Unga

• UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned delegates at the opening of the 81st UN General Assembly session in New York that the multilateral system is straining under fractured geopolitics. • Guterres offered his full backing to Khalilur Rahman of Bangladesh, who serves as the President of the 81st General Assembly session. • The warning highlights the difficulty of coordinating international responses to urgent, interlocking crises when global powers are divided.

• Google will invest at least 13 billion euros in artificial intelligence infrastructure in Finland throughout 2027 and 2028. • This project represents the company's largest investment in Europe to date. • Finland's stable electricity grid and nuclear power capacity make it a primary hub for energy-intensive data centers used by firms like Microsoft and ByteDance.

• UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the multilateral system is straining under fractured geopolitics during his opening address at the 81st UN General Assembly. • Guterres cited a combination of nuclear escalation risks, worsening climate chaos, and declining financial resources for humanitarian operations. • These systemic failures increase the risk of humanitarian suffering and record migration for vulnerable populations worldwide.

• Russia warned of a "harsh and painful" response after Hungary expelled 10 Russian diplomats for engaging in unacceptable activities. • Bosnia and Herzegovina's foreign minister Elmedin Konaković ordered two Serbian diplomats to leave the country in protest over Serbian officials attending a specific funeral. • Foreign ministers from 12 nations, including the UK, France, and Canada, issued a statement supporting or considering trade restrictions on goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

• Alexander Khodakovsky reported that Hungary used its position within the European Union to block several initiatives aimed at Russia. • Hungary pursued its own national interests to maximize benefits from the confrontation rather than acting out of friendship toward Russia. • These political shifts in Europe create uncertainty for those opposing Russia and may influence future EU policy decisions.

• Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine found that a 4-day course of a mycelium-based fungal supplement reduced adverse reactions in COVID-naive vaccine recipients. • According to a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial (NCT04951336) published in BMC Immunology, the supplement also helped sustain antibody levels for up to 6 months. • These findings are significant as they could improve vaccine tolerability and help reduce vaccine hesitancy among the general population.

A ‘capacity for despair’ forged by political oppression has long been consider a Magyar national trait. But after Orbán, writers in the country remind us that melancholy must not always be bleakA lone visitor looks for a garden outside an empty monastery. A morose housekeeper won’t let anyone behind the door of her own home. A retired general living alone on a crumbling estate waits 40 years to confront the only friend he ever had. Melancholy, an affinity with oblivion without a concrete cause, suffuses the Hungarian fiction translated for foreign audiences over the past 30 years, from the tortured tales of Sándor Márai to the taut novels of Magda Szabó.In his book In Praise of Melancholy, essayist László F Földényi tells the story of an Englishman who monomanically decides to teach himself Hungarian. For Földényi, the commitment to studying a language with 26 cases and with no connection to any other language, from a culture besieged by centuries of invasion, is to embrace melancholy, a seductive “capacity for despair”. To read Hungarian literature as an outsider, the poet János Pilinszky claimed in 1972, is to acquire unique spiritual insights that come from centuries of rootlessness, alienation and strife. Continue reading...