visited a Catholic shrine at a major slave trade hub in Angola, where he referenced centuries of suffering for Angolans but did not explicitly address the Vatican’s role. The 2026 apology marks the first time any pope has taken this historic step of accountability.

VILNIUS, Lithuania – In a major cybersecurity incident that has escalated regional security concerns, Lithuanian national authorities have activated top-level alert protocols following the unauthorized exfiltration of over 600,000 records from the country’s official state data registers. Investigators have confirmed that a foreign state is suspected of orchestrating the breach, which has come amid heightened tensions from Russian hybrid operations targeting the Baltic nation.

The General Prosecutor’s Office of Lithuania publicly confirmed the details of the breach on Friday, noting that the leaked data was drawn primarily from the country’s national real estate and legal entity registers. According to official statements, the attackers gained unauthorized access by exploiting valid login credentials belonging to public institutions that are legally permitted to access the registry datasets. In the wake of the security failure, Adrijus Jusas, head of the State Enterprise Centre of Registers, the government body that oversees management of the national data systems, stepped down from his post on Monday.

Immediately following the discovery of the breach, Lithuanian cybersecurity and law enforcement bodies rolled out a series of emergency defensive measures. These included locking the accounts linked to suspicious access activity and enforcing mandatory credential updates for all authorized users to restrict further unauthorized entry, prosecutor officials confirmed.

While investigators have pointed to foreign state involvement as the leading hypothesis, authorities have not publicly named the specific country suspected of carrying out the operation. However, the context of regional security puts the incident in a stark light: as a small European Union and NATO member state with a population of just 2.9 million, Lithuania has long been identified as one of the most frequent targets of Russia’s hybrid warfare campaign against Western Europe, which encompasses everything from sabotage and property destruction to disinformation and influence operations. This history has left the country acutely sensitive to large-scale cross-border cyber intrusions.

Laurynas Kasčiūnas, a leading Lithuanian opposition politician, publicly claimed on social media this Sunday that the data theft is an operation carried out by Russian intelligence, though he has not released any evidence to back up the assertion. Kasčiūnas warned that the compromised dataset may include personal addresses and sensitive identifying information for active intelligence officers, military service members, Lithuanian diplomats, and national political leaders. If confirmed, the leak would give perpetrators actionable intelligence that could enable surveillance, targeted harassment, or coercive pressure operations against the exposed individuals.