Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stood firm in his staunch opposition to Ukraine being admitted to the EU, calling it “corrupt” a week before EU leaders are set to make a decision on starting talks with Kyiv on joining the bloc.

“Hungary is a neighbour of Ukraine … we know exactly what is happening,” Orbán told French news outlet Le Point in an interview published Friday. “Ukraine is known to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It’s a joke!” he said.

“We cannot take the decision to start a process of accession negotiations,” Orbán said.

The Ukrainian parliament on Friday approved four bills necessary to start European Union accession talks, including one on national minorities' rights, a critical demand from Hungary which opposes Ukraine's EU bid.

Parliament's website confirmed that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed all the bills into law. He described them as a key step in Ukraine's application to join the 27-member EU.

An EU summit next week is to consider whether to start negotiations on membership with Ukraine, and neighbouring ex-Soviet Moldova, which Kyiv sees as vital to anchoring itself in Western institutions.

The Russian foreign minister says it is unacceptable that Israel is using Hamas’s October 7 offensive as justification for a collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza and has called for international monitoring of the situation on the ground in the besieged enclave.

Speaking virtually at the Doha Forum on Sunday, Sergey Lavrov told Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor James Bays the unprecedented attack by Hamas inside the Israeli territory did not happen in a vacuum.

In the town of az-Zawayda in central Gaza, neighbours have been working since Sunday morning, collecting the body parts of dozens of people that used to live in the Nisman family home.

At about 4am local time (06:00 GMT), Israeli warplanes bombed the home, destroying it completely.

“This is my uncles’ house,” Fadi Nisman told Al Jazeera. “My two uncles were with their families, three generations of them.”

Only weeks ago, the extended family had fled from the Shati refugee camp in the west of Gaza City following Israeli orders to head south of the enclave and taken refuge with the Nismans.

But in the Gaza Strip, there is no such thing as a safe place.

The companies listed here have provided Israel with weapons and other military equipment used in its so-called “Swords of Iron” attacks in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria during October-December 2023.

Israel pummelled the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of Gaza on Sunday, killing at least 57 people, as heavy fighting in Khan Younis intensified.

The Palestinian death toll reached 18,000 people.

Israel pressed on with its gradual advance into Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, with heavy fighting reported in the city.

Residents said Israeli tanks reached as far as the centre of Khan Younis, which Israel once designated as a "safe" area for Palestinians to flee to.

With more than 85 percent of Gaza's population of 2.3 million displaced by Israel's relentless bombing campaign, UN agencies say there is no safe place to flee to in the entire strip.

There is a growing sense of frustration prevailing among the leadership of the Israeli army towards Benjamin Netanyahu, due to the Israeli prime minister's failure to define the objectives of the war Israel is waging on the Gaza Strip, an analysis in Haaretz said on Friday.

The article claims that Herzi Halevi, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, demanded Netanyahu’s emergency cabinet clearly define the objectives of the war on Gaza before the ground invasion. However, Halevi did not receive a response at the time.

With the Israeli army just over a month into the ground invasion, Halevi is still waiting for the objectives of the war to be clearly defined, according to the article, which added that Israeli forces are operating in Gaza without concrete aims and goals.

Tributes are pouring in for prominent Palestinian academic and poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli air strike this week.

Alareer was an activist, writer, translator and literature professor at the Islamic University of Gaza who inspired a generation of Palestinian writers in Gaza.

His family said he was killed in his brother's home in Gaza City, along with his brother, sister and four of her children.

In late November, a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas paused the bombing in the Gaza Strip. It also served as a window for the two sides to exchange Israelis taken captive during the 7 October Palestinian attack on Israel for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

Every year, Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank arrest between 500 and 700 people under the age of 18.

If charged, they are most often accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Otherwise, the teens, children and many other Palestinian prisoners are held in “administrative detention” – incarcerated without being charged of any crime. Palestinians in administrative detention can be imprisoned for six months without trial, though Israeli authorities can renew this period without any time limit as they see fit.

Around 7,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons, according to Palestinian NGO Addameer.

The Biden administration has filed a motion in federal court calling for a lawsuit accusing the president and his team of failing to prevent a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza to be dismissed.

Rights groups and lawyers say that the administration's filing is an attempt to evade legal responsibility and culpability in what many scholars say is an act of genocide being committed by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.

"The US government's filing is no less disappointing for being predictable," the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which is a party to the suit, said in a statement shared with Middle East Eye.

"Their lawyers focus on jurisdictional issues rather than the substance of the lawsuit."

The United States Department of Energy said on Friday that it plans to buy 3 million barrels of crude oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for March delivery as oil prices sink to levels below the stated threshold for the government’s refill plan.

The Biden Administration saw the stockpiles of crude oil in the nation’s strategic reserve fall from 638 billion barrels at President Joe Biden’s inauguration to just 347 billion barrels by this summer as the Administration tried to bring down gasoline prices for consumers. The large sell-off in the country’s safety supply of crude oil was met with criticism. Also met with criticism has been the Administration’s slow response to falling oil prices—a perfect opportunity for any Administration earnestly looking to replenish SPR oil inventories.

The Administration announced it would plan to refill the SPR with crude oil when prices fall below $70. It later revised that figure to $79 per barrel. Today, crude oil prices are trading at $71, and within the Administration’s desired range to begin the slow refill process. The 3 million barrels announced for March delivery amounts to just 1% of what has been depleted. The crude oil sold from the SPR was sold at about $95 per barrel.

A clinical scientist and immunologist-virologist at a southern California laboratory says he and colleagues from 7 universities are suing the CDC for massive fraud. The reason: not one of 1500 samples of people tested “positive” could find Covid-19. ALL people were simply found to have Influenza A, and to a lesser extent Influenza B. This is consistent with the previous findings of other scientists, which we have reported on several times.

Dr. Derek Knauss: “When my lab team and I subjected the 1500 supposedly positive Covid-19 samples to Koch’s postulates and put them under an SEM (electron microscope), we found NO Covid in all 1500 samples. We found that all 1500 samples were primarily Influenza A, and some Influenza B, but no cases of Covid. We did not use the bulls*** PCR test.’

At 7 universities not once COVID detected

‘When we sent the rest of the samples to Stanford, Cornell, and a couple of the labs at the University of California, they came up with the same result: NO COVID. They found Influenza A and B. Then we all asked the CDC for viable samples of Covid. The CDC said they can’t give them, because they don’t have those samples.’

‘So we came to the hard conclusion through all our research and lab work that Covid-19 was imaginary and fictitious. The flu was only called ‘Covid,’ and most of the 225,000 deaths were from co-morbidities such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, pulmonary emphysema, etc.. They got the flu which further weakened their immune systems, and they died.’

‘This virus is fictitious’

The German newspaper “Handelsblatt” reported on October 2nd that the mRNA COVID “vaccine” was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in order to convince reluctant people to undergo this experimental gene therapy treatment, which I call “spiking” for short.

I derive the term from the fact that the mRNA components code for the coronary spike protein. In my new book, The Indoctrinated Brain, to be published December 12 2023, I show that the recently awarded Nobel Prize for “spiking” is a neuropathological attack on our autobiographical memory (the hippocampus). The injections have dramatic consequences, not only for the cardiovascular system, as is now well documented. In particular, rational thinking, psychological resilience, and natural human curiosity have been shown to be severely impaired.

Some “experts” say with full conviction Hamas is winning this war.

They base it on Hamas having achieved a ceasefire which they consider is already a “win”. And then they said getting Israel to accept a 2-day extension is a further sign of Hamas upper-hand.

That is just wishful thinking. An illusion at best. It would be desirable. But, with Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF) armed to the teeth with western — mostly US — state-of-the-art weapons, plus top secret service advice from Mossad, CIA and UK’s MI6 (Military Intelligence, section six), such ideas are way detached from reality.

Background

First, in this, like in most other wars, there is no winner. There are only losers.

Second, instead of dividing the world in pro or con the one or the other warrying party, the typical “divide to conquer” propaganda, we should all vouch for PEACE.

Former President Trump announced on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Sunday, that he no longer plans to testify at his civil fraud trial on Monday.

Trump had been scheduled to testify Monday as one of the final defense witnesses in a trial that has lasted two months and is entering its final week of testimony.

Court officials also confirmed to Fox News that Trump has notified the court that he is not testifying. 

All that was missing was Rush Limbaugh's famous Al Gore Armageddon Clock!

Jake Tapper has obviously bought into Al Gore's doomsday view of climate change. On  CNN's State of the Union today, Tapper introduced Gore by saying:

"The world's climate nears a breaking point."

For alarmists like Gore, and followers like Tapper, that breaking point has always been right around the corner—but never manages to arrive. 

The Yemeni Armed Forces announced on Sunday the introduction of a new actionable decision in support of Gaza, which will see the prohibition of all ships bound to the occupation entity, regardless of their nationality, from passing through the Arabian and Red seas until food and medicine sufficient to the needs of the population enter the besieged Strip.

In a statement, Yemeni Armed Forces Spokesperson Brigadier General Yahya Saree declared that this prohibition is "effective immediately," noting that Sanaa, "out of its commitment to the safety of maritime navigation, warns all ships and companies against dealing with Israeli ports."

"The Yemeni Armed Forces emphasize their full commitment to the continuity of global trade movement through the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea for all ships and all countries, except those ships associated with Israel or those that will transport goods" to the occupation entity.

The head of UNRWA, the U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, on Sunday said that dehumanization of Palestinians has allowed the international community to bear continued Israeli attacks in Gaza.

An elderly Palestinian woman who went viral on social media after saying that she's "older than Israel" was shot dead by Israeli snipers outside her house.

The woman, Hadiya Nassar, appeared in a video where Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi, holding her ID card, said, "you are older than Israel".

Nassar, who was born in 1944 - four years before Israel's creation - replied, "of course, of course," adding, "I am holding on to the [Palestinian] land."

The U.N. Security Council scheduled an emergency closed meeting Friday at the request of Guyana following Venezuela’s weekend referendum claiming the vast oil- and mineral-rich Essequibo region that makes up a large part of its neighbor.

In a letter to the council president, Guyana’s foreign minister, Hugh Hilton Todd, accused Venezuela of violating the U.N. Charter by attempting to take its territory.

The letter recounted the arbitration between then-British Guiana and Venezuela in 1899 and the formal demarcation of their border in a 1905 agreement. For over 60 years, he said, Venezuela accepted the boundary, but in 1962 it challenged the 1899 arbitration that set the border.

For most of the automobile’s first century of existence, it became safer.

In the 1920s, the death toll from vehicle crashes was so high that gruesome photos of accidents were a staple of newspaper coverage. By 2010 — thanks to better design of roads and vehicles, the addition of seatbelts and greater awareness of drunken driving, among other things — the death rate from crashes had fallen almost 90 percent from its 1920s level.

But the progress ended about a decade ago, or at least it did in the United States. Even as vehicle deaths have continued falling in most counties, they have risen in this country.

Here’s a stark way of thinking about the problem: If the U.S. had made as much progress reducing vehicle crashes as other high-income countries had over the past two decades, about 25,000 fewer Americans would die every year.

An autopsy Sunday revealed an M16 bullet and pieces of shrapnel in the exhumed body of Yuval Castleman, a civilian who was shot by an off-duty reserve soldier at the scene of a deadly terror attack in Jerusalem last month, Hebrew media outlets reported.

The findings are at odds with the Israel Police’s position immediately after the incident that there were no bullets left in Castleman’s body, and that such a procedure was unnecessary. He was buried but exhumed on Friday after the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Police found new evidence that the test was needed.

As a result of the discovery, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai told the head of Israel Police Investigations and Intelligence Division, Superintendent Yigal Ben Shalom, to probe the newfound evidence and the overall handling of the investigation.

A U.S. delegation gave its support to Argentine President-elect Javier Milei over talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and developing its lithium sector during a meeting in Buenos Aires on Saturday, a White House official told Reuters.

Juan Gonzalez, adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden and the National Security Council's Western Hemisphere senior director, said the talks, a day ahead of Milei's inauguration, were "very positive" and focused on the country's embattled economy.

Argentina is struggling with inflation nearing 150%, while over two-fifths of the population is in poverty. Its $44 billion IMF program has skidded off track, central bank net reserves are deep in the red and a recession is looming.

Milei is set to roll out a series of measures to rein in state spending after his inauguration, a "shock" therapy plan which his backers hope will stabilize the economy, but which is likely to be painful for Argentines at least in the short-term.

More than 5,600 federal-only ballots were cast in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election because there was no evidence of U.S. citizenship required of the voters who cast them.

Arizona has an uncommon condition of bifurcated elections, in which residents who present confirmation of U.S. citizenship can vote in all elections, while others can only vote in federal elections, resulting in ballots cast by voters who have not established their U.S. citizenship. The voting anomaly was uncovered by Just the News.

Residents registering to vote in Arizona must produce proof of U.S. citizenship, according to state law. However, following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision that Arizona must accept U.S. voter registration forms due to federal requirements under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the state now allows residents registering to vote who do not provide proof of citizenship to receive ballots only for federal races.

China’s economic troubles deepen as consumer prices experience the sharpest decline in three years, highlighting growing deflationary pressures amid weak domestic demand. The consumer price index (CPI) dropped 0.5% year-on-year and month-on-month in November, exceeding forecasts and marking the steepest year-on-year decline since November 2020.

We tend to think of the global food crisis as something that is happening on the other side of the world.  And it is certainly true that there are vast hordes of impoverished people that are desperate for food in other areas of the planet right now, because hunger is spreading like wildfire in poor countries.  But the truth is that hunger is spreading rapidly in the United States as well.  According to a report that was just released by the USDA, a whopping 44 million Americans now live in “food insecure households”…