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🇭🇺 🇷🇺 🇪🇺 Is #Hungarian PM Viktor #Orban #Russia’s “Trojan horse” in Europe? 🤝 Frequent official meetings with President Vladimir #Putin, staunch opposition to European aid packages to #Ukraine, a “Kremlin hotline” with live updates on #EU summits – all of these factors could play into voters’ considerations ahead of Hungary’s legislative elections on Sunday. 🔎 FRANCE 24 takes a closer look.
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🇭🇺 🇷🇺 🇪🇺 Is #Hungarian PM Viktor #Orban #Russia’s “Trojan horse” in Europe? 🤝 Frequent official meetings with President Vladimir #Putin, staunch opposition to European aid packages to #Ukraine, a “Kremlin hotline” with live updates on #EU summits – all of these factors could play into voters’ considerations ahead of Hungary’s legislative elections on Sunday. 🔎 FRANCE 24 takes a closer look.
Melania Trump has been accused of “shifting the burden” onto sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors after her extraordinary statement at the White House.
In a joint statement released to the media, a group of survivors said the first lady had moved to “protect those in power”.
They accused her of “shifting the burden onto survivors under politicized conditions to protect those with power”.
The statement read:
Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony.
Asking more of them now is a deflection of responsibility, not justice.
It added:
It also diverts attention from [former attorney general] Pam Bondi, who must answer for withheld files and the exposure of survivors’ identities.
Those failures continue to put lives at risk while shielding enablers. Survivors have done their part. Now it’s time for those in power to do theirs.
The first lady told reporters on Thursday that she “never had a relationship” with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
It was unclear which specific accusations spurred the first lady to respond publicly. She delivered her scripted remarks at a podium in the same room Donald Trump used to address the nation on the war in Iran last week.
“I [have] never been friends with Epstein,” Trump said in her statement. “I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.”
The first lady went on to say that she and the president were invited to the same parties as Epstein “from time to time” as “overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach”. But she specifically denied that her emails to Maxwell were anything more than “casual correspondence”.
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
The push from House Democrats to pass a war powers resolution by unanimous consent failed yesterday, after the pro forma speaker, Republican Chris Smith, did not recognize Democrats. It was always a tall order, given that pushback from even a single member would require Democrats to pursue a formal vote on the resolution.
While it’s largely a symbolic move, Democrats in both chambers have vowed to hold votes again when Congress returns from recess next week. On the steps of the US Capitol, lower chamber Democrats appeared confident that when Congress returns from recess next week, they will have at least a couple of House GOP members who are willing to buck their party and pass the resolution.
Donald Trump told NBC News that he is “very optimistic” a peace deal with Iran was within reach as a diplomatic delegation led by his vice-president JD Vance prepared to head to Pakistan for high-stakes talks aimed at ending the war this weekend. Iran’s leaders “talk much differently when you’re at a meeting than they do to the press. They’re much more reasonable,” the president said, in line with his administration’s narrative that there’s a disconnect between what Tehran says publicly and privately.
Key events
Donald Trump will be in Washington for much of the day.
He’ll be in closed door policy meetings until he leaves for Charlottesville, Virginia, where he’s due to attend a meeting and roundtable dinner with Make America Great Again Inc, the pro-Trump super pac at 6:30pm ET. That’s not open to the media, but we’ll let you know if anything changes and we hear from the president.
Donald Trump’s administration this week acknowledged it made a significant error in figures it used to help justify a fraud probe into New York’s Medicaid program.
The error, one of at least a few misrepresentations in its description of the program, prompted health analysts to question how many of the Republican administration’s sweeping anti-fraud efforts around the country were based on faulty findings, AP reported.
“These numbers could have been cleared up in a phone call, so it’s really slapdash,” said Fiscal Policy Institute senior health policy adviser Michael Kinnucan, whose recent analysis called attention to the Trump administration’s inaccurate claim.
The mistake appeared in comments made last month by Dr Mehmet Oz , the administrator of the Centers for Medicare + Medicaid Services, in a social media video and in a letter to New York’s Democratic governor announcing the fraud investigation.
Oz claimed that New York’s Medicaid program last year provided some five million people with personal care services, which assist people in need with basic activities like bathing, grooming and meal preparation. That would add up to nearly three-quarters of the state’s 6.8 million Medicaid enrollees.
“That level of utilization is unheard of,” Oz said in the video, adding in his post that New York needs to “come clean about its Medicaid program.”
José Olivares
A Trump administration appointee has delayed publication of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that shows benefits related to the Covid vaccine, leading to concerns that the administration is engaging in behind-the-scenes tactics to undermine vaccines.
Research by CDC scientists found that the Covid vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency room visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to reporting from the Washington Post. The acting CDC director, Jay Bhattacharya, reportedly delayed the report’s publication due to concerns surrounding the research’s methodology.
The move to postpone the publication of the CDC’s report has raised concerns among experts and former CDC officials about further attacks to the agency’s vaccine-related work by the Trump administration.
Since Trump took office last January, health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and his appointees have engaged in public and behind-the-scenes maneuvers to hamper vaccine research and recommendations.
“This is definitely an escalation of this administration’s undermining of CDC science,” said Dr Fiona Havers, a former senior adviser on vaccine policy at the CDC. “The fact that they are now blocking this is extremely concerning.”
Havers resigned from the CDC last year, in response to the Trump administration’s approaches to vaccine policy.
David Smith
Donald Trump is an “evil human being” who “wants to be an emperor” and should be removed from office over the war in Iran, Yassamin Ansari, an Iranian American member of the US Congress, has told the Guardian.
Ansari, the daughter of Iranian immigrants who decades ago fled the regime, spoke out after the president threatened to wipe out Iran’s civilisation before backing down and announcing an uncertain two-week ceasefire.
As news of the truce broke on Tuesday night, Ansari said in a statement she was “momentarily relieved for the 90 million Iranians who just spent the worst 24 hours of their lives thinking they were about to face nothing short of a nuclear catastrophe”.
But the Arizona Democrat maintained that Trump’s dire promises of genocide and war crimes warrant intervention by the cabinet or Congress. Earlier on Tuesday, Ansari warned that the president represents a clear and present danger to Iran, the US and the world.
“There is no doubt in my mind he is mentally unstable and not all there but I also believe he is a deeply troubled, evil human being that only cares about himself and his family,” she said in a phone interview. “He has shown that throughout his entire life. He has shown that throughout his presidency by ripping away healthcare and basic necessities from the average American, while he and his family have made billions of dollars.”
Robert Mackey
Melania Trump’s surprise statement denying she had any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein sparked confusion about why she had chosen to speak out, and whether Donald Trump knew that the first lady was planning to draw attention to a subject he has called for the public to move on from.
Even normally well-sourced correspondents for rightwing outlets were at a loss to explain why Melania Trump felt the need to issue the seemingly out-of-the-blue statement about her relationship with Epstein, the late sex offender who socialized with her husband for nearly two decades, or his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
The Fox News senior White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich said that she and her team were baffled.
“We’ve been trying to understand why she made it today, if there was something that she is reacting to that might already be in the news that has upset her, or if there’s a story that’s yet to come out, that’s about to drop that she wanted to get ahead of,” Heinrich told Fox viewers. “Because it did feel like it came out of left field for us.”
“We’re still trying to figure out why she made this statement today,” she added. “I’ve called every contact in my phone, including the president, and not gotten any answers.”
The New York Post, which, like Fox, is owned by Rupert Murdoch and often acts like an arm of the Trump White House communications team, was also puzzled. “It’s unclear why the first lady chose to hold the press event at a time when the White House is trying to move on from the Epstein saga that has been a drag on her husband’s second term,” the New York tabloid reported.
Epstein survivors accused Melania Trump of ‘shifting the burden’ after surprise statement
Melania Trump has been accused of “shifting the burden” onto sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors after her extraordinary statement at the White House.
In a joint statement released to the media, a group of survivors said the first lady had moved to “protect those in power”.
They accused her of “shifting the burden onto survivors under politicized conditions to protect those with power”.
The statement read:
Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony.
Asking more of them now is a deflection of responsibility, not justice.
It added:
It also diverts attention from [former attorney general] Pam Bondi, who must answer for withheld files and the exposure of survivors’ identities.
Those failures continue to put lives at risk while shielding enablers. Survivors have done their part. Now it’s time for those in power to do theirs.
The first lady told reporters on Thursday that she “never had a relationship” with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
It was unclear which specific accusations spurred the first lady to respond publicly. She delivered her scripted remarks at a podium in the same room Donald Trump used to address the nation on the war in Iran last week.
“I [have] never been friends with Epstein,” Trump said in her statement. “I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.”
The first lady went on to say that she and the president were invited to the same parties as Epstein “from time to time” as “overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach”. But she specifically denied that her emails to Maxwell were anything more than “casual correspondence”.
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
The push from House Democrats to pass a war powers resolution by unanimous consent failed yesterday, after the pro forma speaker, Republican Chris Smith, did not recognize Democrats. It was always a tall order, given that pushback from even a single member would require Democrats to pursue a formal vote on the resolution.
While it’s largely a symbolic move, Democrats in both chambers have vowed to hold votes again when Congress returns from recess next week. On the steps of the US Capitol, lower chamber Democrats appeared confident that when Congress returns from recess next week, they will have at least a couple of House GOP members who are willing to buck their party and pass the resolution.
Donald Trump told NBC News that he is “very optimistic” a peace deal with Iran was within reach as a diplomatic delegation led by his vice-president JD Vance prepared to head to Pakistan for high-stakes talks aimed at ending the war this weekend. Iran’s leaders “talk much differently when you’re at a meeting than they do to the press. They’re much more reasonable,” the president said, in line with his administration’s narrative that there’s a disconnect between what Tehran says publicly and privately.
More than 5,000 council places in England are being contested on 7 May, along with several mayoralties, and elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, in a significant test for all the major parties.
Councils began publishing lists of confirmed candidates on Friday, after the closure of nominations at 4pm on Thursday. Reform say they are standing candidates in just over 95% of seats, around as many as Labour. Nigel Farage, Reform UK’s leader, has said the party’s vetting procedures have been beefed up.
One of its candidates for Bolton council is Derek Bullock, a former Conservative who was suspended by the party over allegations he posted a racist comment about people of Pakistani heritage on Facebook. Bullock said screenshots showing the comment were faked.
Bullock was a Tory candidate for the council in 2023 when images emerged of a post sent at the time of the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack in which he allegedly used a racial slur to call for people of Pakistani heritage to be shot.
The Conservatives disowned his candidacy, and Bullock won as an independent. Earlier, in 2020, Bullock had faced internal disciplinary action by the Conservatives after allegedly posting an anti-Islam article on Facebook .
A Reform spokesperson said: “Mr Bullock has always strongly maintained that this image is fake and has reported this resurfaced material to the police. Mr Bullock is a valued member of his community and is currently a trustee of the Asian Elders’ Resource Centre in Bolton.”
Reform has separately said that among its candidates for Sunderland council is Glenda Hall, whose Facebook page includes posting a video setting out Covid conspiracy theories, and appearing to recommend a blog post describing Afghan men as “sexual predators”.
Nigel Farage launches local election campaign slogan in Westminster. Photograph: Matthew Chattle/Shutterstock
In 2020, Hall shared what she called an “interesting video” about whether Covid is the “hoax of the century” by a renowned conspiracy theorist called Vernon Coleman. He has described the pandemic as the “greatest fraud in human history”, calling it an exaggerated scare created by “the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Bliderbergers and the Jesuits”.
Last year she recommended a Substack post about, as she called it, “secret immigration of Afghans into the UK”.
The post calls Afghan men “sexual predators”, arguing that stories about the murder of Afghan men by western troops might have been “wishful thinking motivated by revulsion at the sexual behaviour of Afghan men.”
She added: “Personally I hope they were true.”
Reform has been contacted for comment on Hall. A Labour party spokesperson called the comments “utterly deplorable”.
“Nigel Farage has repeatedly boasted about Reform’s vetting procedures,” the spokesperson said. “Yet again, his party is insulting voters by standing individuals who are completely unfit for public office. Farage needs to urgently condemn these vile remarks and sack them as Reform candidates.”
Reform are forecast to make significant gains across a number of councils, as well as in Scotland and Wales. While Labour and the Conservatives are expected to experience heavy losses, the Green party are hoping to win a number of seats amid a surge in polling under Zack Polanski, the party’s leader in England and Wales since September.
On Friday evening, the Greens said they had candidates standing in 89% of the English local council seats being contested, far higher than in any previous election. Their previous highest was 72%, set last year.
Earlier in the week, the Greens took a seat from Reform on Kent council, often described as Reform’s “flagship” administration, after a byelection prompted by the sitting Reform councillor being jailed for controlling or coercive behaviour towards his wife.
David Smith
Robert Mackey
