The European Parliament’s debate on Monday, October 5th, comes at an awkward moment for Brussels. After years of confrontation with Viktor Orbán, the European Commission now believes Hungary has done enough to justify releasing €4.2 billion in cohesion funding and restoring full access to Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe.

The question before MEPs is therefore deceptively simple: have the conditions really been met, or has Brussels simply found a convenient political moment to declare victory?

The answer matters well beyond Hungary. The original dispute was not some abstract quarrel over Brussels etiquette. In 2022, the EU suspended €6.3 billion in Hungarian cohesion funding after identifying deficiencies in public procurement, conflicts of interest, corruption controls and the effectiveness of prosecutorial action. The conditionality mechanism was deliberately designed to make access to EU taxpayers’ money dependent upon safeguards for the rule of law and the protection of the EU budget.

That principle is important. If membership of the EU means anything, it cannot mean that governments receive billions regardless of whether public money is properly administered.

But Hungary has changed politically. Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule ended with Péter Magyar’s decisive election victory in April. Magyar campaigned partly on repairing Hungary’s relationship with Brussels and unlocking the billions frozen during the Orbán years. His government subsequently notified the Commission that it had implemented the required reforms.

The Commission has now accepted that argument — albeit partially. Its September 23rd proposal says Hungary has addressed the rule-of-law breaches affecting the EU budget, citing improvements in public procurement, the anti-corruption framework, prevention of conflicts of interest and prosecutorial effectiveness. If the Council approves the proposal, €4.2 billion in cohesion commitments will be reinstated and Hungarian students and researchers will regain full access to Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe.

That is a substantial political prize for Magyar, and a substantial test for the EU.

The danger for Brussels is obvious. Having spent years insisting that European money must not subsidise corruption or institutional capture, the Commission cannot now appear to have changed the rules simply because a more congenial government has arrived in Budapest.

There is, however, an equally serious danger on the other side. If Hungary has genuinely implemented the reforms demanded by Brussels, continuing to withhold money would make the conditionality mechanism look less like a defence of European values and more like a political punishment system. That would be profoundly damaging. Rules that apply only to governments Brussels likes are not rules at all.

This is why Monday’s debate matters – and the €4.2 billion is only part of the story.

The Commission has made clear that other Hungarian funds remain blocked. Around €3.5 billion is affected by a separate mechanism, including approximately €2.7 billion linked to horizontal conditions concerning the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, including academic freedom, LGBTI rights and asylum.

Meanwhile, Hungary is still seeking access to roughly €10 billion under the Recovery and Resilience Facility. The new Hungarian recovery plan includes measures on anti-corruption, public procurement, transparency, judicial independence and stakeholder participation, with payments tied to the achievement of specific milestones.

So this is not a clean victory for either side.

For Magyar, the release of €4.2 billion demonstrates that his strategy of accommodation with Brussels is delivering tangible results. For the Commission, it provides an opportunity to demonstrate that conditionality can work: reforms are made, the Commission verifies them, and money is released.

But the real test will come afterwards. Brussels must monitor whether the reforms survive political pressure. Anti-corruption bodies must remain genuinely independent. Public procurement must be transparent. Prosecutorial safeguards must work in practice rather than merely on paper. And the judiciary must be capable of challenging the government when necessary.

That is where the European Parliament should concentrate its fire. The temptation will be to turn Monday’s debate into another referendum on Viktor Orbán. That would be yesterday’s argument. Orbán has gone. The more important question is whether Hungary’s new government has actually dismantled the machinery that generated the dispute.

There is a wider lesson here for the European Union.

Conditionality can only work if Brussels is prepared both to withhold money when standards are breached and to release it when standards are met. Anything else undermines the credibility of the entire system.

The Commission says Hungary has crossed that threshold. The Council must now decide whether it agrees.

MEPs should therefore resist both triumphalism and cynicism, if the reforms are real, Hungary should get its money.

If they are cosmetic, Brussels should keep the cheque in the drawer.

Brussels Moves to Release €4.2bn to Hungary as Magyar Unwinds Orbán-Era Dispute

Ferries remain docked at several ports in Greece on Friday, October 2, due to gale-force winds reaching 9 and up to 10 Beaufort locally in the Aegean Sea. A sailing ban was imposed at the ports of Rafina and Lavrio in south-eastern Attica on Friday morning, while sailings from the port of Piraeus were also […]

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For years, Pakistan’s claim that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan operates from sanctuaries inside Afghanistan produced a familiar exchange: Islamabad accused, Kabul denied, and each new militant attack triggered another round of recrimination. That pattern is becoming harder to sustain. The sanctuary dispute can now be tested against a growing body of evidence rather than competing claims […]

The post Afghanistan’s TTP sanctuary is becoming harder to deny appeared first on Asia Times.

Diesel in the US has climbed to more than US$6.50 a gallon, up about 75% from a year ago, and Asia is likely to pay for it in the form of higher interest rates. Expensive diesel keeps American inflation elevated, which gives the Federal Reserve reason to keep raising interest rates. Higher US rates lift […]

The post US diesel crisis about to become Asia’s interest rate problem appeared first on Asia Times.

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Was in Ungarn derzeit passiert, ist nur schwer zu verstehen. Dort tobt ein Skandal wegen eines banalen Vorfalls aus dem Jahr 2024, bei dem der heutige ungarische Regierungschef Magyar in einem Nachtclub einem Gast, der ihn filmte, das Mobiltelefon entrissen und in die Donau geworfen hat. Das entsprechende Strafverfahren war bereits eingestellt, wurde nun aber […]

The Durban Conference in South Africa in September 2001 was not just an event; it was a turning point. It was the modern-day Wannsee that planned the contemporary destruction of the Jewish people. I was there for the Italian newspaper, La Stampa. The stench of something rotten was already emanating from the preparations for the great gathering “against racism” convened by the United Nations, with the participation of an enormous number of NGOs—some 3,000—all of them with knives between their teeth, determined to demonstrate that, under the banner of human rights, the real enemy was Israel, writes Fiamma Nirenstein.

It was there, even more than with the U.N.'s “Zionism is racism” resolution of 1975, that Stalin’s path was resumed. In 1952-53, he had initiated and theorized a new great hunt against the Jews, inventing the blood libel of the “Jewish doctors’ plot” and staging the Slánský trial. The systematic murder and deportation of Jews were interrupted by the dictator’s death in 1953. But with theorists such as Maxime Rodinson and Francis Crémieux, the premises were laid for declaring Israel the new enemy of humanity.

The positions that ultimately led to Durban maintained that “the Israeli government has long been simply an agent of American imperialism.” The supposed proof lay in the malign role of Jews in the world. The doctors accused in the so-called conspiracy—all innocent, their confessions extracted under torture—became “identical to the Nazi doctors of Dachau,” in the pay of the Americans. The inversion begins This was the beginning of the inversion that, on Oct. 7, 2023, led to Israel and the Jews being accused of genocide instead of the evident intentions of Hamas and its barbaric determination being condemned. At Durban, the death sentence against Israel went hand in hand, for the first time, with the preemptive legitimization of terrorism, now carried out by “freedom fighters” rather than the terrorists of Munich or Fiumicino.

At a demonstration along the battered streets on the outskirts of Durban, just days before Sept. 11, the crowd marched behind portraits of its mastermind, Osama bin Laden. Along the dusty road, young NGO activists called—as their documents did—on “all of civil society,” from the Maya to the Tibetans, everyone oppressed by racism, to embrace the struggle against Israel and transform it into the fundamental human-rights struggle. When I told the editors at my newspaper, La Stampa, they replied that I had an obsession with that poor Saudi shepherd. The conference was organized by a United Nations that had by then been captured by the great Third World and Islamic blocs that had reliably provided the Soviet Union with a majority. “Zionism is racism,” the 1975 resolution, was an addendum to the death sentence against Judaism following Hitler’s attempt to eliminate it from the planet.

Israel was the new target of antisemitism, invariably linked to anti-Americanism and viewed as the spearhead of the colonial and imperialist West. Every truth was erased. Israel’s almost desperate attempts to share the territory and make territorial concessions to the Arab world were rejected time and again. In 2000, after Arafat had been brought back despite his appalling embrace of terrorism, the Second Intifada erupted. By the time Durban took place, we were in the midst of the Intifada—a preliminary 7 October.

Its preparatory documents had been written and discussed in Strasbourg, Santiago and, astonishingly, Tehran, where since 1979 an Islamist regime had ruled whose foundational principle was the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel as absolute evil In Durban, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat and Robert Mugabe converged, and the Jewish question was inserted into the heart of demands for billions in reparations for slavery. Israel obviously had nothing to do with this history, but it was portrayed as absolute evil. The Palestinianism of Durban held that Israel was racist, imperialist, colonialist and genocidal—and therefore even a slave-owning power. All these adjectives are meaningless when applied to a country that represents the miraculous return home, disarmed and hungry, of the people indigenous to that land, armed only with hoes and books.

They armed themselves only when, awakening from the dream, they realized that their lives were once again at risk. And even then, Israel continued to surrender large pieces of territory in the search for peace. I was there In Durban, I rented a room inside a compound surrounded by high walls. I shared it with a journalist from the Italian left-leaning daily, La Repubblica, who was thrilled by the opportunity to encounter Castro and the other idols of the era in the corridors—and, with a little luck, perhaps Nelson Mandela as well. There was the official conference, the domain of Mary Robinson, who purported to moderate the international proceedings and restrain them from excessively harsh resolutions that had in fact been planned from the beginning.

Then there were the stadium and other NGO gathering places, where antisemitic hatred was expressed in every possible way: leaflets, speeches, songs and actual physical hunts for Jews. Several times I had to run away and seek refuge in a building belonging to the local Jewish community, where one could also find something to eat. Thousands of NGO members wore T-shirts bearing the image of Mohammed al-Dura alongside the conference logo. The production of leaflets about Palestinian suffering was endless. Jews were depicted with missiles and knives, blood dripping from their mouths and murdered children. The word “genocide” was already commonplace. From the podium, in a crowded, darkened hall, Fidel Castro, while demanding financial reparations for entire continents for slavery and colonialism, spoke of “the terrible genocide being perpetrated today against our Palestinian brothers” by Israel’s then-prime minister, Ariel Sharon, whom he described as a far-right leader acting in alliance with the “hegemonic superpowers.” Arafat celebrated the universal acceptance of his worldview, describing the situation as the “expression of the racist colonial conspiracy” to uproot the Palestinians and conquer their land. In short, the troops of that global war had finally assembled—a war that only days later would find its expression in the attack on the Twin Towers. That was the true meaning of Durban.

And the Palestinian cause, together with the destruction of Israel, was baptized as the indispensable prerequisite for every revolutionary struggle. The astonishment and disbelief in Israel and the United States were enormous. After everything the Jews had endured, and while they were suffering through the Intifada, finding themselves once again facing such a broad and senseless assault on their right to self-determination and self-defense, their right to return home and the very liberal-democratic nature of their country seemed like a nightmare. The two delegations under attack took days to decide to leave. Israel continued to insist, as Diaspora Affairs Minister Michael Melchior said, that racism—the supposed subject of the conference—was so important to Jews that the country wanted to participate in the discussion and the decisions. In the end, the United States and Israel had to walk out. Canada and Europe remained, but the European position sought an impossible compromise. It proposed restoring the Holocaust to the final documents as the worst expression of racism.

The interventions by Italy’s Renato Ruggiero, Germany’s Joschka Fischer and, in the corridors, the excellent Margherita Boniver—the only one who understood fully, to the point of tears—were hesitant and moderate. Fischer had the strength to say that the right of the Jews to their own state was indisputable. But he returned to the Palestinians’ right to a state and once again forgot that Israel had never called that right into question since 1948, despite its countless offers. ‘Did not happen in a vacuum’ By contrast, the denial of the Jews’ right to have their own state like every other people reached its paroxysm on Oct. 7. And once again the United Nations lined up against Israel, as it had at Durban. So it was with the words of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who, instead of expressing horror and condemnation, responded with his infamous statement that the 7 October attacks “did not happen in a vacuum”. It is true: They did not happen in a vacuum. Durban is a milestone in the antisemitic catastrophe that once again torments the world today, and the United Nations is its prophet.

Port authorities imposed a sailing ban from the ports of Lavrio and Rafina in south-eastern Attica on Friday, August 14, 2026, while some ferry itineraries from the port of Piraeus were cancelled on Friday morning due to gale-force winds. Mostly affected by the strong winds are the islands in the Aegean Sea and Crete. Modifications […]

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Swimming and all marine activities have been banned in part of the Ardani area on the island of Karpathos on Sunday, August 9, after objects believed to be munitions were discovered. According to information obtained by state-tun news agency amna.gr, the items are believed to be old munitions. The Hellenic Coast Guard has cordoned off […]

The post Munition found: Swimming, marine activities banned in part of Karpathos appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Greek authorities imposed a sailing ban from the ports of Rafina and Lavrio, eastern Attica, as gale-force winds sweeping across the Aegean Sea also on Friday, July 31, 2026, and ferry services have been disrupted. The sailing ban comes into effect after some ferries has problems to anchor at islands ports and as thousands flock […]

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