Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte will not have Budapest’s backing in his bid to become the next secretary general of NATO, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Tuesday.
The Dutch politician is considered the frontrunner for the job. Rutte has the endorsement of several heavyweights in the military alliance, including France, Germany, the UK, and the US. But the Hungarian government opposes the candidacy due to his vocal criticism of their country in the past. ”We certainly can’t support the election of a man to the position of NATO’s secretary general, who previously wanted to force Hungary on its knees,” Szijjarto said. He was referring to remarks made by Rutte in 2021, after Hungary passed a law that prohibited the exposure of LGBT-themed content to minors. The Dutch prime minister had argued that this was incompatible with EU values, saying Hungary had “no business being in the European Union any more.” Brussels’ goal should be “to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue,” he added, speaking ahead of an EU leaders’ summit. While roughly two-thirds of alliance member states support Rutte’s bid, the secretary general has to be appointed by a unanimous vote. Budapest has demonstrated its willingness to leverage its voting rights in NATO by withholding the ratification of Sweden’s bid to join the transatlantic bloc for almost two years. President Tamas Sulyok signed the bill approving the accession on Tuesday. The Dutch prime minister is serving his fourth term. Rutte announced his decision to depart from national politics last July. He currently holds office in a caretaker capacity, as MPs elected in November’s election have struggled to form a new government. Jens Stoltenberg is set to step down as NATO secretary general in October after a decade in the position. His successor is expected to be chosen in July, during a leaders’ summit in Washington.
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The Hungarian government is in favor of Sweden joining NATO and will soon schedule a ratification vote in the parliament, Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced on Wednesday.
The move will allow Stockholm to become a member of the US-led military bloc after almost two years of delays. Sweden applied to join NATO in May 2022, citing the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but ran into opposition from Türkiye and Hungary due to ongoing disputes with the two states. The bloc’s rules require unanimous consent before it can accept new member states. “Just finished a phone call with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg,” Orban said on X (formerly Twitter). “I reaffirmed that the Hungarian government supports the NATO membership of Sweden. I also stressed that we will continue to urge the Hungarian National Assembly to vote in favor of Sweden’s accession and conclude the ratification at the first possible opportunity.” Budapest has accused Stockholm of telling “blatant lies” about Hungarian democracy as part of an ongoing dispute within the EU. As of Wednesday, the Hungarian parliament has not put up the ratification vote on its docket. Turkish lawmakers voted to approve Sweden’s membership on Tuesday, sending the ratification bill to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s desk. Ankara had serious differences with Stockholm over human rights, terrorism, and arms trade, which interfered with NATO plans to have Sweden and Finland join the bloc together. Both Scandinavian countries abandoned their longstanding policy of non-alignment after Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine, citing it as a threat to their security. When Finland officially joined the bloc in April 2023, NATO doubled the length of its border with Russia. Moscow stated that it had no issue with either country until then, but would have to react if they join NATO. Russia has insisted that the bloc’s expansion eastward, which began in 1999, is a threat to Russian national security and one of the root causes of the Ukraine conflict. Orban has repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine and said he would block any attempts by Kiev to join NATO or the EU, as that would mean “bringing the war” into both blocs. Hungarian-born Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman of the US have won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research that led directly to the first mRNA vaccines to fight COVID-19, made by Pfizer and Moderna, according to the awarding body.
“The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the jury said in Sweden’s capital Stockholm on Monday. Katalin Kariko is a professor at Sagan’s University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Drew Weissman conducted his prizewinning research together with Kariko at the University of Pennsylvania. The pair will receive their prize, consisting of a diploma, a gold medal and a $1m cheque, from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament. The frontrunners for this year’s award in medicine included Kevan Shokat, an American biologist who figured out how to block the KRAS cancer gene behind a third of cancers, including challenging-to-treat lung, colon,\ and pancreatic tumours. Two American biologists, Stanislas Leibler and Michael Elowitz, were also in the run for their work on synthetic gene circuits which established the field of synthetic biology. It enables scientists to redesign organisms by engineering them to have new abilities. The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was won last year by Swedish scientist Svante Paabo for discoveries in human evolution that unlocked secrets of Neanderthal DNA which provided key insights into our immune system, including our vulnerability to severe COVID-19. The physics prize will be announced on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on October 9.
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2023 Formula 1 World Championship Drivers' Standings
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* Grid penalty The Hungarian prime minister says his country will not experience any fuel shortages, despite the current energy crisisHungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has blamed the European Union’s energy shortfall on bureaucrats and environmentalists, saying his own country is protected from the crisis.
“If we want to dig to the bottom of the problems, we always end up in the same place: the issue of energy. And the situation is that Europe has run out of energy,” Orban wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday. The premier blamed the situation on “fundamentalist greens and the bureaucrats” playing “geopolitical games,” arguing that the bloc is refusing to use “different energy sources” for “political reasons,” driving up the cost of living and damaging its industries. “There are few continents in such a difficult situation as ours, but only our continent is making its own life so much harder,” Orban said, pledging to do everything “needed by the homeland.” In late August Hungary secured a deal with Russian energy giant Gazprom for additional natural gas supplies, pumped via Serbia. Hungary is one of the few EU member states to comply with the Moscow’s ruble payment requirement for gas deliveries. However, Budapest is also moving to cut energy consumption. Earlier this week, the government introduced an 18-degree Celsius temperature cap in all public institutions across the country. The authorities have also instituted a mandatory slashing of gas consumption for state institutions, except hospitals and social housing facilities. Hungary has repeatedly criticized EU sanctions against Russia introduced over the conflict in Ukraine. Budapest argues that the restrictions have failed to produce the intended result, while disrupting the supply of natural gas to the bloc and sending energy prices to unprecedented highs.
2022 FORMULA 1 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP CONSTRUCTOR STANDINGS
The performance of the machine was lacking, it is not the fault of the strategies.
The Ferrari team principal analyzes the defeat, accusing the F1-75's drop in performance: "The car didn't allow us to do what we wanted. Then I don't deny that Charles's choice of hard tires turned out to be wrong." "We all expected a different result, the car did not work and it is evident. It is not a problem of strategy, but more of the car. Today Ferrari did not run in these conditions, you could wear any tire, as Sainz showed the same strategy as Hamilton and ended up behind him. The car didn't allow us to do what we wanted. We will try to analyze why we didn't have the right pace. " These are Mattia Binotto's hot explanations to explain Ferrari's bad day in Hungary. Difficult laps The team principal ruled out that it was a strategy issue. "Today I am the team manager and I analyze first of all this - continued Binotto - we knew that with hard tires there would be at least 2-3 laps of warm-up. On the 30 laps, we knew that the top 10 would be the more difficult. I'm not saying that the choice of white tires is the right one, but we have to review everything ". I have no answer "The priority is to understand why the car didn't work - he said - it's the first time this season that the car hasn't had race pace, basically this is the problem I have no answer to. choice of hard tires for Charles? We thought we could play for it by keeping the position on Verstappen. It was the wrong choice, but the performance of the car was lacking. "
2022 Formula 1 World Championship Drivers' Standings
FORMULA 1 ARAMCO MAGYAR NAGYDÍJ 2022 - Race Results
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