Four Hungarian men and one British woman brought at least 44 women to Britain over two years to work as prostitutes Five members of an organised crime gang who brought women from Hungary to the UK to work as prostitutes have been jailed. The Hungarians Mate Puskas, Zoltan Mohacsi, Istvan Toth and Peter Toth, and Puskas's former girlfriend Victoria Brown, from Bognor, West Sussex, brought at least...
s third mayor since the fall of communism in Hungary. Champagne had flowed. But just hours later, on 4 October 2010, his phone was buzzing with messages from frightened locals. They kept mentioning a dam. "There is no dam," he told one caller. There was a dam – six metre-high, a couple of miles away, that held back a reservoir of deadly "red mud", a caustic byproduct of aluminium extraction. But it...
s British former girlfriend, Victoria Brown, were found guilty on Tuesday following a trial at Hove crown court. Istvan and Peter Toth were convicted in their absence. The charges relate to more than 60 incidents over a period of almost two years. The women were brought from Hungary into the UK after their "profiles" had been uploaded on to a website advertising sexual services for sale. Customers...
s transport minister, and Brendan Howlin, minister for public expenditure, said there should be sanctions to target poor performance by government officials. In an official paper to be released later this year Howlin hopes to establish clearer lines of accountability . Varadkar called for mechanisms to be introduced to make it easier to sack under-performing civil servants . He said the next stage...
s national treasures. In an echo of the recent case in Munich where more than 1,000 works of art were rediscovered most of the Kövesi collection has been unseen for up to 50 years. "As regards 'flat collections', this is one of the greatest," the art historian Péter Molnos said. Now his daughter has consented to show the works by artists such as József Rippl-Rónai, János Vaszary and Izsák Perlmutter....
s bright bell-like tones and charming personality provided a welcome relief from ruinous inflation, world depression and the approaching sound of Nazi jackboots. The leading operetta composers of the day, Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, Robert Stolz and Paul Abraham, all wrote songs for her films. However, by 1938, after the Anschluss, with the exception of Lehár, all of them, being Jewish,...
s protests are not about a yearning for European values and that "they can deal with both Russia and the EU" ( Comment , 13 December): Ukrainians face a strategic, historic choice – joining a customs union together with the backward-looking, chronically corrupt Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan and their dictatorial leaders, or securing closer ties with the EU democracies. The hundreds of thousands who...
s punishments were weakened in 1992, amid a neo-Nazi revival, by President Kurt Waldheim, who won the Iron Cross in Russia and of whom the late Austrian politician Fred Sinowatz said: "Let us acknowledge that Waldheim did not serve in the SA, only his horse did." There are countless Mussolinis in Italy, whether in cellars, in enclosed villa gardens, or at Termini station in Rome, where a 2011 statue...
s basilica in Budapest's city centre every night from 8pm until the early hours. His job is to direct passing tourists towards a nearby "gentleman's club". He earns 300,000 forint (£830) per month in a country where the average wage is less than half this amount. He speaks five languages and is happy to answer questions during what he says is a "slow" evening. Even so, he talks to 12 English-speaking...
s war-time ruler and Hitler's ally – symbolises a refusal to face up to the country's darkest history Last month in Budapest a new statue was unveiled to a dangerous man. Right in the heart of the city – in Szabadság Tér (Freedom Place) – there now stands a monument to one of Hitler's closest allies : Admiral Miklós Horthy, the "regent" who ruled Hungary from 1920 to 1944. The bust stands in the church...
s Ninth Symphony. At least two fellow honorees – Alfred Brendel and Mitsuko Uchida – were in the audience, and at least one of them was whooping approval. The rest of the audience was also on its feet, responding to a programme that had demonstrated in a nutshell what there is to love most about Kurtág's music: its imagination, its rigorous concision, its unassuming lightness of touch. In the first...
On 9-10 November 1938, Nazi stormtroopers led a wave of violent attacks on Jewish people and property throughout Germany and Austria, which the Nazis had annexed. During these pogroms, 91 Jews were killed, thousands were taken from their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps, 267 synagogues were destroyed, and some 7,500 Jewish-owned shops were smashed and looted. The Kristallnacht pogroms...
s dream and transform Britain into the old Soviet Union. According to this dominant narrative, if you want to take any meaningful action against the "big six" energy giants, and interfere with market forces, you must be some kind of unreconstructed Bolshevik – or at the very least a misguided leftie who wants to take the country back to the nightmare 1970s, the decade when the gap between rich and...
s Köztemeto cemetery , graves are dutifully tended. Should the neighbouring one be unkempt, it will be weeded and a fresh or plastic flower or two placed in the empty vase. Sometimes, the dead can influence the lives of the living. Anna had spent much of her childhood in the L-shaped house built by her grandfather on a nearby street. She lived with her adoptive parents in one half, and the other was...
s culture and promote a nationalistic agenda There is an Elvis Presley Park and a John Paul II Square. There are streets named after footballers and actors, as well as others named after more unsavoury characters from the past. But Hungary's newfound zeal for renaming its public spaces has run into trouble after a plan to honour an antisemitic writer with her own street prompted criticism of the government's...
voting rights in EU councils – what Barroso dubbed the "nuclear option" – has been reinforced by developments in Hungary and Romania over the past year where the governments have clashed with Brussels and the Council of Europe human rights watchdog (not an EU body) over perceived abuses of democratic rights . Germany's foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, has also called for "new mechanisms" in the...
From Hungary to the Czech Republic, and from Romania to Turkey, democracy is being tested by a new generation of authoritarian leaders. Click on the faces below ... Paddy Allen Ian Traynor Mark Rice-Oxley ...
s Orbán and Czech Republic's Zeman to Erdoğan in Turkey, a new breed of democratic strongman is emerging A 40-minute drive south-west of Budapest, Felcsút is a typical Hungarian village on the surface, its cottages strung out neatly along either side of the long main street. Untypical of the Hungarian countryside, however, is the frenzy of building activity here. Private security guards watch over...
s case and his whereabouts were revealed in 2012 by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish organisation which hunts Nazis who have yet to be brought to justice. In 1949, Csatáry arrived in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, became a Canadian citizen in 1955 and worked as an art dealer in Montreal. He left Canada in 1997 after it was discovered that he had lied about his Nazi-era past to obtain citizenship...
native Hungarian sounded ridiculous. But now her tiny vocabulary keeps their memory alive My grandmother was fearless. Yet if I asked her about the past, she would start crying. What kind of monster would have questioned her? So I resisted and now it is too late. She and her husband, my maternal grandparents, were Hungarians. Or so I thought. They spoke Hungarian, impenetrably, to each other. Even...