I’m gonna be honest, as a Brit I had just kind of assumed that we would come to Ireland’s defence if they wanted and needed it. As the article says, we’ve been doing aerial interceptions for them for about 70 years. We get to keep the UK safer if there’s not a relatively undefended area right next to us, and Ireland gets to be defended by a larger power that has already learned the hard way that it can no longer subjugate Ireland

If there was an effort to change them before, Orban would have vetoed it

Money is only useful if people trust that they’ll get what they expect for it. A government can make a nationalised bank take a decision like that, but who’s going to use that currency if the government just snaps its fingers and makes 100 trillion yuan of everyone’s money disappear?

National government debts are usually owed to a variety of domestic banks, private investors, and similar interests. I don’t know about China for sure, but I’ve never seen anything indicating that it’s different in this regard. Not much of it, as a proportion, is owed to foreign governments or investors. So far as I’m aware, the main unusual things about China’s government debt is that Chinese citizens have a high savings rate (meaning banks holding those savings have more to work with as creditors) and the provincial governments have quite a lot of debt (potentially almost as much as the central government when added up, though I don’t know where to get reliable numbers for this)

or alternatively they are just that rich

It’s this one. They do tax highly - not necessarily the highest, but up there - but they’re also ranked near the top of GDP per capita and labour productivity. Oil definitely does give Norway specifically an extra leg up, but the broader picture is similar across all of the Nordic countries (although I’m not so sure on the Faroe Islands, and Greenland is quite different)

Unfortunately that one is also blocked in the UK

That’s the same link as the post (which is indeed not available here in the UK)

I believe they’ve mostly come from Iran itself, with at least one being from Lebanon (so presumably Hezbollah, since the actual Lebanese military isn’t likely to have done it)

The British airbase. There have been a few different things fired its way now

No, they aren’t. We still produce oil, and whether or not to permit drilling to exploit known reserves has been an ongoing political issue for the last couple of years. At current rates of production we’ve got about 11 years of proven reserves and an estimate of another 20 or so unproven. If we were to bump production back up to our historic peak output in 1999, divide those numbers by 4.5 (so two and a half years proven - not long, but enough to set up a lot of solar)

Orban is against the recognition of Palestine even though Hungary technically officially recognises it and hasn’t withdrawn that recognition, and he’s also one of the loudest voices amongst Islamophobic and right-wing EU political leaders. Presumably Netanyahu figures that an ally like that within a bloc as big as the EU, which also has some more pro-Palestine voices who could potentially sway others, is worth the cost of Russia being in a better position. After all, while it is an ally of Iran, Russia’s attention is largely being kept elsewhere for now

That point is definitely an error. Apart from how weird and unnecessary a flight-path it would be, the southward leg of it would require the plane to do about Mach 6 to make the timestamps work

OP, can you edit the title to clarify that this is HRW addressing Hungary and not a statement by Hungary? There are already people misunderstanding in here because they haven’t opened the link

Without wishing to weigh in on this specific case right now, I think we have to recognise that votes don’t work for all instances of this because way too many people do not read the article. An outlet can publish an incendiary headline and then people that agree with it upvote it without ever noticing that the article doesn’t actually back it up

Scotland has indeed had a lot of problems with drinking too much. Still does, but there have been major improvements. When the laws that brought in the 10am - 10pm limit were introduced in 2005, Scotland was seeing roughly 2.5 times as many alcohol-specific deaths per capita as the UK as a whole and almost twice as many as Northern Ireland, the second-worst for it. And that’s the UK, a country with a notoriously unhealthy drinking culture in the first place. Scotland remains clearly the worst in the UK, but the gap has narrowed to more like 150-200% instead of 250%. A few things to note:

• The 2005 law brought in many changes on the recommendation of a 2003 report, so effects can’t be isolated to the limited hours alone. Promotional deals on alcohol were severely restricted, as an example
• Further changes have been made since to introduce things like a minimum price per unit of pure alcohol
• Scotland’s alcohol problem hits the poorest hardest, but is certainly not exclusive to the poorest or to the homeless. The laws were not specifically aiming to reduce alcohol consumption among the homeless in particular

As I understand it, the reasoning was basically to minimise how often people would be buying more alcohol while already drunk. I think that this is probably a sensible move. I definitely enjoy alcohol, and I can recognise that it’s much easier to make poor decisions about how much to drink when you’ve already had a few

It’s definitely not a magic bullet, of course. Nothing ever will be. But yeah, I do think it can help

Separately, it is so engrained in me that I feel deeply uncomfortable buying drinks in a supermarket late at night in other parts of the UK

It has, but the article is specifically associating this bill with the more recent reveals about Peter Mandelson. Both general public awareness of Mandelson’s association with Epstein and his appointment as ambassador to the US that brought that connection to the current government’s attention happened well after the introduction of the bill. The article draws no other connection to Epstein whatsoever, only Mandelson

The article does mention Epstein, but this Bill was first introduced to parliament way back in 2024

Turquoise Cyprus

(More seriously it’d probably be Türkish if you were going to do that, but as far as I’m aware the request at the UN to use the name Türkiye does not seem to have come with a new adjectival form to go with it)

This kind of interoperability is really useful for getting people to switch over. The only reason to use these apps is to talk to other people, so the network effect has a heavy hand on people’s decisions

Madness. It’s still a month before there’s even a chance that Orban gets voted out. The EU needs to come down hard on this