Archive November 9, 2025

Hungary has struck a deal for what Prime Minister Viktor Orban called a “financial shield” to safeguard its economy from potential attacks following talks with US President Donald Trump.

Orban, a longtime ally of Trump and one of Europe’s most outspoken nationalist leaders, met the US president at the White House on Friday to seek relief from sanctions on Russian oil and gas. Following the meeting, he announced that Hungary had secured a one-year exemption from those measures.

“I have also made an agreement with the US president on a financial shield,” Orban said in a video posted by the Hungarian outlet index.hu on Sunday. “Should there be any external attacks against Hungary or its financial system, the Americans gave their word that in such a case, they would defend Hungary’s financial stability.”

A White House official said the deal also included contracts worth roughly $600m for Hungary to buy US liquefied natural gas. Orban gave no details of how the “shield” would work, but claimed it would ensure Hungary would face “no financing problems”.

“That Hungary or its currency could be attacked, or that the Hungarian budget could be put in a difficult situation, or that the Hungarian economy could be suffocated from the financing side, this should be forgotten,” he said.

The move comes as Orban faces economic stagnation and strained relations with the European Union, which has frozen billions of euros in funding over what Brussels calls Hungary’s democratic backsliding. Critics accuse Orban of using his ties with Washington to sidestep EU pressure and secure new financial lifelines.

Orban said on Friday that Hungary also received an exemption from US sanctions on Russian energy after a meeting with Trump.

Hungary’s economy has struggled since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but its currency, the forint, has shown some recovery this year, supported by high interest rates.

Trump, meanwhile, has extended his support to another far-right leader, Argentina’s Javier Milei, pledging to strengthen the country’s collapsing economy through a $20bn currency swap deal with Argentina’s central bank. Trump said he would also buy Argentinian pesos to “help a great philosophy take over a great country”.

A Sudanese medical organisation has accused the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of engaging in a “desperate attempt” to conceal evidence of mass killings in Darfur by burning bodies or burying them in mass graves.

The Sudan Doctors Network said on Sunday that paramilitaries are collecting “hundreds of bodies” from the streets of el-Fasher, in Sudan’s western Darfur region, after their bloody takeover of the city on October 26, saying the group’s crimes could not be “erased through concealment or burning”.

“What happened in el-Fasher is not an isolated incident but rather another chapter in a full-fledged genocide carried out by the RSF, blatantly violating all international and religious norms that prohibit the mutilation of corpses and guarantee the dead the right to a dignified burial,” it said in a statement.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that 82,000 of el-Fasher’s total population of 260,000 fled after the RSF seized the last Sudanese military stronghold in the region, amid reports of mass killings, rape, and torture. Many residents are believed to still be trapped.

Reporting from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan said many people fleeing el-Fasher for Al Dabbah in the north died on the road, “because they had no food or water, or because they sustained injuries as a result of gunfire”.

Morgan said that escapees told Al Jazeera they learned of the deaths of relatives from social media videos of their killings posted by RSF fighters. Several videos depicting extreme acts of violence have emerged in the public domain since the group overran the city.

Targeted ethnic killings

With the “communications blackout” in the city, many did not know what happened to their family members.

“They believe if their relatives are still alive inside el-Fasher, then they may not be so for long because of a lack of food and water… or because the RSF has been targeting people based on their ethnicities,” Morgan reported.

The RSF, which has been fighting the Sudanese army for control of Sudan since April 2023, traces its origins to the predominantly Arab, government-backed militia known as the “Janjaweed”, which has been accused of genocide in Darfur two decades ago.

Between 2003 and 2008, an estimated 300,000 people were killed, and nearly 2.7 million were displaced in campaigns of ethnic violence.

Sylvain Penicaud of Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, who spoke to civilians who fled el-Fasher for the town of Tawila, said many of those fleeing said they were “targeted because of the colour of their skin”.

“For me, the most terrifying part was [civilians] being hunted down while they were running for their lives; being attacked simply for being Black,” Penicaud said.

The Zaghawa, the dominant ethnic group in el-Fasher, has been fighting alongside the army since late 2023.

The group, which initially remained neutral when the war began, aligned with the military after the RSF carried out massacres against the Masalit tribe in West Darfur’s capital, el-Geneina, killing up to 15,000 people.

Hassan Osman, a university student from el-Fasher, said residents with darker skin, especially Zaghawa civilians, were subjected to “racial insults, humiliation, degradation and physical and psychological violence” as they fled.

The director-general of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has resigned after a row over the editing of a speech made by US President Donald Trump on the day of the 2021 attack on the United States Capitol.

Sunday’s joint resignations of Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness capped a turbulent week of accusations that the broadcaster edited a speech Trump made on January 6, 2021, to make it appear as if he encouraged the riots that followed his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Davie said he took “ultimate responsibility” for mistakes made, saying that quitting his role at the helm of the public broadcaster after five years was “entirely my decision”.

“I have been reflecting on the very intense personal and professional demands of managing this role over many years in these febrile times, combined with the fact that I want to give a successor time to help shape the charter plans they will be delivering,” he said.

A documentary by flagship programme Panorama aired a week before last year’s US election, splicing together clips of Trump’s speech uttered at different points.

The edit made it seem as if Trump said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”

Critics said it was misleading as it cut out a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

‘Buck stops with me’

Turness said the controversy about the Trump documentary “has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC – an institution that I love”.

“As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me,” she added.

Earlier on Sunday, UK Culture, Media and Sport Minister Lisa Nandy called the allegations “incredibly serious”, saying there is a “systemic bias in the way that difficult issues are reported at the BBC”.

Reporting from London, Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands noted that the BBC has always been in a difficult position.

“It is pilloried by the right, who perceive it to be a hotbed of liberal bias. It’s pilloried by the left, who think that it kowtows to the establishment and pumps out government lines when it comes to things like Gaza, particularly, not holding the powerful to account as it should do as a broadcaster.”

Accusations of anti-Israel bias

The controversy, whipped up by UK right-wing media, reached the other side of the Atlantic with Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt describing the BBC as “100 percent fake news” and a “propaganda machine” on Friday.

The story broke on Tuesday when The Daily Telegraph cited a memo complied by Michael Prescott, a former member of the BBC’s editorial standards committee, which raised concerns over the Trump edit, as well as criticising perceived anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s Arabic service.

On Saturday, the newspaper reported right-wing lawmaker Priti Patel, of the Conservative Party, demanded the UK Foreign Office review its funding of BBC Arabic through its grant for the BBC World Service, alleging “pro-Hamas and anti-Israel bias”.

The broadcaster has also been accused of giving Israel favourable coverage in its reporting of the war on Gaza, coming under criticism from its own staff.

Davie’s resignation was celebrated by Nigel Farage, leader of the populist hard-right Reform UK party, which is soaring in opinion polls.