Robert Carmichael

We are receiving increasing reports of large-scale document destruction from various ministries, affiliated institutions, and companies close to Fidesz.

Excellent @ICIJorg longform piece on #pharma drug pricing - specifically focused #Merck's secretive pricing of its blockbuster drug Keytruda. icij.org/investigations… Worth flagging this part of it:

Neurodegenerative disease does not begin the day symptoms appear. The processes that lead to cognitive decline can begin decades earlier. That is why prevention matters. What you do in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s can shape how your brain ages.

Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth. #ApostolicJourney #Cameroon vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

Watch 😂 ht ⁦@anneapplebaum⁩

It’s really good news, this - and I’m also encouraged by the positive reaction from Europe (below is just one example). Maybe we’ve turned the corner and can finally begin to put the last decade behind us.

Very interesting thread on Russia and its (seemingly disastrous - a good thing) drone programme.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi is spending her 124th day of imprisonment in Zanjan Central Prison while her health faces a grave threat. During two in-person visits on April 28 and April 11, 2026 conducted in the presence of prison authorities with her family and legal team, clear signs of a deterioration in her general condition were observed, and her physical state was described as “critical.” Hamidreza Mohammadi, Narges Mohammadi’s brother, stated: "My family managed to have an in-person meeting with Narges on Saturday, April 11. They reported that she has become extremely weak and has suffered significant weight loss. Narges is being held in a cell with prisoners charged with murder and has been threatened with death by some of these inmates several times." Narges Mohammadi, who has long suffered from severe chest pain, suffered a heart attack on March 24, 2026 and lost consciousness in the women's ward of Zanjan Prison. This state lasted for more than an hour and 15 minutes, raising serious concerns about her health. Hamidreza Mohammadi continued: "Following the heart attack, she was referred to a cardiologist in Zanjan on March 30. This physician identified the medications prescribed by the prison's general practitioner as factors contributing to the heart attack and refused to prescribe new medication or perform any treatment without the opinion of Narges’s trusted attending physician at Pars Hospital in Tehran. He also emphasized that Narges must be under the supervision of her own doctor and warned of the risk of a recurrent heart attack." Read full report : narges.foundation/alarming-condi… #FreeNarges #NargesMohammadi #Iran #ZanjanPrison #FreePoliticalPrisoners

The journalists of ⁦@Etilaatroz⁩ work under acutely dangerous conditions in Afghanistan. This is Hamid Farhadi. His work is banned by the Taliban. He is now being held in Bagram Prison. As board chair I consider him my employee. It is urgent he be released.

Well wow.

Having lost Orban, Israel is eagerly looking for a new EU saboteur-in-chief

A factual correction for the USA VP from those on the ground in Gaza with @JeremyKonyndyk ‘When the Israeli government talks about truck volumes into Gaza, they leave out that fact that very little of that is aid - only 1 in every 5 or 6 trucks’ Most aid remains blocked

✨The Iranian man who saved more Jewish lives than Oskar Schindler.✨ In the dark days of 1940, Nazi tanks rolled into Paris. Most diplomats fled. But one man stayed behind. His name was Abdolhossein Sardari, an Iranian consul from a noble family in Tehran. He was a Muslim. He was alone in the occupied city, with no orders from home and no backup. Iranian Jews living in France were suddenly in mortal danger. The Nazis marked them for death like every other Jew. Sardari refused to look away. He started by issuing new Iranian passports that simply left out any mention of religion. That small change gave families a fighting chance to move freely. But he went much further. Sardari used every trick of diplomacy and law he knew. He wrote letters arguing that these Iranian Jews, known as Jugutis, were not "real" Jews in the Nazi racial sense. They were Persians. They were Aryans by blood, he claimed, who had only adopted the faith of Moses centuries ago. He twisted the Nazis' own twisted logic against them. The Germans bought it enough to grant exemptions. Thanks to Sardari, hundreds of families were spared the yellow star, the roundups, and the trains to the camps. When that was not enough, he began issuing Iranian passports to non-Iranian Jews as well, hundreds of them, often using blank documents from the consulate safe. He sheltered desperate families inside the embassy building itself. When embassy funds ran dry, he spent his own money. He risked his career, his freedom, and his life every single day. One wrong move and the Gestapo would have taken him. By the end of the war, Abdolhossein Sardari is believed to have saved between 2,000 and 3,000 Jewish lives. After the war he returned to Iran, lived quietly, and never bragged about what he had done. When asked years later why he helped, he gave a simple answer: "It was my duty." In a time of pure evil, one brave Iranian diplomat chose humanity. His story reminds us that courage and decency can shine even in the heart of darkness. Never forget the quiet heroes who stood up when the world looked away.

Stellar reporting by the BBC here about the wholly avoidable transmission of HIV to hundreds of children in Pakistan. bbc.com/news/articles/…

Hungary under Orbán was essentially operating as a pass-through for Russian oil money to fund the international far right. That's ending now.

‼️Se confermata, questa sarebbe la prima decisione del governo italiano per fermare il genocidio in Palestina. Segno che l’impegno di giuristi e cittadini ha funzionato. Ora il passo decisivo: bloccare ogni commercio UE- 🇮🇱 finché occupazione e apartheid non saranno smantellate.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni says Italy is suspending its defence agreement with Israel as global protests mount over the US-Israel war on Iran. 🔴LIVE updates: aje.news/8xcc64

A series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane comments capped by threatening to wipe out Iran and attacking the pope have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power and revived the debate about Trump's mental health. nytimes.com/2026/04/13/us/…

Israel has normalized the killing of journalists, writes @JohnSimpsonNews: “There used to be some sense that killing a reporter would mean serious consequences. Now that understanding has vanished.”