Top Stories — Tuesday, April 7, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Vance to Visit Hungary to Boost Orban Before Election — nyt News
- Why Hungary’s Election Could Swing on Roma Votes — nyt News
- In Paris’s Catacombs, Can a Restoration Breathe New Life Into City’s Dead? — nyt News
Vance to Visit Hungary to Boost Orban Before Election
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/7/2026, 9:31:13 AM
After 16 years in power, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary is struggling to maintain his footing as his governing Fidesz party trails badly in most polls. Now, Vice President JD Vance is attempting a last-ditch rescue effort to revive the flagging prospects of Europe’s nationalist standard-bearer.
Mr. Vance was scheduled to visit Budapest, the nation’s capital, on Tuesday, just days before Sunday’s election, and to urge voters to stick with Mr. Orban. His trip underscored just how important an election in a small country with a tiny economy is to countries far beyond its borders.
Both the Trump administration and Moscow see Mr. Orban as a linchpin of their common antagonism toward Europe and are hoping the polls are wrong. The European Union, long hobbled by Hungarian obstruction on key issues like the war in Ukraine, hopes the polls are right, though it is not saying so publicly to avoid providing fuel to Mr. Orban’s anti-European diatribes.
For President Trump, Mr. Orban stands as a resilient European agent against the kind of liberal “woke” politics that his MAGA movement abhors, and he is a valued thorn in the side of the European Union.
For President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, he has been essential in stymying E.U. sanctions and holding up multibillion-dollar loans for Ukraine to help it defend itself in its four-year war with Russia. Moscow has made no secret of its collaboration with the Orban government.
Mr. Orban has put hostility toward Ukraine at the center of his campaign for re-election, presenting his Fidesz party as the only guarantor of security in face of what he says are dangerous threats from Hungary’s eastern neighbor.
Mr. Vance, who has long ruffled Europe’s political mainstream by cheering on political disruption from the nationalist right, was jumping into the final stage of Hungary’s volatile election campaign with a message of support for Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party.
Mr. Vance’s intervention delivered on the Trump administration’s policy, outlined in a new national security strategy paper released in December, of aligning with “patriotic European parties,” code for hard-right movements scorned by the mainstream and in some cases banned for extremism.
Mr. Orban, who won four previous general elections with ease to govern Hungary unchallenged since 2010, is a model for many in these “patriotic” movements, lauded for his electoral success, his open contempt for the European Union and his crackdowns on migrants and on activists pushing progressive social causes.
But most polls in the run-up to Sunday’s election suggest that his winning formula, which had relied heavily on overwhelming control of the media, has lost its magic. The surveys show his Fidesz party trailing by 10 percentage points or more behind Tisza, an upstart political movement headed by Peter Magyar, a conservative former Orban loyalist who broke with the governing party in 2024.
By sending Mr. Vance to Budapest so close to Election Day, the Trump administration is signaling that it thinks there is still time to turn the tide and prove the pollsters wrong.
President Trump has boasted openly of what he sees as his ability to sway foreign elections in favor of right-wing candidates to whom pollsters give little chance.
Before national midterm elections last year in Argentina, Mr. Trump sent his treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to offer support to President Javier Milei, whose party looked set to lose. “He was losing in the election, and I endorsed him and he won in a landslide,” Mr. Trump said in a December interview with Politico.
Whether Mr. Vance’s visit to Budapest can do the same, however, is unclear, not least because Washington has offered none of the hefty financial assistance to Hungary that it promised to Argentina.
After a visit to the White House late last year, Mr. Orban said he had struck a deal with Mr. Trump for a “financial shield” worth tens of billions of dollars to protect Hungary’s flagging economy.
Mr. Trump told Politico this was not true. “No, I didn’t promise him, but he certainly asked for it,” he said.
The Kremlin has also been open in trying to tilt the election toward Mr. Orban, not least by sending a steady stream of Russian energy supplies to support Hungary’s anemic economy, which has the lowest growth rate in the region.
A day before Mr. Vance’s visit, the Kremlin also offered support to claims by Mr. Orban’s government that Ukraine had planted explosives near a pipeline carrying Russian natural gas through Serbia to Hungary.
Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said on Monday that Ukraine had a history of sabotage and “it is most likely that signs of the Kyiv regime’s involvement will be found” in the pipeline episode.
Serbia’s authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vucic, a close ally of Mr. Orban, said on Sunday that explosives of “devastating power” had been found on a Serbian stretch of the pipeline to Hungary.
Mr. Magyar, the leader of a Hungarian opposition movement, immediately questioned the veracity of the explosives claim and accused Mr. Orban of trying to spread panic before Election Day.
Lili Rutai contributed reporting from Budapest.
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.
Why Hungary’s Election Could Swing on Roma Votes
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/7/2026, 9:31:10 AM
The party of Prime Minister Victor Orban of Hungary is facing parliamentary elections on Sunday that are expected to be exceptionally close. And the marginalized Roma ethnic minority may prove to be an unexpected swing vote, pivotal to whether his party remains in power.
Over the last 16 years, Mr. Orban’s government has doled out public jobs to Roma voters, some in exchange for political loyalty to his party, Fidesz. But it has also overhauled Hungary’s education system in ways that experts and analysts say have systemically trapped Roma in Hungary’s underclass.
“There are many reasons why we won’t vote for Orban,” said Bettina Pocsai, an education expert in Budapest who is Roma and works with Roma people. “Many people in our community face so many challenges that it’s not just the failure of the educational system. But mainly that is what contributes to it.”
Long held back by economic instability and prejudice across Europe, ethnic Roma make up about 8 percent of Hungary’s population of 9.6 million, according to government officials and experts. But with a range of polls showing Mr. Orban’s party trailing in the election, “this is not the best time to risk the Roma vote,” said Gabor Gyori, a political analyst with the Policy Solutions research organization in Budapest.
Since taking office in 2010, Mr. Orban has imposed a range of national education initiatives that academics and analysts say have had a disproportionate impact on Roma students, largely limiting them to mediocre or substandard schools that, in turn, lead them toward low-wage jobs.
Mr. Orban’s government centralized control of public elementary and secondary schools, taking decisions about how children are educated out of the hands of communities. It shifted public funding to church-run schools that relatively few Roma attend. And it lowered the mandatory school attendance age from 18 to 16, leading to a significant drop in 17-year-old Roma continuing their educations.
At the same time, government programs have provided low-skills jobs to impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged Hungarians, many of them Roma, to replace some welfare assistance.
Disagreement over whether Mr. Orban’s education and employment policies hurt or help Roma has simmered for a long time. It took a profanity-laden remark in January by Mr. Orban’s transportation minister, Janos Lazar, to turn the debate into widespread anger.
Speaking at a public forum at a lake resort town west of Budapest, Mr. Lazar used a racial epithet for Roma to declare that “someone has to clean the toilets on InterCity trains.”
He later apologized, but the remark created an uproar. Mr. Gyori said it reflected how politicians had generally “ignored the problems of the Roma community, thereby effectively cementing racial segregation in parts of Hungary.”
He called it “an instance of the mask slipping.”
Mr. Lazar did not respond to a request for comment.
Tisza, the political party challenging Mr. Orban and led by the opposition politician Peter Magyar, said Mr. Orban’s policies had “further deepened social exclusion” of Roma, in part through the advantages for religious schools.
Mr. Orban’s allies dismiss the criticism as a campaign ploy and predict that Roma voters will continue to support him.
“I think the Roma in general acknowledge the work that the government is doing,” said Attila Sztojka, who is Roma and is Mr. Orban’s state secretary for social opportunities and Roma relations.
In the months since his minister’s disparaging comment, Mr. Orban has focused Fidesz’s election campaign on illegal migration and European Union support for Ukraine, presenting them as threats to Hungary’s sovereignty. That may resonate with Roma voters.
Attila Csik, a Roma cabdriver whose children go to a kindergarten in Budapest with non-Roma students, said he knew many people who would “stand up for Fidesz,” adding, “They will believe the propaganda about the war, about migration.”
Agnes Alexandra Bercsenyi’s two children go to the same kindergarten. She is not Roma but is disgusted, she said, by policies and political rhetoric that Mr. Orban presides over.
“We don’t need that hate,” she said. “I hope it will have an impact in April.”
Mr. Orban’s education overhaul, starting in 2011, is a particular sore point among Roma.
Centralized control of public education and the shifting of money has led to an exodus likened to “white flight” to church-run schools by skilled teachers and privileged students, according to a report issued in November by the deputy commissioner for protecting citizens’ fundamental rights. That report, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, has since been taken off the office’s website.
Lowering the mandatory school attendance age, to 16, was part of the Orban government’s efforts to supply the economy with blue-collar workers, according to a 2023 study by Janos Kollo and Anna Sebok, researchers at the KRTK Institute of Economics in Budapest. The study concluded that significantly more Roma students ended their schooling early after the change than did non-Roma.
The study found that the number of 17-year-old Roma children who were attending school in 2016 fell by 21 percentage points from 2011, before the law took effect. By contrast, that number dropped by 5.9 percentage points among non-Roma 17-year-olds in the same time period.
That meant Roma children were more likely to be locked in cycles of low-wage work, Mr. Kollo said in an interview on Monday.
Mr. Sztojka, the Roma government official, defended the government’s education policies.
He said centralized control was established to create a consistent nationwide standard for the country’s schools. And he said that teachers earned the same salaries in church-run and public schools and that those who worked with large populations of economically disadvantaged students, which generally include Roma, were offered 20 percent raises.
Any school where Roma or other disadvantaged groups are not fairly represented among students risk losing 10 percent of government funding, Mr. Sztojka said.
“We constantly monitor the situation,” he said.
He said the lowering of the mandatory school age did not have a negative effect on Roma graduation rates, pointing to a 2025 study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights showing that more Roma were attending early-childhood education and graduating from high school than were a decade ago.
Those rates remain far behind those of the rest of Hungary’s students. The study also said slightly more Roma were attending schools that were fully or mostly segregated than in 2016.
Klaudia Kiraly was the only Roma student in her public high school class in Kalocsa, a small city south of Budapest, after rejecting teachers’ suggestions in 2013 that she switch to a vocational school to become a nurse. She said Roma who remained in public schools were often pushed toward trade colleges instead of universities.
“I told them I have other plans,” said Ms. Kiraly, 26, now a lawyer in training.
The New York Times was not allowed into a range of public schools in Kalocsa and in a heavily Roma district in Budapest. Nor would the principal of a Catholic-run school in Kalocsa answer questions about students’ ethnicities or government funding when approached in late February outside the building, a gleaming, modern structure with a soaring glass atrium.
Its advantages were made obvious, however, by a public vocational school next door that had paint peeling from its fading yellow facade.
A few blocks away, a semicircle of Roma and non-Roma kindergartners sat on the carpet in a classroom, listening to their teacher. Kindergartens in Hungary are run by local municipalities, not the central government, and making sure they include a mix of Roma and non-Roma students is left to communities.
The district’s director, Ildiko Szabone Juhasz, used to oversee a Roma-only kindergarten in Kalocsa that closed in 2022. Her students there, many from poor neighborhoods, rarely interacted with children from other parts of the city until they were transferred to the integrated school, she said.
“I’m glad we were able to get rid of that,” Ms. Juhasz said.
Lara Jakes, a Times reporter based in Rome, reports on conflict and diplomacy, with a focus on weapons and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. She has been a journalist for more than 30 years.
Read the full story at nyt News.
In Paris’s Catacombs, Can a Restoration Breathe New Life Into City’s Dead?
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/7/2026, 9:31:06 AM
For more than two centuries, tourists have descended beneath the streets of Paris to visit the catacombs, a dank and macabre labyrinth filled with the remains of up to six million Parisians. From floor to ceiling, they are lined with bones, femur by femur, skull by skull, that draw 600,000 visitors a year to the dimly lit tunnels.
Parts of those gloomy passageways have now been given a much-needed face-lift.
Over the past five months, architects, designers, technicians and masons have been renovating this vast tomb — installing new lighting and ventilation systems, restoring the bone walls, and preparing new audio guides. Some elements of the labyrinth, previously unlit, will now be visible to visitors.
The goal, curators say, is to preserve the site and make it more accessible while still maintaining its somber, spooky appeal.
“The goal isn’t to turn it into Disneyland,” said Isabelle Knafou, the catacombs’ administrator.
The labyrinth extends for hundreds of miles, and the mile-long section that the public can visit will reopen on Wednesday. The “galleries” are essentially the tunnels of quarries, first excavated in the Roman era. The network was converted in the 18th century to provide a novel remedy to a gruesome problem: The city’s cemeteries were overflowing, causing sanitation issues.
In 1785, the authorities began to move the dead underground, dumping the bones of people who lived from the 10th to the 18th centuries in parts of the abandoned tunnels, which became known as the ossuary, or tomb.
In the 19th century, Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, a senior official who oversaw the quarries, turned the piles of bones into an underground museum. Under his watch, workers rearranged the remains into decorative walls and pillars of femurs, tibias and skulls — and the catacombs officially opened to visitors in 1809. Messages, chiseled into the stone, invited onlookers to reflect on their own mortality. “Where is death?” reads one. “Always ahead or behind, the moment it arrives, it is already gone.”
The setting was never meant to be sensationalist, Ms. Knafou said. “On the contrary,” she noted, “it was to emphasize solemnity and create an atmosphere of respect.”
Two centuries of visitors brought humidity and carbon dioxide, both of which contributed to falling walls and molding bones. A dilapidated electrical system, almost untouched since 1974, hardly helped.
The restorers’ primary challenge was to ensure that the renovations did not compromise the site’s haunting essence, Ms. Knafou said.
“The first priority is, above all, to preserve the site and maintain a balance between the visit and the conservation of the remains,” she added.
Mélissa Cayralat, the project’s lead architect, said that it had also been challenging to find workers who were fit enough and willing to work 60 feet underground, traipsing up and down stairs repeatedly each day, working in cramped and damp spaces, surrounded by bones.
“At the start of the project, some people said, ‘We’re leaving,’” she said.
Florian Robin, a lighting technician, said that the project’s historical stakes had motivated him to overlook the logistical challenges. Mr. Robin, who helped restore the Cathedral of Notre-Dame after a catastrophic fire in 2019, said that he saw the catacombs’ renovation as another contribution to Paris’s legacy. He is “bringing them back to life,” he said, by installing lighting that better showcases the space.
Surrounded by buckets of skeletal remains, the head stonemasons Loïc Dollet and Florent Bastaroli were restoring the walls by wedging bones back into place without using cement or other materials that could cause damage.
The idea is to create rows of femurs and tibias that alternate with lines of skulls, creating walls behind which the remaining bones are piled up, many out of sight.
Eyeing the ghoulish mosaic, Mr. Bastaroli said, “It puts us back in our place as mortals.”
Mr. Dollet acknowledged that working with human material had caused him some angst.
“If you really think about the task, it’s inhumane work,” he said. “You shouldn’t handle your ancestors that way.”
After three years working in the catacombs, Mr. Dollet added, he is still shocked at some of the things he sees. Twisted bones that suggested they once belonged to deformed limbs. Punctured skulls that indicated they had been treated for brain swelling or other maladies.
“You think to yourself, damn, life wasn’t easy for everyone,” he said.
Read the full story at nyt News.
For complete details, visit the original sources linked above.
Comments
Post a Comment