Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's new far-right party alliance in the European Parliament has fulfilled the requirements to form a political group called "Patriots for Europe."

To form the group, 23 MEPs from seven countries are needed.

On Saturday, the group secured the membership of the far-right Danish People's Party and the far-right Flemish Vlaams Belang, meeting the required threshold.

Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and Finland became the latest countries on Saturday to pause funding for the UN refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA), after the body said Friday that it had sacked “several” employees accused by Israel of involvement in Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

The United States, Australia and Canada had already paused funding to the aid agency, a critical source of support for people in Gaza, after the allegations by Israel. The agency said on Friday it had opened an investigation into several employees and severed ties with those people.

Pneumonia cases in children are unexpectedly surging in the Netherlands at an alarming rate — at the same time as China continues to grapple with a tidal wave of respiratory illnesses threatening to overwhelm its hospitals.

Last week, 80 out of every 100,000 children in the Netherlands between ages 5 and 15 were treated for pneumonia, reported the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research (NIVEL).

Pneumonia cases among tots ages 4 and under were also on the rise, jumping from 124 to 145 per 100,000.

In 2005, I interviewed Dutch politician Geert Wilders when the threat to his life from Islamic extremists was deemed to be so severe that he was forced to spend a lot of time living in a prison:

The dam is breached. The “shock election victory” of Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) will reverberate through all of Europe. The Dutch people decided to cast their vote for the Right-wing firebrand — and massively so, at least considering the conditions of the country’s parliamentary system. With a notoriously high number of political parties participating in elections, 23% of votes going to the PVV still qualifies as a political earthquake. 

It’s been almost a decade now since Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban boldly declared his goal of turning the country into an “illiberal state” founded on “national” values and modeled on countries such as China, India, Russia and Turkey. He’s been true to his word. Hungary is no longer a democracy in a meaningful sense, the sole European Union member that the US nonprofit Freedom House rates as only partly free.