Global Pulse

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  • Progressive leaders rally in Barcelona to defend the traditional liberal order

    Progressive leaders rally in Barcelona to defend the traditional liberal order

    BARCELONA, Spain — A high-profile gathering of progressive and centrist democratic leaders convened in Barcelona on Saturday, with a shared mission to reverse eroding public trust in the global liberal order, which faces growing pressure from surging far-right extremism and spreading international conflict. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, a vocal critic of U.S. President Donald Trump and the recent U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, is hosting two interconnected events focused on democratic resilience and progressive policy in the convention center of Spain’s second-largest city.

    The fourth iteration of the Meeting in Defense of Democracy brought together sitting heads of state from across the Global West and Global South, including Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro. In addition to leaders from 10 other nations represented at the summit, British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy also took part in the proceedings.

    Though no attending leader explicitly named Trump during the portion of the summit open to media coverage, the shadow of his administration’s staunchly unilateral agenda — a sharp break from decades of established U.S. foreign policy, marked by repeated public criticism of NATO and the United Nations — hung over every discussion. The entire summit is framed around defending the existing multilateral, rules-based global system that Trump’s approach has directly challenged.

    Opening the gathering, Sánchez laid out the core threats that attendees have united to address: “We all see the attacks against the multilateral system, the repeated attempts to undermine international law and the dangerous normalization of the use of force.” He outlined the summit’s key priorities for strengthening the global order: kickstarting comprehensive reform of the United Nations, implementing regulatory frameworks for social media platforms to curb the spread of hate speech and harmful disinformation, and developing evidence-based policy solutions to address rapidly widening economic inequality around the world.

    “ We all share the vision that democracy is the best system to respond to the complexities of our societies,” Sánchez added. Organizers note that the forum was first established in 2024 as a joint initiative by Brazil, Spain, and Chile, created to serve as a collaborative space for developing strategies to counter the triple threats of extremism, deep political polarization, and widespread misinformation that have eroded the foundations of participatory democracy across the globe.

    Following the conclusion of the defense of democracy summit, a subset of leaders remained in Barcelona to participate in the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization, an event expected to draw roughly 3,000 left-leaning elected officials, policy experts, and activists to exchange ideas and coordinate cross-border action.

    Saturday’s back-to-back gatherings came one day after Sánchez and Lula held a pre-summit bilateral meeting at a historic former royal palace in Barcelona. The two leaders used that discussion to highlight their shared alarm over the series of ongoing conflicts that have roiled global stability: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s military offensive in Gaza launched in response to the October 2023 attack by Hamas, and the latest outbreak of hostilities involving Iran that has sent shockwaves through global energy markets.

    Sánchez and Lula occupy a unique space in contemporary global politics: they count among the small handful of high-profile progressive leaders who have retained national power and popular support despite a broad global shift toward right-wing governance. Both leaders have consistently upheld multilateral cooperation, universal human rights, robust environmental protections, and gender equality — a set of core values that have come under repeated attack from Trump, Argentina’s libertarian far-right President Javier Milei, and a growing bloc of far-right movements across Europe.

  • Iran says it has closed Strait of Hormuz again over US blockade

    Iran says it has closed Strait of Hormuz again over US blockade

    CAIRO – Tensions around the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz have exploded into a fresh escalation just days after a tentative de-escalation, as Iran rolled back its decision to reopen the waterway and opened fire on passing commercial vessels Saturday. The sudden reversal comes in direct response to the United States’ refusal to lift its sweeping naval blockade of Iranian ports, a move that has thrown fragile ceasefire talks into jeopardy and reignited fears of a widening regional conflict that could upend global energy markets.

  • Russia has looted thousands of Ukrainian cultural objects in the war. Finding them is a challenge

    Russia has looted thousands of Ukrainian cultural objects in the war. Finding them is a challenge

    When Russian troops withdrew from Kherson in late 2022 after Ukraine reclaimed the strategic southern Ukrainian city, Alina Dotsenko, director of the Kherson Art Museum, returned to her workplace to a devastating scene: nearly all of the institution’s collections had been stripped and carted away.

    “ I stepped inside to find every storage unit gutted, every shelf bare. My legs couldn’t hold me, and I just slid down the wall, crying like a child,” Dotsenko recalled in an interview with the Associated Press.

    Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Kherson Art Museum housed more than 14,000 artworks spanning global creative traditions from North American pieces to Japanese art. Multiple sources, including Dotsenko and citizen footage captured after the liberation, confirm that retreating Russian forces loaded the majority of the collection onto military trucks and transported it to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014. To date, the whereabouts of nearly 10,000 missing artifacts remain unknown.

    Today, this act of cultural plunder is back in the international spotlight as Russia pushes to rejoin global cultural circles, just months ahead of the 2024 Venice Biennale — one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art events. For the first time since 2022, event organizers have cleared Russian representatives to participate, a move Ukraine has sharply condemned. Kyiv argues the biennale “must not become a platform to whitewash the war crimes Russia commits daily against the Ukrainian people and our cultural heritage.”

    Unlike most cases of cultural looting across Ukraine, the Kherson Art Museum theft is uniquely well-documented, thanks to pre-war preparation by Dotsenko herself. Years before the invasion, the director launched a full-scale project to photograph every item in the museum’s collection, building a comprehensive digital archive. When Russian forces occupied Kherson, Dotsenko hid the archive’s hard drives in secret, and retrieved them intact after liberation.

    This detailed record has turned the Kherson case into a top priority for Ukrainian prosecutors and Interpol, who are using the catalog to trace missing works and build legal cases against those responsible for the looting. Unfortunately, this level of documentation is extremely rare across the country.

    Across Ukraine’s occupied and war-torn regions, most pre-war cultural collections lack complete, accessible digital records. Russian occupying forces have deliberately seized or destroyed original inventory logs and collection documentation, making it nearly impossible to meet the strict evidentiary requirements for international legal claims to recover lost artifacts.

    The experience of the Donetsk Regional Art Museum reflects this widespread challenge. Halyna Chumak, the museum’s former director, fled Russian-controlled Donetsk in 2014, shortly after Moscow first seized parts of eastern Ukraine. She was only able to smuggle out a fraction of the museum’s collection catalogs, documenting just over 1,000 of the institution’s 15,000 total works. Over the course of a year, Chumak carried the fragile documents through multiple armed checkpoints, leaving most behind to avoid attracting suspicion from pro-Russian search teams.

    A decade later, a team led by Ukrainian entrepreneur Oleksandr Velychko is working to digitize these surviving catalogs, a painstaking process that took more than three months to process just 400 works. Once complete, the digitized database will be turned over to Ukrainian authorities to serve as partial legal evidence for future ownership claims.

    Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Office currently has 23 open criminal cases focused on cultural heritage crimes, covering 174 separate incidents of looting, destruction, and damage to cultural sites. Anna Sosonska, deputy head of the office’s war crimes unit, explained that the Kherson case stands out from the rest almost entirely because of Dotsenko’s surviving archive.

    “Russian forces almost always take inventory books and all original collection documentation from museums they occupy,” Sosonska explained in an interview. Without these records, prosecutors must rely on open-source intelligence, tracing looted artifacts through social media posts, auction house listings, and other online traces — a slow, labor-intensive process that can rarely reconstruct entire stolen collections. Still, Sosonska emphasized that cultural heritage crimes fall under international humanitarian law and carry no statute of limitations, meaning investigations will continue long after active fighting ends.

    The full scale of Ukraine’s cultural losses remains impossible to calculate accurately. As of March 2024, Ukraine’s Culture Ministry confirms Russia has destroyed or damaged more than 1,700 designated cultural heritage sites and 2,503 cultural infrastructure facilities, including high-profile targets like the Mariupol Drama Theatre. More than 2.1 million museum objects are still held in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, and more than 35,000 items have been confirmed looted from territories Kyiv has retaken since 2022.

    Moscow has moved to formalize its control over stolen cultural property. In 2023, the Russian government amended national legislation to add 77 Ukrainian museums from occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions to Russia’s official national cultural catalog. Critics call this move a deliberate attempt to cement illegal ownership and block the eventual return of looted works to Ukraine.

    Tetiana Berezhna, appointed Ukraine’s Culture Minister in October 2023, has made widespread digitization of all Ukrainian cultural collections a core priority for her ministry. “If we had fully digitalized all collections before the invasion, we would know exactly how many objects were stolen and exactly what they look like,” she noted.

    There are small signs of progress on accountability for these crimes. In March 2024, a Polish court approved the extradition of Russian national Oleksandr Butiahin to Ukraine, where he faces charges for conducting illegal archaeological excavations in occupied Crimea and smuggling ancient artifacts out of the site that Ukraine recognizes as its sovereign cultural heritage. Butiahin was arrested in Poland in 2023 at Ukraine’s request, and the ruling is still subject to appeal. If extradited and convicted, this would mark the first time a Russian national faces prosecution in Ukraine for crimes against Ukrainian cultural heritage in occupied territory.

    For Dotsenko, who has dedicated 50 years of her life to the Kherson Art Museum, the fight to recover the collection is deeply personal. She recently spoke to the AP at a Kyiv exhibition featuring high-quality reproductions of the stolen paintings, many of which have not been seen by the public since 2022. “While these works remain in captivity, all of us hold out hope that this will be resolved in favor of the Kherson Art Museum,” she said. “I did not spend 50 years of my life building this collection for nothing.”

    The Russian Culture Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the Associated Press on the allegations of looted Ukrainian art. In past statements, Russian-installed officials in occupied Ukrainian territories have described the removal of cultural artifacts as “protective measures” to save works from damage during fighting. Kirill Stremousov, the former Russian-installed deputy administrator of occupied Kherson who died shortly before the city’s liberation, claimed looted statues would “definitely return” to Kherson once active fighting ended.

  • Ireland’s bank bailout era draws to a close

    Ireland’s bank bailout era draws to a close

    Fifteen years ago, Ireland’s devastating banking collapse handed Irish taxpayers an unwanted new asset: a controlling stake in small domestic lender Permanent TSB (PTSB). What was once a symbol of systemic rot and public fiscal burden is now set to return to full private ownership, marking the definitive end of a painful chapter in Ireland’s post-2008 economic history. This week, Austria’s leading regional bank BAWAG announced a binding agreement to acquire the Irish government’s majority holding in PTSB for a total of €931 million (£812 million).

    The 2011 PTSB bailout was not an isolated event. It came amid a full-blown collapse of Ireland’s property-fueled banking sector, where reckless lending on overinflated real estate assets left most major lenders on the brink of insolvency. At the time, a government-ordered probe revealed that the systemic damage ran far deeper than policymakers had initially acknowledged, and PTSB required an emergency €4 billion (£3.49 billion) cash injection just to avoid total collapse. No private commercial investor was willing to take on the ailing bank’s toxic assets and liabilities, leaving Irish taxpayers to foot the entire bailout bill. That €4 billion injection was just one small slice of the hundreds of billions in public funds committed to stabilizing Ireland’s collapsing banking system after the 2008 global financial crisis.

    Irish Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Simon Harris has framed the PTSB sale as the most transformative shift in Ireland’s retail banking sector in more than 10 years. Beyond marking the state’s exit from its final major bank shareholding, Harris has expressed clear expectations that BAWAG’s entry will inject much-needed competition into a market long dominated by just two institutions: Bank of Ireland and AIB, the two other large lenders that survived the crisis via state bailouts.

    Harris also stressed that the transaction delivers a strong fiscal outcome for public finances. When combined with earlier asset sales of PTSB holdings and various regulatory and transaction fees collected by the state over the past 15 years, total public funds recovered from the PTSB bailout will top €3.7 billion (£3.23 billion) – putting the government within touching distance of recouping the full 2011 emergency injection. More broadly, Harris noted that taxpayers have actually come out roughly €1.3 billion (£1.13 billion) ahead across the combined bailouts of PTSB, AIB, and Bank of Ireland.

    Yet even as this chapter closes, the debate over the legacy of Ireland’s banking bailouts remains far from clear-cut. While the three surviving major lenders have returned to profitability and private ownership, the catastrophic collapse of Anglo Irish Bank – the most reckless of Ireland’s crisis-era lenders – casts a long shadow over any narrative of full success. That single collapse cost Irish taxpayers an estimated €30 billion (£26 billion) in bailout funds, wiping out any overall net gain from the sector’s rescue.

    Dan O’Brien, chief economist at the Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA) and a leading analyst of Ireland’s financial crisis, points out that Ireland’s 15-year path to full market stabilization mirrors the trajectory of Sweden’s 1980s banking crisis, which followed a near-20-year cycle to restore full market health. Excluding the outlier of Anglo Irish Bank, O’Brien argues the Irish bailout strategy would align with the Swedish model and be widely deemed a success story.

    The end of state ownership has also reignited long-running debates around one of the most controversial decisions of the crisis: the choice to protect international bondholders who lent to failing Irish banks, rather than forcing them to share part of the losses – a policy approach widely referred to at the time as “burning the bondholders.” O’Brien explains that the decision to shield bondholders came under overwhelming external pressure from Eurozone authorities. At the time, European Central Bank leadership insisted that any haircut for bank bondholders would drive up borrowing costs for every euro area bank, triggering widespread financial contagion across the bloc. This pressure culminated in a notorious ultimatum from then-ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet, who warned that “a bomb would go off in Dublin” if Ireland did not back down from any plan to impose losses on bondholders.

    One striking outcome of the crisis that O’Brien highlights is the lack of sustained Euroscepticism in Ireland, despite the harsh economic constraints and external pressure the country endured during the bailout era. Today, opinion polling consistently ranks Ireland among the most pro-EU member states across all key metrics, from public support for the euro to trust in the European Commission and wider EU institutions.

  • Starmer’s Mandelson nightmare never ends. This time, it may cost him his job as UK leader

    Starmer’s Mandelson nightmare never ends. This time, it may cost him his job as UK leader

    LONDON — For British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the name Peter Mandelson has become a political albatross that threatens to end his tenure in Downing Street, just eight months after he swept to power on a promise of clean governance after years of Conservative Party scandal. The deepening controversy around Starmer’s fateful decision to appoint Mandelson, a veteran Labour figure with long-documented ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as Britain’s ambassador to the United States has reignited urgent questions about the prime minister’s judgment and credibility.

    Two months ago, Starmer already survived a wave of internal pressure over the 2024 appointment, with senior Labour figures including the party’s Scottish leader calling for his resignation. This time, the crisis is far more severe: Starmer now stands accused of misleading the UK Parliament over whether Mandelson cleared mandatory official vetting to take the sensitive diplomatic post.

    The bombshell dropped earlier this week, when The Guardian revealed that Mandelson had originally been denied formal security clearance for the ambassador role — a position Starmer once described as the most coveted posting in UK diplomacy. This directly contradicts Starmer’s previous statement to Parliament that “full due process” was followed during the appointment process. The UK government has confirmed that Starmer and senior cabinet ministers only learned this week that the Foreign Office had issued a negative initial assessment of Mandelson’s eligibility. The fallout has already forced the resignation of Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office’s top civil servant.

    Vetting for the ambassador role would have included a full review of Mandelson’s financial history, professional connections, and personal associations, with his long-standing links to Epstein a core point of scrutiny. Starmer has pushed back against claims that he pressured officials to bypass red flags about the 72-year-old appointee, saying he is “absolutely furious” that details of the blocked initial clearance were hidden from him, calling the omission “staggering” and “unforgivable.” The prime minister is set to address Parliament and the public on the scandal Monday.

    This controversy is far from an unexpected crisis. Mandelson was always a high-risk pick for the critical US ambassador role: he resigned twice from previous Labour governments over early 2000s ethical and financial missteps, and his association with Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in prison in 2019 while serving a sentence for sex trafficking, was well documented ahead of the appointment. Starmer’s original calculation was clear: he gambled that Mandelson’s well-honed lobbying skills and deep trade expertise would help the UK secure favorable terms with a second Trump administration, avoiding the most punishing tariffs on British exports. For a time, that gambit appeared to pay off.

    The narrative shifted dramatically in September 2025, when newly released private emails proved Mandelson had publicly supported Epstein even after the financier was convicted and jailed for sex offenses. Starmer moved quickly to fire Mandelson, hoping to close the chapter on the embarrassment. But a new wave of disclosures followed in January, when the US Department of Justice released millions of pages of court documents tied to the Epstein case. Files included emails showing that while Mandelson served in the Labour government between 2009 and 2010, he passed sensitive, potentially market-moving government information to Epstein.

    Starmer has repeatedly apologized to the British public and to Epstein’s victims for trusting what he calls “Mandelson’s lies.” British police have since launched a formal criminal investigation into Mandelson’s conduct: officers searched his two properties in London and western England, and arrested him on February 23 on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He was released on bail after more than nine hours of questioning, and has denied all wrongdoing; he does not face any accusations of sexual misconduct tied to the Epstein case.

    Before the latest vetting revelations, political fervor around Starmer’s leadership had cooled. The prime minister had earned moderate public support for his decision to avoid direct British involvement in the Iran conflict, and he had hoped to weather expected heavy Labour losses in May’s local elections, the UK equivalent of US midterms. That calm has evaporated entirely.

    “Starmer positioned himself as the leader who always followed the rules, a stark contrast to figures like Boris Johnson, and he won office on a promise to ‘drain the swamp’ of the scandal that marred the previous Conservative government,” explained Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. “Because he built his entire electoral platform on integrity, the latest revelations from this mess mean many voters now see him as both a liar and a hypocrite — and hypocrisy is one of the most unforgivable sins for any British politician.”

    Opposition Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has doubled down on calls for Starmer’s resignation, saying “This scandal is not ending. He has run out of people to sack, he has run out of places to hide, he has run out of authority. The buck stops with him. His position is untenable and he must go.”

    The ultimate fate of Starmer’s leadership now hinges on the mood of his own Labour Party lawmakers. So far, only a small handful of senior party figures have openly called for him to step down. But ahead of Starmer’s Monday parliamentary address, political observers are watching closely to see if more Labour representatives break ranks after this weekend’s local campaign events with voters. Should more party members publicly withdraw their confidence, Starmer’s position could become unsustainable almost overnight. Confidence in political leaders can evaporate in an instant, a lesson Britain learned just a few years ago: Boris Johnson won a landslide parliamentary majority in 2019, only to resign as prime minister and lawmaker three years later amid a cascade of overlapping scandals.

  • Roommates of man accused of killing 2 say a dispute preceded the Atlanta-area attacks

    Roommates of man accused of killing 2 say a dispute preceded the Atlanta-area attacks

    In the early hours of a Monday this spring, a string of unprovoked shootings across the Atlanta metropolitan area left two people dead and one homeless man clinging to life in critical condition, leaving local communities shaken and law enforcement piecing together a tragic sequence of violence that began with a heated argument over air conditioning in a shared affordable housing unit.

    The accused gunman, 26-year-old Olaolukitan Adon Abel, is a United Kingdom-born U.S. Navy veteran who naturalized as an American citizen in 2022 while stationed in Southern California. In the days after the attack, prosecutors have levied a series of severe state and federal charges against him, including two counts of malice murder, aggravated assault, and illegal firearms possession. A second man, 35-year-old unhoused individual Damon Marquis Yarns, also faces federal charges for acting as a straw purchaser to acquire the 9mm pistol used in the attacks, falsely claiming on a federal firearms form that he was the weapon’s intended owner.

    According to three of Adon Abel’s roommates at his Panthersville-area shared home, the violence followed a dramatic late-night confrontation that erupted just hours before the first shooting. Adon Abel had a long-running dispute with another housemate over his habit of turning the communal air conditioning to extremely cold temperatures. What had been minor arguments in the past escalated into a screaming match Sunday night that left other residents terrified.

    “It’s not the first time they got into it about the AC. But that time was a real big argument,” roommate Angela Britton told the Associated Press Friday.

    Another roommate, Lakisha Mckinzie, said the fight left her so frightened that she called her mother before going to bed that night, asking for prayers for the entire household’s safety. Mckinzie added that she had already feared Adon Abel for weeks: he had allegedly asked her out on a date before sexually assaulting her inappropriately, and frequently banged on her bedroom door late at night after she rejected him. Mckinzie said she filed multiple complaints about the behavior with the property’s landlord and the shared housing platform PadSplit, but no disciplinary action was ever taken. PadSplit did not respond to requests for comment from reporters on the allegations.

    After the argument, roommates told investigators Adon Abel packed a large duffel bag and drove away from the home shortly after midnight. Around 12:50 a.m., five miles away near Decatur, 31-year-old Prianna Weathers was found shot to death outside a local fast food restaurant. Roughly an hour and a half later, 12 miles northwest in Brookhaven, a 49-year-old homeless man was shot multiple times while sleeping outside a grocery store. As of Thursday, he remained hospitalized in stable but critical condition, and authorities have not yet released his name to the public.

    The final and highest-profile victim came just after 7 a.m., a few hundred feet from Adon Abel’s shared home: 40-something Lauren Bullis, an auditor with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was found dead with gunshot and stab wounds while out walking her dog. Investigators have confirmed that ballistics evidence links Adon Abel to all three attacks, though law enforcement has not confirmed a clear motive for the violence, and note that at least one of the victims was likely targeted at random. Adon Abel had no known connection to any of the three people attacked, according to initial police findings.

    Georgia State Patrol officers pulled Adon Abel over just before 11 a.m. that same morning in Troup County, close to the Georgia-Alabama border. Investigators recovered matching ammunition and shell casings from his vehicle that match those found at Weathers’ murder scene, and the murder weapon and additional casings were recovered near Bullis’s body.

    Court records reveal that Adon Abel already had a lengthy criminal history prior to the Atlanta attacks. In October 2024, he pleaded guilty in San Diego County to assault with a deadly weapon and criminal vandalism for an attack that targeted two police officers and a civilian. Just months before that, in June 2024, he pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of sexual battery in Chatham County, Georgia. Due to his prior felony conviction, Adon Abel is prohibited from legally owning firearms under both federal and Georgia state law.

    Following Yarns’ arrest, the 35-year-old suspect told Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents that he purchased the weapon on February 20 from a federally licensed dealer in Atlanta for a man he only knew as “Abdul or Obie”, and positively identified Adon Abel from a police photo lineup.

    The case has already drawn political attention, with current Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin releasing a statement questioning why Adon Abel was granted U.S. citizenship during the Biden administration. Mullin has publicly listed the suspect’s multiple previous offenses, though it remains unclear how many of those convictions occurred prior to his 2022 naturalization.

  • Orbán’s era was over in a flash and Hungary’s next PM is a man in a hurry

    Orbán’s era was over in a flash and Hungary’s next PM is a man in a hurry

    Hungary’s political landscape has undergone its most seismic shift in nearly two decades, after newcomer Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party secured a dramatic landslide victory in last Sunday’s national election, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16 years of uninterrupted governance. With final vote counts set to be formalized this Saturday – including recounts for closely contested constituencies and the tabulation of overseas ballots – preliminary results give Tisza 52% of the popular vote, translating to roughly 140 seats in the 199-seat National Assembly, enough for a commanding two-thirds supermajority. Orbán’s long-ruling Fidesz party has plummeted from its previous 135 seats to just an estimated 55, a collapse that has sent shockwaves through the party that once dominated every level of Hungarian politics.

    Within days of the victory, Magyar moved quickly to lock in a timeline for power transition. He secured a commitment from Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok to bring forward the convening of the new parliament to the week starting May 4, when the body will vote to install the new Tisza-led government. In a marked break from the past two years, when state broadcasters largely sidelined or attacked Magyar, he gave fiery interviews to public television and radio, and has pledged to introduce legislation to suspend the outlets’ current programming until independent, impartial editors can be appointed to replace the outgoing leadership aligned with Fidesz.

    Buoyed by his supermajority, Magyar has also announced plans to retroactively cap the number of consecutive terms a sitting prime minister can serve at two. With Orbán already having held the post for five terms, the reform would permanently block the former leader from returning to the country’s highest office, effectively closing the book on his decades-long political dominance.

    It was not until late Thursday, four days after the election defeat, that Orbán finally broke his public silence in an interview with his party’s Patrióta YouTube channel. Acknowledging the historic shift, the ousted prime minister called the result “the end of an era”, saying he would accept the outcome with dignity. He opened up about feeling “pain and emptiness” from the loss, and took full personal responsibility for the defeat, though he offered little in-depth analysis of the campaign’s missteps beyond highlighting the years-long delay of the Russian-designed Paks 2 nuclear power plant, which is now six years behind its original completion schedule.

    Orbán met this week with the Hungarian president, but slipped into the building through a side entrance to avoid questions from the press. Fidesz has scheduled a top leadership meeting for April 28, ahead of a full party congress in June, where the party will chart its future as an opposition bloc. Orbán indicated that he would be willing to stay on as party leader if re-elected by members, but admitted the party requires “complete renewal”. Of Fidesz’s 55 incoming parliamentary seats, only 12 are won by individual constituency candidates, with the rest coming from party lists. Orbán argued that many of the list-based deputies need to be replaced, as they have no experience working in opposition, a rare admission of weakness for a party where public dissent has long been uncommon.

    Within Fidesz, there is no clear successor to Orbán, and no current figure matches his unique political skill and charisma for unifying competing factions within the party. Senior party insiders told the BBC that Fidesz faced an impossible structural challenge after 16 years in power: it could not credibly position itself as a force for change, even as voters grew hungry for turnover. Campaign advisers from the U.S. and UK had already criticized Fidesz’s core slogan, “the safe choice”, for alienating the large bloc of young Hungarian voters hungry for change. To counter this perception, Orbán leaned heavily on two younger senior cabinet members – 47-year-old Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and 51-year-old Transport Minister János Lázár – to headline campaign rallies, but the strategy backfired: their energy only highlighted how aged and worn Orbán, who turns 63 next month, appeared after 38 years of frontline politics. The result is a mood of fear and internal recrimination sweeping through the defeated party.

    In Budapest, widespread anger at the outgoing government has already boiled over into public view, with nearly every Fidesz campaign poster defaced across the city center. Most have the word “Vége” – Hungarian for “the end” – spray-painted across Orbán’s face, while others have been torn down or covered in expletives. The sudden collapse of Fidesz’s public popularity, even among some former supporters, has been one of the most striking aspects of the election result.

    For Magyar and his incoming administration, the top immediate priorities are stopping capital flight by oligarchs closely aligned with Fidesz – many of whom are rumored to be moving assets to popular destinations like Dubai – and preventing the destruction of corruption evidence in government ministries. While some outgoing officials have been shredding documents in government offices, two Tisza insiders told the BBC that multiple current civil servants have already reached out to the incoming team, offering digital copies of incriminating records on USB drives in exchange for job security or immunity from future prosecution. Tisza also alleges that in the final week before the vote, as polls consistently predicted a large Tisza majority, Fidesz rushed through dozens of no-bid contracts for IT, infrastructure, and research projects to hand-picked allied companies, locking in public spending commitments that will carry over to the new government.

    The tough rhetoric coming from Tisza leadership is both a reflection of popular anger and a calculated political move, after two years of sustained demonization of Magyar and his party by the Fidesz-controlled Central European Press and Media Foundation (Kesma), which controls 476 media titles including roughly 50 major news outlets. Beyond media reform, Magyar has already reaffirmed key campaign pledges: establishing a dedicated office to recover state assets stolen under the previous government, and bringing Hungary into the Luxembourg-based European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), a move designed to signal to the European Union that the new government is serious about tackling corruption.

    Magyar has already held talks with Zsolt Hernádi, CEO of Hungarian energy giant MOL, which operates critical refineries serving both Hungary and Slovakia. On energy policy, the incoming prime minister agrees with Orbán on one urgent priority: the reopening of the Druzhba oil pipeline from Russia, which has been closed since late January. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated this week that flows could resume by the end of the month, though Magyar has stressed his commitment to diversifying Hungary’s energy supplies, particularly by expanding capacity on an alternative pipeline from Croatia’s Krk Island.

    Exit polling estimates show nearly three-quarters of voters aged 18 to 29 backed Tisza, a generational rejection of Orbán’s long rule. Réka Szemerkényi, a former Hungarian ambassador to the U.S. under Orbán who is now based at Budapest’s Equilibrium Institute, told the BBC that young voters sent a clear policy message with their votes. “The chants were ‘Ria, Ria Hungaria’ – meaning we love our country – then ‘Europa’, and the third I heard repeatedly was ‘Russians go home’. These three together are like a foreign policy agenda,” she explained.

    International reaction has been swift, with a high-level delegation from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s office arriving in Budapest on Friday for informal talks with Tisza’s leadership. The new Hungarian government stands to unlock €17 billion (£15 billion) in frozen EU funds that were withheld from the Orbán government over concerns about rule of law and corruption, but will need to meet 27 strict benchmarks on judicial independence, anti-corruption enforcement, and media freedom to access the money. With Hungary’s economy already mired in a deep recession, Magyar and his team have made clear they know they need to deliver results quickly to meet the high expectations of voters who swept them into power.

  • Historic 1926 census shows Protestant population drop in Irish Free State

    Historic 1926 census shows Protestant population drop in Irish Free State

    A century after it was collected, the first national census of the newly formed Irish Free State has been made fully accessible to the public online, unlocking groundbreaking new details about one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in modern Irish history.

    Released by the National Archives of Ireland on Saturday, the 1926 survey captures the first comprehensive snapshot of the country’s population just four years after the Irish War of Independence concluded with the formation of the independent Irish Free State (the precursor to the modern Republic of Ireland) and the partition of the island into the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom.

    The census data confirms a staggering 32% drop in the non-Catholic population — overwhelmingly made up of Protestant communities — across the 26 counties of the Irish Free State between 1911 (when all of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom) and 1926. In comparison, the Catholic population saw only a 2% decline over the same 15-year period, while the overall population of the 26 counties fell just 5% from 3.14 million in 1911 to 2.97 million in 1926.

    That period of Irish history was marked by unprecedented political and social upheaval, including the 1916 Easter Rising, the two-year War of Independence, and the violent split over the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty that created the partition. The divide ran largely along religious lines: most Protestants identified as unionists who favored remaining in the UK, while most Catholics supported Irish nationalist calls for full independence.

    National Archives director Orlaith McBride explained that the scale of the non-Catholic population decline is far out of line with the overall population drop, making it a historically significant shift. “That’s very, very significant,” she said of the 32% decline. Census analysts estimate roughly one quarter of the Protestant population decline can be attributed to the withdrawal of British military personnel and their families from the new state after independence. McBride added that much of the remaining decline stemmed from internal migration across the new border: many Protestants relocated from the Irish Free State to Northern Ireland, while Catholics from border regions moved south into the Irish Free State.

    The decline was not uniform across all regions of the new state. The southern province of Munster recorded the sharpest drop at 42.9%, followed by the western province of Connacht at 36.3% and Leinster at 32.4%. The border counties of Ulster that became part of the Irish Free State — Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan — saw the smallest decline at just 22.5%. Dublin was the only county in the Irish Free State to record a population increase overall, growing by nearly 6% between 1911 and 1926.

    Despite the overall population drop, the census also reveals that Protestant communities remained heavily overrepresented in many of the most prominent professional, commercial and agricultural roles in 1926. Protestants made up 17% of all employers, 18.4% of managers and professional workers, 46% of all chartered accountants, and 39% of barristers. The number of Protestant farmers and their families actually saw a small increase of nearly 4% compared to 1911, and Protestants continued to hold a disproportionate share of large agricultural estates. Historians with the National Archives note this overrepresentation stemmed in part from past land reform policies that benefited Protestant landowners, many of whom retained large demesne estates after the breakup of old aristocratic land holdings.

    In addition to its historical demographic insights, the 1926 census offers members of the public the chance to search for their own ancestors and connect with their family history. One of the people still alive who appears in the 1926 census is 101-year-old Anne Carey, a County Meath resident who will turn 102 in November. Carey is one of 48 centenarian ambassadors selected by the National Archives from the nearly 100 living people who were alive at the time of the 1926 census and reached out to the institution.

    A former seamstress who worked making fur coats in Dublin and sewed all of her own clothing, Carey has lived through both World Wars and recalled the 1941 German bombing of Dublin in an interview. When her mother woke her to warn her of the bombing, she recalled asking, “Why did you wake me up?” When asked for the secret to her longevity, she shared her simple philosophy: “In my bedroom, I have a window and I look out. And I say to myself: ‘I’ll never see this day again, don’t bang it up.’”

    While the 1926 census for Northern Ireland has been lost to history, the surviving Irish Free State census offers an unparalleled window into life in Ireland a century ago. Beyond religious demographics, the data outlines broader social and economic trends: 92.6% of the population identified as Catholic, just 18.3% of residents could speak Irish, and 51% of the working population was employed in agriculture, 4% in fishing, 14% in manufacturing, and 7% worked as domestic servants. The population was split nearly evenly by gender, with 51% male and 49% female residents.

  • UK and France to lead defensive mission in Strait of Hormuz

    UK and France to lead defensive mission in Strait of Hormuz

    Against the backdrop of escalating regional tensions and disrupted global energy flows after weeks of restricted access through one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a new UK- and French-led multinational mission designed to protect commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, set to launch once active hostilities in the region conclude.

    Speaking following a gathering of representatives from 51 nations, Starmer emphasized that the initiative would operate exclusively as a strictly peaceful and defensive deployment. The strait, which carries roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil trade, was effectively blocked by Iran after joint strikes by the United States and Israel in late February — a disruption that sent global energy and fuel prices soaring across international markets.

    In a surprising development on Friday, both Iranian Foreign Ministry and U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed the waterway was now fully open to commercial traffic. But Trump used the announcement to launch a fresh attack on NATO, dismissing the alliance as “useless when needed”. The U.S. president revealed he had received a formal offer of assistance from NATO on Friday, but took to his Truth Social platform to write that he “TOLD THEM TO STAY AWAY, UNLESS THEY JUST WANT TO LOAD UP THEIR SHIPS WITH OIL”.

    Trump has repeatedly lashed out at NATO throughout the ongoing Iran conflict, with the UK drawing particular criticism from the commander-in-chief. For his part, Starmer has maintained a cautious stance throughout the crisis, repeatedly confirming the UK would not be dragged into active conflict and previously stating London would not back any blockade of Iranian shipping.

    Standing alongside French President Emmanuel Macron during the announcement, Starmer added that dozens of countries have already pledged to contribute military and logistical assets to the joint mission. “This will be strictly peaceful and defensive, as a mission to reassure commercial shipping and support mine clearance,” he said. “We invite all nations with an interest in the free flow of global trade to join us. Some have already indicated their readiness to contribute.”

    Full operational details of the mission will be unveiled next week following a military planning conference scheduled to take place in London, Starmer confirmed.

    Tehran has given assurances that the strait will remain open to commercial shipping until the mid-point of next week, when the temporary ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is set to expire. For his part, Trump has made clear that his own naval blockade of vessels entering and exiting Iranian ports will remain in place despite the temporary opening of the strait.

    While Friday saw a surge of vessel activity across the broader Persian Gulf, maritime tracking data still shows only a handful of ships completed full transits through the strait, indicating lingering uncertainty among shipping operators about the security of the route.

    Macron echoed Starmer’s remarks, noting that the weeks-long closure of the strait had inflicted “very severe consequences” on “the whole of the planet and the global economy”. “Recent events are encouraging, even if we have to remain prudent,” he added.

    German Chancellor Friedrich Merz also backed the initiative, saying Germany “stands ready to play its part in ensuring freedom of navigation” through the critical waterway. Speaking after the multilateral meeting, Merz added that it would be “desirable” for the United States to join the UK-French led mission.

  • White House chief of staff to meet with Anthropic CEO over its new AI technology

    White House chief of staff to meet with Anthropic CEO over its new AI technology

    The Trump administration is set for a pivotal, high-stakes meeting with Anthropic’s top leadership on Friday, marking a major turn in a months-long public and legal conflict between the U.S. government and one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence developers. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles will open discussions with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, centered on the company’s newly unveiled Mythos model, a cutting-edge AI system that has drawn unprecedented federal scrutiny over its far-reaching implications for both U.S. national security and economic competitiveness.

    A senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity to detail private planning for the gathering, confirmed that the current administration is proactively engaging with leading advanced AI research labs to review new model capabilities and assess software security protocols. The official emphasized that any AI technology under consideration for future federal government use would first undergo a rigorous, extended technical evaluation process to verify safety and functionality before any official adoption.

    This planned meeting comes after months of escalating friction between the Trump administration and Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI firm that has long prioritized building guardrails around advanced AI development to mitigate catastrophic risk while advancing potential benefits for the U.S. The dispute erupted earlier this year when President Donald Trump issued a public social media order banning all federal agencies from using Anthropic’s flagship chatbot Claude amid a bitter contract conflict with the Pentagon. In the February post, Trump declared the administration “will not do business with them again!”

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doubled down on the administration’s pressure, pushing to designate Anthropic as a federal supply chain risk—an unprecedented move against a domestic U.S. technology company. Anthropic has challenged that designation in two separate federal courts. The core of the dispute centers on Anthropic’s demand for binding assurances that the Pentagon will not use its AI technology to develop fully autonomous weapons or conduct mass surveillance of U.S. civilians, while Hegseth has insisted the company must permit all lawful uses the Pentagon deems appropriate. In a landmark March ruling, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin blocked enforcement of Trump’s original ban on federal use of Anthropic products, handing the company a major legal victory.

    What has reignited cross-government and global attention on Anthropic in recent weeks is the April 7 launch of Mythos, a model the company describes as “strikingly capable” of outperforming professional human cybersecurity experts at identifying and exploiting critical software vulnerabilities. Because of this unprecedented capability, Anthropic has restricted access to Mythos, only rolling it out to a small, curated group of vetted customers.

    While some tech industry analysts have questioned whether Anthropic’s warnings about Mythos’ power amount to a calculated marketing tactic, even prominent critics of the company have acknowledged the model likely represents a meaningful leap forward in AI capability. David Sacks, the White House’s own AI and crypto czar and a frequent Anthropic critic, told listeners of his popular “All-In” podcast that the claims around Mythos should be taken seriously. “Anytime Anthropic is scaring people, you have to ask, ‘Is this a tactic? Is this part of their Chicken Little routine? Or is it real?’” Sacks said. “With cyber, I actually would give them credit in this case and say this is more on the real side.” He added that the logic of advancing AI capability holds: as coding models grow more powerful, they naturally gain improved ability to find security bugs, chain multiple vulnerabilities together, and develop functional exploits that can compromise protected systems.

    The model’s unique combination of transformative benefits and catastrophic risk has drawn attention from global policymakers beyond U.S. borders. The United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute, which conducted its own independent evaluation of Mythos, concluded the model is a clear “step up” from already rapidly improving earlier AI generations. The institute warned in its report that “Mythos Preview can exploit systems with weak security posture, and it is likely that more models with these capabilities will be developed” across the global tech sector in the coming years. European Union officials also confirmed Friday that Anthropic has held ongoing talks with EU regulators about Mythos and other advanced, unreleased AI models.

    Alongside the launch of Mythos, Anthropic unveiled Project Glasswing, a cross-industry collaborative initiative bringing together tech giants including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, plus major financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, to harden global critical software infrastructure against the risks posed by next-generation AI systems like Mythos. The company says restricted access to Mythos allows key public and private sector organizations to use the model’s own capability to find and patch unaddressed vulnerabilities before bad actors can exploit them.

    Speaking at this week’s Semafor World Economy conference, Anthropic co-founder and policy chief Jack Clark stressed that Mythos, while ahead of current industry curves, is not an anomaly. “There will be other systems just like this in a few months from other companies, and in a year to a year-and-a-half later, there will be open-weight models from China that have these capabilities,” Clark said. “So the world is going to have to get ready for more powerful systems that are going to exist within it.”

    The meeting between Wiles and Amodei was first reported by Axios. Anthropic declined to comment on the planned gathering ahead of time. Reporting for this article was contributed by AP business reporter Kelvin Chan from London.