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In a landmark legislative shift marking a sharp break from Viktor Orbán’s 12-year conservative administration, Hungary’s new parliament has voted to repeal the most stigmatizing provisions of the 2021 Child Protection Law that banned the portrayal or promotion of homosexuality and transgender identity nationwide. The rollback comes six months after Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won April’s general election, ousting Orbán’s Fidesz party and moving quickly to dismantle the previous government’s restrictive legacy.

The 2021 law, ramrodded through parliament by Fidesz’s then two-thirds supermajority, cast a wide regulatory chill across sectors, restricting access to inclusive education, limiting freedom of assembly for LGBTQ groups, and triggering repeated clashes between the Orbán government and the European Union over rule of law and fundamental rights. Under the new administration, which also holds a two-thirds legislative majority, Tuesday’s amendments were bundled into a broader legislative package designed to unwind key Fidesz-era policies. Within minutes of the final vote confirmation, Budapest announced the European Commission had formally approved the release of €4.2 billion (£3.5 billion) in cohesion funds that had been frozen for years over concerns about rule of law breaches linked to the previous government’s policies.

The unlocking of funds had been flagged last month, when the European Commission concluded the Magyar administration had addressed core deficiencies tied to the EU budget, and recommended that Hungary be readmitted to two flagship EU programs: the Erasmus+ student exchange initiative and the Horizon Europe research and innovation framework. The legislative change has been broadly welcomed by LGBTQ and human rights organizers across the country, who have waged a five-year campaign against the 2021 law.

Tamás Dombos, a leading figure with Hungarian civil rights group Háttér Society, told reporters that while the original bill submitted for amendment contained unresolved flaws, most concerns had been addressed during the legislative process. “We are very happy that this got adopted,” Dombos said. “We’ve been fighting this so-called child protection law for five years.” He noted that the new approach marks a tangible improvement from the Orbán era, when the LGBTQ community was targeted as a persistent political scapegoat, but emphasized that the fight for full equality is far from over. Remaining priorities for activists include full legal recognition of same-sex marriage, adoption rights for same-sex couples, and the restoration of transgender people’s right to officially change their legal names. “We are still knocking on a closed door,” Dombos said, “but at least they are listening on the other side.”

The shift in policy comes as the governing Tisza Party navigates a careful political balance: both Fidesz and Tisza have positioned themselves as defenders of child protection, but the two parties have taken sharply different approaches to LGBTQ rights. While Orbán’s Fidesz courted conservative voters by framing queer and transgender people as an inherent threat to public morality, Magyar’s administration has moved to roll back the most restrictive laws while stopping short of openly embracing a liberal pro-equality agenda, to avoid alienating right-leaning voters.

The turning point for the original child protection law came in 2024, when a pardon scandal fatally undermined Orbán’s narrative: the public learned that the Fidesz government had pardoned the deputy director of a state children’s home, who had been convicted of covering up his supervisor’s child abuse offenses. What had long been a winning electoral issue for Orbán turned into his political Achilles heel, clearing the way for Magyar’s electoral upset. During his election campaign, Magyar positioned his party as a champion for children in state care, while deliberately avoiding explicit discussion of LGBTQ rights to retain support from conservative voters.

In a recent interview with Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat, Magyar emphasized his cautious approach to divisive social issues. “As prime minister, it’s my duty to represent all Hungarians, and we have sensitive issues, such as the situation of sexual minorities,” he said.

The shift has already been visible on the streets of Budapest: in June 2025, the annual Budapest Pride march drew an estimated 250,000 participants, held without the official restrictions that marred the 2024 event, when Orbán had promised to block the march entirely. Last year, despite an official ban, police declined to intervene to stop the event, and all legal proceedings against Budapest’s mayor and event organizers were later dropped.

Opposition to the new amendments remains unified on the right: both Fidesz and its coalition partner the Christian Democrats voted against the changes this week. In an official statement posted to its website, the Christian Democrats reaffirmed their position that “there is no place for the promotion of LGBTQ content in schools or the media.”

In a landmark annual address delivered at MI5’s London headquarters, domestic intelligence service director general Sir Ken McCallum has laid out a stark assessment of the UK’s evolving national security landscape, revealing that the agency now allocates more resources to countering state-sponsored threats than it did at the height of the Cold War.

Sir Ken opened his speech by naming Russia the UK’s top aggressor, noting that overall foreign state threats have grown fourfold over the past 10 years. This dramatic surge has left MI5 balancing counterterrorism and state threat operations at roughly equal scale, a shift unseen in modern UK intelligence history.

Turning to Moscow’s ongoing global activities, Sir Ken outlined that Russia is waging a deliberate campaign of hybrid warfare designed to avoid triggering a collective NATO response, a red line the Kremlin would be strategically foolish to cross. With its full-scale invasion of Ukraine yielding minimal territorial gains at horrific human and military cost, Russia has instead focused on destabilizing European democratic societies. Thanks to coordinated global action that has seen nearly 1,000 Russian intelligence operatives expelled from countries worldwide since the invasion began, the Kremlin’s traditional covert network in the UK has been gutted. This has forced Moscow to rely on hiring criminal proxies to carry out attack plots on its behalf, a shift Sir Ken described as a clear sign of Russian strategic weakness, not strength. “These are not the actions of a great power with the strategic upper hand,” he emphasized.

Beyond Russia, Sir Ken warned that Iran is rapidly expanding its own hybrid campaign of aggression within UK borders. Over the past 12 months alone, UK authorities have made 50 arrests linked to Iranian state-backed activities, which have disproportionately targeted British Jewish communities while also plotting attacks against harder military infrastructure targets. While he declined to comment directly on the recent alleged plot at RAF Fairford – which Prime Minister Keir Starmer linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Sir Ken stressed that any actors seeking to sow chaos on UK soil, whether local hired attackers or their overseas paymasters, will face an unyielding law enforcement response. He added that the 2023 National Security Act, a landmark piece of legislation designed to counter foreign interference, is already being heavily deployed to address threats from Russia, Iran, and China alike.

A core focus of the address was the emerging, rapidly evolving risk of bad actors exploiting artificial intelligence for malicious purposes. Sir Ken confirmed that MI5 has already intercepted terror groups attempting to integrate AI into their attack planning, including pairing AI-enhanced autonomous drones with new reconnaissance methodologies that lower the barrier for successful attacks. AI is also being used to generate hyper-personalized propaganda and radicalization content, supercharging the ongoing cybersecurity arms race between attackers and defenders.

Most concerning, Sir Ken argued, is the risk of extremist groups leveraging AI to develop novel or more dangerous bioweapons. While this threat has not yet been fully realized, he warned that AI has the potential to fundamentally reshape the risks posed by both existing and emerging bioweapons. “Human history has given us no experience of facing an actor which is smarter than we are,” he noted, referencing the unprecedented uncertainty surrounding advanced AI development. To address this gap, Sir Ken announced the launch of MI5’s new AI Threat Assessment Centre, tasked with separating exaggerated speculation from tangible risks and coordinating national responses to AI-enabled threats. The agency is already collaborating closely with GCHQ, MI6, and the UK’s world-leading AI Security Institute to mitigate these emerging hazards.

On the topic of domestic terrorism, Sir Ken contextualized the April 2024 decision to raise the UK’s terror threat level to “severe” – the first such increase in five years, meaning an attack is deemed highly likely. While long-standing threats from Islamist groups including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State continue to motivate and direct attacks, Sir Ken highlighted extreme right-wing terrorism as a key driver of the elevated risk. Over the past year, the service has recorded a sharp rise in cases where extremist anti-immigration and anti-Muslim narratives have escalated into concrete terror planning. Unlike many other terror threats, extreme right-wing radicalization disproportionately skews young, fueled by unregulated online extremist spaces. Sir Ken revealed that MI5 had recently investigated a radicalized 13-year-old extreme right-wing extremist in the UK, and intelligence from that investigation allowed an international partner to stop a lethal attack on their territory.

In closing, Sir Ken reaffirmed MI5’s commitment to adapting to the changing threat landscape, noting that the service’s expanded resourcing and new initiatives like the AI Threat Assessment Centre position it to meet the challenges of an increasingly volatile global security environment.

Nearly 20 years after the last royal visit to the Spanish North African exclave of Ceuta, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia touched down on Tuesday to a warm welcome from local crowds, launching a visit that arrives at a critical moment for the territory. The trip comes as Ceuta continues to recover from a mass influx of roughly 70,000 migrants that crossed over from Morocco in July, an event that sparked a major humanitarian and political crisis for Spain.

Humanitarian organizations have confirmed that at least 141 migrants lost their lives during the dangerous border crossings that month. While most of the new arrivals have moved on from Ceuta in the months since the surge, thousands remain. Until recently, the majority of these remaining migrants were forced to sleep in unregulated open-air sites, with no access to basic shelter or services.

On the first day of their visit, the royal couple is scheduled to hold meetings with Ceuta’s local governing body, tour a local public school, and take part in an interfaith commemoration at the Sidi Embarek Muslim cemetery, where many of the migrants who died during the July crossings were laid to rest. On Tuesday evening, King Felipe is set to deliver a public address at Ceuta’s Parador hotel, before traveling to Melilla on Wednesday – Spain’s second exclave on the North African coast, which is also claimed by Morocco.

Juan Jesús Vivas, Ceuta’s conservative regional president, framed the royal visit as a much-needed boost for the beleaguered territory. “This visit will bring hope to a place that needs a lot of hope,” Vivas told Spanish radio earlier this week. He has repeatedly described the July migrant surge as “the most serious national security crisis of the democratic era” for Spain, and estimates that around 15,000 migrants still remain in Ceuta. That figure is sharply contested by Spain’s central government, which puts the number far lower and notes that it has made 7,400 shelter spaces available to accommodate migrants staying in the territory.

The sudden mass arrival in July placed unprecedented strain on Ceuta’s local infrastructure, stoking fears over public safety and resource scarcity among long-term residents. In a small number of isolated but high-profile incidents, some local residents have attempted to block the distribution of humanitarian aid to the newly arrived migrants. It was not until last month that the central government completed construction of temporary makeshift shelters, bringing an end to the period where most migrants were sleeping rough. The shelters are being used to house migrants while Spanish authorities carry out immigration legal screenings to determine whether each individual will be allowed to remain in Ceuta or deported back to Morocco or another country.

The crisis has pushed Ceuta’s situation and the broader issue of immigration to the top of Spain’s national political agenda, just weeks ahead of upcoming national elections. Immigration has already emerged as one of the most contentious key issues in the campaign, with opposition parties heavily criticizing Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist-led government for its handling of the crisis. Large demonstrations in support of Ceuta’s local population have been held across mainland Spain, putting additional pressure on Sánchez’s administration.

The crisis has also dramatically inflamed longstanding tensions between Spain and Morocco, which has maintained a formal sovereignty claim over both Ceuta and Melilla for decades. Many Spanish political observers and officials initially pointed the finger at Morocco, accusing the North African kingdom of deliberately allowing or even orchestrating the mass crossing in July. Prime Minister Sánchez, however, has stated that there is no concrete evidence to support the claim that Morocco knowingly facilitated the surge.

Earlier this week, Sánchez confirmed a media report that Moroccan military vessels had entered Spanish territorial waters off the coast of Ceuta on July 31, during the peak of the migrant crossing, but he downplayed the incident, framing it as a minor, isolated occurrence that does not represent a broader escalation. Morocco, for its part, has doubled down on its longstanding sovereignty claims to both Ceuta and Melilla in the wake of the crisis. Back in August, Moroccan Justice Minister Abdellatif Ouahbi reiterated his country’s “historical and geographical right” to the two exclaves and called for bilateral negotiations with Spain to resolve the sovereignty dispute – a call that the Spanish government immediately rejected.

Opposition leaders have accused Sánchez of failing to take a firm stance against Morocco amid the crisis. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative opposition People’s Party (PP), has accused Sánchez of misleading the Spanish public about the root causes of the July migrant surge and committing “frivolity” in his handling of the issue. “To Morocco, [we should offer] loyalty and good neighbourliness, but also firmness,” Feijóo stated, outlining the opposition’s approach to the ongoing diplomatic tensions.