Top Stories — Saturday, April 11, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Growing List of Orban Loyalists Defecting Before Critical Election — nyt News
- Iran Has Been Consistent in War. Will It Be Consistent in Peace Talks? — nyt News
- How Lu Xun, a Famous Chinese Writer, Became a Cute Communist Mascot — nyt News
Growing List of Orban Loyalists Defecting Before Critical Election
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/11/2026, 9:31:25 AM
When Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary this week, he spoke at and praised Mathias Corvinus Collegium, an educational institution set up to create a new conservative elite in step with the Russia-friendly and MAGA-aligned views of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Mr. Vance’s laudatory remarks on Wednesday about the 10-year-old college, known as M.C.C., as a bastion of free thinking and common sense, however, stuck in the craw of Zalan Alkonyi, one of its researchers focused on Russia.
The college, Mr. Alkonyi said in an interview at his book-filled home in Budapest, has many serious scholars, but it puts pressure on them to speak and publish in support of the government’s line.
The chairman of the college’s board of trustees is Balazs Orban, who is not related to the prime minister but does serve as his political director.
“For years I had to practice severe self-censorship on Russia and the Russian policy of the Hungarian government,” said Mr. Alkonyi, 28.
He recounted feeling pressure to support, or at least not contradict, Mr. Orban’s view that Ukraine, not Russia, was the main threat to European security and that the European Union had been foolish in helping Kyiv resist Russian attack.
With Hungary about to hold a general election that could end Mr. Orban’s 16 years in power — an outcome that neither Washington nor Moscow wants — Mr. Alkonyi is among a growing list of defectors from institutions that the governing Fidesz party for years counted as loyal allies.
The latest of these was Viktor Norman Virag, a former senior member of the National Bureau of Investigation, who on Wednesday told Partizan, an opposition media outlet, that 80 percent of his work involved “meeting political expectations,” which in one case meant dropping a case against a Russian suspected of being a cybercriminal.
Others who have broken ranks with the government include Szilveszter Palinkas, a captain in the military who was featured on recruiting posters and attended a military academy in Britain at the same time as Mr. Orban’s son, Gaspar.
Another defector was Zombor Berezvai, who recently quit as chief economist at the Hungarian Competition Authority, a state institution under the control of the government. Explaining his departure, he told Partizan that he had been prevented from investigating businesses tied to Fidesz.
Their decisions to abandon ship came as Fidesz slumped in the polls behind Tisza, an upstart opposition party led by Peter Magyar, himself a former Orban loyalist who split with the governing party in 2024.
The polls could well be wrong, as they were in the United States in 2016, but the mere prospect of change has loosened bonds that were based less on ideological affinity with Mr. Orban than on dependence on Fidesz-controlled institutions for steady work and career advancement.
Mr. Alkonyi, who joined M.C.C. in 2022 after a stint working for Hungary’s foreign ministry, said the college has only a “tiny minority of true believers” but many who, after four thumping Fidesz election victories in a row, believed that Mr. Orban was here to stay so kept quiet.
“I considered myself a right-winger, too, but I’m not sure anymore,” he said. “I have a crisis of identity like the whole country.”
“I decided to speak up about Russian interference,” he added, “because this is not a distant issue happening in Moldova or Georgia but in my own country.”
Deciding that Fidesz’s rule might not be eternal after all, last month put a Tisza banner on the balcony of his apartment overlooking a busy Budapest avenue. Shortly after that, he posted a message on Facebook denouncing “Russian intervention in the Hungarian elections” that he said was “unprecedented in the European Union in its methods and sophistication.”
That directly contradicted the government’s line — reinforced by Mr. Vance in public statements during his visit to Hungary — that the only significant interference in the election has come from “bureaucrats” at the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels, and from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
Mr. Alkonyi then posted a video contending that M.C.C. employees were pressured to distribute government propaganda.
He took vacation time before making the posts and is not due back at work at M.C.C. until after the election. He said he expected to be reprimanded or fired, but had so far heard nothing from his superiors at M.C.C.
Colleagues, he added, had contacted him to voice private support.
As part of its election program, the opposition Tisza party has promised to claw back assets — primarily shares in a big state oil company — given to M.C.C. by the Fidesz government. The party says it will “end the practice of using public funds to build political networks.”
M.C.C. did not reply to requests for comment.
Defection often carries a heavy price, said Gabor Ivanyi, 74, a Methodist pastor who christened the two eldest children of Mr. Orban and counted him as an ally in the struggle against Hungary’s Communist government in the 1980s, when both shared a commitment to a liberal, European future for their country.
Since parting ways two decades ago with Mr. Orban, who was angered by the pastor’s open criticism of Fidesz’s nationalist turn in the 2000s, Mr. Ivanyi has been targeted in a series of media smear campaigns. His church has been hit with tax investigations and police raids against a homeless shelter and a school for special-needs children that it runs in Budapest.
The government stripped that church and scores of others of official recognition, cutting them off from significant state subsidies.
“This is all their revenge,” Mr. Ivanyi said of actions taken against him by media outlets and government agencies controlled by Mr. Orban’s party. Mr. Orban, he added, is “very vindictive” against those he sees as traitors to his political cause.
A February article published in Hungarian and English on a website registered just a few days earlier accused the pastor of abusing five children who attended schools run by his church. But that article, according to disinformation experts, was the work of Russian dirty tricks, not Fidesz. It was later deleted.
The article also falsely claimed that the opposition leader, Mr. Magyar, had called Mr. Ivanyi his “spiritual leader,” and that three former students attempted suicide.
“I don’t think the Russians care about me or even know who I am, but behind Fidesz are lots of dirty Russian games,” he said. “I’m not even running in this election, but they have a big problem with me because I say they are criminals.”
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw, on temporary assignment in Shanghai.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Iran Has Been Consistent in War. Will It Be Consistent in Peace Talks?
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/11/2026, 9:31:18 AM
From the moment the United States and Israel ignited their war against Iran, Tehran has maintained a markedly consistent set of demands, built around a permanent peace, economic relief and the right to pursue nuclear enrichment.
In contrast, President Trump frequently has recast the war’s aims — fluctuating among denying Iran nuclear weapons, inflicting devastating destruction, imposing regime change and achieving total victory — sometimes several times in one day.
Iran’s unwavering demands helped the regime to survive a war inspired at least partly by the hope that it would collapse, analysts said. The question is whether the two-week cease-fire that was announced Tuesday can endure should Iran maintain the same line during negotiations due to start Saturday in Pakistan. The maximalist demands put forth publicly in its 10-point plan for the talks appear both unrealistic and unworkable, not least because Mr. Trump has already been dismissive.
The United States is seeking major concessions, including Iran surrendering its highly enriched uranium and committing to no nuclear weapons as well as other limits on its military capabilities; restoring unfettered transit through the Strait of Hormuz; and ending support for its regional proxies like Hezbollah. In posts on his Truth Social app, Mr. Trump described Iran’s published demands as a “hoax,” while suggesting that Iran’s proposals behind closed doors are more reasonable.
Iran says that its goal from the talks is to establish “new security and political equations” in the Middle East that recognize the country’s “power and leadership,” according to a statement posted online Tuesday evening from the Supreme National Security Council, the powerful body that formulates defense and foreign policy.
The regime wants more than to merely survive, noted Dr. Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, an international relations think tank in London. Iran has repeatedly demanded a deal that blocks any similar attack in the future and speeds recovery from this war, she said. But if it can stick to those demands in Pakistan remains to be seen.
“Consistency has been important to hold the regime together at a time of crisis, but under negotiation pressure, where Iran is forced to make compromises, unity and consistency could unravel,” Ms. Vakil said.
Mr. Trump has claimed victory, and believes the United States has the upper hand. The war hit Iran hard, inflicting billions of dollars in damage, seriously degrading its military and killing almost 2,000 civilians, according to a count by the Human Rights Activists News Agency.
Yet it has also emerged from the conflict with new leverage, having impaired the global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz while damaging both energy infrastructure crucial to its Gulf Arab neighbors and U.S. bases in the region. It wants to avoid a repeat of the events last June, when the 12-day U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran just petered out without any formal agreement to end hostilities, which resumed on Feb. 28.
Mr. Trump initially set a high bar for the war, demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” which he later defined as Iran losing the ability to fight.
He often vacillated between demands. Last Monday alone, for example, on the eve of the truce, the president started the day calling the prospects for a cease-fire “a significant step,” while in the afternoon he was demanding that Iran “cry uncle” and in the evening stated that “the entire country can be taken out in one night.”
In the decades since its revolution, Iran acceded to compromises on significant foreign policy issues just twice, noted Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Iran accepted a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, after an estimated 250,000 of its soldiers had been killed. And in 2015, under the Obama administration, it signed a nuclear agreement that included outside inspections and exporting most of its highly enriched uranium.
Neither forced Iran to abandon what Mr. Sadjadpour called the two fundamental principals that have served as the regime’s lodestar since it first took power in 1979: undermining American influence and rejecting Israel.
That revolutionary ideology feeds hostility in Washington, as Mr. Trump made clear in announcing the war on Feb. 28.
“For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries,” he said, returning to that theme repeatedly throughout the fighting.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader for almost 40 years before he was assassinated on the first day of the war and succeeded by his son, always refused to abandon that ideology.
“They believe their ideology is their identity, and their identify is inextricable to their survival,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “Once you start to dilute or abandon your principles, that’s like taking a sledgehammer to the pillars of a building, it’s going to collapse.”
For the talks set to begin Saturday, the 10 points that Iran released publicly include a series of far-reaching demands that the Trump administration has suggested are implausible.
Aside from the guarantees that it will never be attacked again, they include maintaining its nuclear development program, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region and an end to attacks against its proxy forces, in particular Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Perhaps most important, Iran wants to impose tolls on what had been the free passage of ships through Hormuz. About 20 percent of the world’s oil supply transits the Strait. On the economic front, it seeks war reparations and the lifting of decades of sanctions.
Echoing Mr. Trump, his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said at a White House briefing on Wednesday that Iran had modified its initial proposal, privately submitting a condensed, more reasonable plan that prompted the U.S. to accept the cease-fire.
Yet the statement on Tuesday from the Supreme National Security Council suggested that “resistance” — Iran’s shorthand for its hostility toward the United States and Israel — would continue.
“Iran wants major concessions from the U.S., but at the same time wants to maintain it as its primary adversary,” Mr. Sadjadpour said, “The two positions cannot be reconciled.” The public demands made by the United States and Iran “are not in the same universe,” he said.
The fact that the regime has been largely decapitated, with its most senior leaders killed, will likely compound the difficulty of already thorny negotiations, analysts said. While the replacements have long-established political and military credentials, they have yet to amass the power or the legitimacy needed to start tinkering with the fundamentals of the revolution, even if they wanted to, they said.
Issues like Hormuz or Israel’s attacks on Lebanon could also undo the cease-fire. This was the first time that Hezbollah attacked Israel specifically to help defend Iran, noted Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, so not defending the organization would set a bad precedent for other proxy forces in Yemen and elsewhere. “If the Iranians betray Hezbollah, how can they count on the Houthis?” he said.
At the same time, while Mr. Trump has expressed readiness to resume fighting, the calendar will work against him, analysts noted. In quick succession he faces an already delayed summit meeting with President Xi Jinping of China, the United States hosting of the World Cup soccer championship and the U.S. midterm election season. An ongoing war would cast a shadow over all of them.
Despite its bluster, Iran might be ready for compromise given the huge costs of the war, leaving it with daunting problems, analysts noted.
First, the bombing shattered crucial economic infrastructure, deepening the government’s already troubled finances. Popular discontent with the regime, veiled while the country was at war, will likely re-emerge with the cease-fire. From the other end of the spectrum, hard-liners are attacking the government for accepting a truce before winning key demands, particularly guarantees against future attacks.
Still, leaders of the Islamic Republic have a history since the 1979 revolution of putting the survival of the regime well ahead of the interests of the country as a whole. That suggests they might be reluctant to retreat from the demands that saw them through the war, analysts said.
“They feel triumphant that they have been able to survive,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “They will continue to prioritize revolutionary ideology over national interests.”
Sanam Mahoozi and Shirin Hakim contributed reporting.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
Read the full story at nyt News.
How Lu Xun, a Famous Chinese Writer, Became a Cute Communist Mascot
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/11/2026, 9:31:16 AM
China Dispatch
The Chinese Communist Party has turned Lu Xun, a Mao-era hero who excoriated the establishment, into a bland, Disney-style character.
Reporting from Shaoxing, China
China’s best-known modern writer, Lu Xun, made his name a century ago as a coruscating critic of traditional Confucian culture, foreign bullying and the grandiose pieties of Chinese despots old and new.
Today, in his hometown, Shaoxing, a prosperous city in eastern China laced with canals, the writer has transformed from a fiery anti-establishment rebel into a cuddly Communist Party mascot. His prickly character and sharp views have been smoothed as flat as the refrigerator magnets sold across town as souvenir tributes to him.
Shortly before his death in 1936, Lu Xun wrote that “when the Chinese suspect someone of being a potential troublemaker, they always resort to one of two methods: they crush him, or they hoist him on a pedestal.”
Hoisted atop a giant pedestal by Mao Zedong, who in 1940 declared the writer “a hero without parallel in our history,” Lu Xun (pronounced Loo SHWUN) has stood for decades at the center of China’s most expansive literary-political cult.
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Read the full story at nyt News.
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