Hungary, whose government maintains support of Russian narratives about war in Ukraine, is accused of seeking defence data. Ukraine and Hungary are expelling two diplomats each after both sides accused the other of engaging in espionage. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, writing on X on Friday, announced the action after Kyiv’s SBU security agency said it had uncovered a spy network run by the Hungarian state to obtain intelligence about its defence. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said Budapest’s expulsion order was in response to what he called Ukrainian “propaganda”. “Two Hungarian diplomats must leave our country within 48 hours,” Sybiha wrote on X. “We are acting in response to Hungary’s actions, based on the principle of reciprocity and our national interests.” Relations between Kyiv and Budapest have long been strained, but the antipathy has grown amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine’s SBU said in a statement it had detained two suspected agents who, it said, were being run by Hungarian military intelligence. The activities of the suspected spies were focused on the western Ukraine region of Zakarpattia, which borders Hungary and is home to a sizeable Hungarian ethnic minority. Budapest and Kyiv have clashed over the rights of Hungarians in Zakarpattia, most of which was part of Hungary until the end of World War I. Sybiha said in a statement that the spy network was tasked with collecting information about the military security of the region, search for vulnerabilities in the region’s ground and air defences and “study the sociopolitical views of local residents, in particular scenarios of their behaviour if Hungarian troops enter the region”. The SBU said the suspects – a 40-year-old man and a woman – were former members of Ukraine’s military. They were placed in custody on Friday and given notice that they were under suspicion of committing state treason. They both now face up to life in prison, it added. It was the first time in Ukraine’s history that a Hungarian spy network had been found to be working against Kyiv’s interests, the SBU said. Hungary’s Szijjarto did not directly deny the allegations of a Hungarian espionage cell operating in the neighbouring country, but stated that the SBU’s claims could be classified as “anti-Hungarian propaganda” launched by Kyiv in retaliation for Hungary’s refusal to assist Ukraine in its fight against Russia. “We do not tolerate that Ukraine should continuously launch such defamatory acts against Hungary and the Hungarian people,” Szijjarto said in a Facebook video on Friday. “Therefore, today, we have expelled from Hungary two spies working under diplomatic cover at Ukraine’s embassy in Budapest,” he added. Hours later, Sybiha announced that the two Hungarian diplomats would be expelled. Hungary, a member of NATO and the European Union, has taken an adversarial approach to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion launched on February 24, 2022. Throughout the Ukraine war, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has delayed Western military aid to Kyiv and maintained warm relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, at odds with his European Union peers. Orban has used staunch nationalism to build his political base at home, in particular stressing grievances over the territories lost to neighbouring states – including Ukraine – under the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I. Budapest has berated Kyiv for years, claiming discriminatory actions against the 150,000 or so ethnic Hungarians, most of whom live in the Zakarpattia region. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

The doctoral student, targeted for pro-Palestine article, recounts being ‘afraid’ and ‘crying’ during her detention. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University doctoral student detained as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine visa holders, has been ordered to be released from immigration custody. On Friday, Vermont-based US District Judge William Sessions ruled that Ozturk’s “detention cannot stand”. “The court finds that she does not pose a danger to the community, nor does she present a risk of flight. The court orders the government to release Ms Ozturk from custody immediately,” Sessions said. Lawyers for Ozturk, a Turkish citizen in the US on a student visa, had argued that the Trump administration’s efforts to detain and deport her violated her constitutional rights, including to free speech and due process. Sessions appeared to side with the legal team’s argument, saying Ozturk’s “continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens”. Ozturk’s lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said in a statement she was “relieved and ecstatic” about the judge’s order but that it came far too late. “When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?” she said. The 30-year-old Ozturk had appeared at the Vermont hearing via video from a detention centre in Louisiana, wearing an orange jumpsuit and a hijab. During her testimony, she recounted being surrounded and detained by plain-clothed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents near her student housing in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25. Surveillance video of that incident later spread online, sparking outrage. She said she suffered a series of asthma attacks, 12 in total, as she was being transferred to Louisiana. The first came at the airport in Atlanta, she said, and she did not have all of the medication she needed. “I was afraid, and I was crying,” she said. The doctoral student told the judge her studies related to community engagement in children in warzones. She was among dozens of student visa holders and permanent residents targeted by the Trump administration for pro-Palestine advocacy. The administration has relied on an obscure provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the secretary of state to deport someone deemed to “adversely affect US foreign policy interests”. Officials have broadly portrayed pro-Palestinian protests and other forms of advocacy as “anti-Semitic”, despite providing scant evidence in individual cases. Still, Ozturk’s detention has been notable given her relatively low public profile, with her only public advocacy coming in the form of an article she co-wrote with three other students for the campus newspaper. The piece criticised the university’s response to student-led calls for administrators to acknowledge “Palestinian genocide” and “disclose its investments and divest from companies” with links to Israel. Speaking at Friday’s hearings, Ozturk said Tufts would provide her housing if she is released, and her friends and lawyers would drive her to future court hearings. She added that she remained committed to finishing her PhD degree. The judge’s order on Friday came just over a week after Mohsen Mahdawi, a US permanent resident and pro-Palestine protest leader at Columbia University, was released from immigration detention by another federal judge in Vermont. On Thursday, Mahdawi, who still faces an ongoing deportation case, announced the creation of the Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund, to help immigrants facing deportation hearings. Speaking to Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey, Mahdawi recounted being detained by immigration officials as he attended a citizenship hearing in Vermont in April. He said ICE agents had sought to transfer him to the more conservative jurisdiction in Louisiana, as they had done with Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia University protest leader targeted for deportation. Mahdawi added that the move was meant to isolate him from his community and legal support. “They had the aeroplane ticket, commercial flight printed with my name on it, but I was lucky enough that we missed the flight by nine minutes,” Mahdawi said. That brief window, he explained, gave his lawyers time to intervene. They sought and received a temporary restraining order preventing Mahdawi from being transferred out of the state. Mahdawi credits remaining in Vermont with paving the way to his release. “I mean, if the plan worked out as they have laid it down, we would not be having this interview,” he said. Prior to Ozturk’s hearing on Friday, Judge Sessions had ordered her to be transferred to Vermont no later than May 14, as that is where she was held at the time her lawyers filed an initial petition for her release. Sessions, however, decided to continue with her bail hearing even before Ozturk was physically moved. The Trump administration had previously appealed an earlier deadline for her transfer to Vermont, set for May 1. Ozturk has not been accused of any crime. The Trump administration has offered little justification for its decision to revoke Ozturk’s student visa, pointing only to the article she co-authored and claiming she was “creating a hostile environment for Jewish students”. The administration has broadly claimed that visa holders are not afforded the same constitutional rights protections as US citizens, a question that could eventually be decided by the Supreme Court. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt briefly weighed in on Friday’s decision during her daily news briefing, where she reiterated the administration’s position that such rulings are tantamount to judicial interference. “We’ve made quite clear that lower-level judges should not be dictating the foreign policy of the United States, and we absolutely believe that the president and the Department of Homeland Security are well within their legal rights to deport illegal immigrants,” she said. “It is a privilege, not a right, to come to this country on a visa,” she added. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

The Liverpool player is believed to have been driving at high speed when he and his brother Andre Silva died last week, according to Spanish police. Liverpool and Portugal star Diogo Jota was likely speeding when his car veered off a motorway in Spain last week, killing him and his brother, Spanish police said. The shock deaths of Jota, 28, and Andre Silva, 25, on July 3 plunged the football world into mourning, less than two weeks after the striker had gotten married. An ongoing investigation is examining “the marks left by one of the vehicle’s wheels … everything points to a possible excessive speed beyond the road’s speed limit”, the Civil Guard said on Tuesday. “All the tests conducted so far indicate that the driver of the vehicle was Diogo Jota,” it added. The force had previously said a tyre had probably blown out while the vehicle was overtaking, causing it to crash and burst into flames in the northwestern province of Zamora. Just hours before the accident, Jota had posted a video of his June 22 wedding to partner Rute Cardoso, with whom he had three children. The deaths sparked an outpouring of grief, particularly in the brothers’ native Portugal and at Jota’s Premier League club Liverpool. Political leaders as well as star players from Portugal and Liverpool joined family and friends at the funeral on Saturday in the Porto suburb of Gondomar. Following spells at Atletico Madrid, Porto and Wolverhampton Wanderers, Jota became a fan favourite at Liverpool after joining the Premier League giants in 2020. He netted 65 times for the Reds in five seasons, lifting the League Cup and FA Cup in 2021-22 and helping them win a record-equalling 20th English league title last season. The striker also earned 49 caps for Portugal and was part of the team that won this year’s UEFA Nations League. Younger brother Andre played in midfield for FC Penafiel in Portugal’s second tier. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

Church decries ‘anti-clerical campaign’ after premier alleged that the Catholicos fathered a child and backed a coup attempt. A confrontation between Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Armenia’s top Christian clerics seems to be deepening, polarising the deeply religious South Caucasus nation of 3 million. St Echmiadzin, the Armenian Apostolic Church’s headquarters, has been “taken over by the anti-Christian, immoral, antinational and antistate group and has to be liberated”, Pashinyan wrote on Facebook on Tuesday, adding: “I will lead this liberation.” The dispute escalated late last month, with bells ringing tocsin over St Echmiadzin on June 27. Usually, the loud and alarming sound signals an event of significance, such as a foreign invasion. But on that parching-hot June day, the noise rang out to signal the detention of a top cleric who, according to Pashinyan, was part of a “criminal-oligarchic clergy” that was involved in “terrorism” and plotted a “coup”. He said the “coup organisers” include the Church’s head, Karekin II, who has disputed with Pashinyan in a months-long personal feud. But the conflict should not be seen as a confrontation between secular authorities and the entire Church, observers said. “It’s a personal clash,” Richard Giragosian of the Regional Studies Center think tank based in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, told Al Jazeera. But some Armenians still described the furore in almost apocalyptic terms. “We lost our statehood so many times, so being part of the Church was equal to being Armenian,” Narine Malikyan, a 37-year-old mother of two from Armenia’s second-largest city of Guymri, told Al Jazeera. “Attacking the Church is like attacking every Armenian.” The Church, whose doctrine differs from that of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox sees, has for centuries helped maintain the identity of Armenians while their lands were ruled by Iranians, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols, Turks and Russians. The conflict between Pashinyan and Karekin is rooted in the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended a decades-old “frozen conflict”. In the early 1990s, Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous Azeri enclave dominated by ethnic Armenians, broke away in a bloody war that uprooted up to a million. Moscow-backed separatist leaders from Nagorno-Karabakh became part of Armenia’s political elite and cultivated ties with the Church. The so-called “Karabakh clan” spawned two presidents who ruled Armenia for 20 years but were accused of corruption, cronyism and pocketing donations from Armenian diasporas in France, the United States and Russia. In 2018, Pashinyan, an ex-lawmaker and popular publicist, led huge protests that toppled the “Karabakh clan”. He became prime minister with approval ratings of more than 80 percent. Some protesters back then flocked to St Echmiadzin to urge Karekin to step down as they lambasted his penchant for luxurious cars and lavish parties. Two years later, Armenia lost Nagorno-Karabakh in a 44-day war that proved the superiority of drone attacks and hi-tech stratagems. By 2023, Azerbaijan regained control of the entire Dubai-sized territory, while tens of thousands of its residents flocked to Armenia. Karekin blamed Pashinyan for the defeat, even though observers have argued that the responsibility lies with his predecessors’s miscalculations. Pashinyan struck back. He claimed that 73-year-old Karekin – who was ordained in 1970, studied theology in Austria, Germany and Moscow and became the Church’s head in 1999, broke his vow of celibacy to father a child – and should, therefore, vacate his seat. “If Karekin II tries to denounce this fact, I’ll prove it in all necessary ways,” Pashinyan wrote on Facebook on June 9. He did not specify the details, but Armenian media “discovered” that Karekin’s alleged daughter is a medical doctor in Yerevan. Karekin did not respond to the claim but accused Pashinyan of dividing Armenians. “The anti-clerical campaign unleashed by authorities is a serious threat to our national unity, domestic stability and is a direct blow to our statehood,” the grey-bearded clergyman, clad in a ceremonial robe adorned with crosses, said on June 22 at a ceremony at St Echmiadzin. A day later, a priest called Pashinyan “Judas” and claimed he was circumcised. Pashinyan retorted by offering to expose himself to the priest and Karekin. On June 27, dozens of intelligence officers interrupted a conference in one of St Echmiadzin’s tawny, centuries-old buildings to forcibly deliver another Pashinyan critic, Archbishop Mikael Adjapakhyan, to an interrogation. But priests and parishioners summoned by the tocsin fought them off – while critics compared the incident to the 1938 killing of Armenia’s top cleric in St Echmiadzin during the Soviet-era crackdown on religion. Hours later, Archbishop Adjapakhyan volunteered for an interrogation, telling supporters that he “was being persecuted illegally”. He was arrested for two months – along with 14 alleged “coup organisers,” including another archbishop, Bagrat Galstanyan, opposition lawmakers and “Karabakh clan” figures. The coup was supposed to take place on September 21, on Armenia’s Independence Day, according to its plan leaked to the Civic.am daily. Also arrested was construction tycoon Samvel Karapetyan, who made his estimated $3.6bn fortune in Russia and owns Armenia’s main power company. Karapetyan had threatened Pashinyan, saying if the conflict with Karekin is not solved, “we will take part in it all in our own way.” The arrests were “a move by the Armenian government to preempt any potential Russian interference in the coming [parliamentary] elections that are set for June 2026”, analyst Giragosian said. Those opposed to Pashinyan’s Civil Contract Party have accused him of siding with Azerbaijan and Turkiye. But Baku has its qualms about Pashinyan. “Pashinyan is by far not a peace dove,” Emil Mustafayev, chief editor of the Minval Politika magazine based in the Azeri capital, Baku, told Al Jazeera. “He is hard to negotiate with.” However, after the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, Pashinyan “began to take heed of Baku’s position”, Mustafayev said. “Of all possible options in Yerevan, he’s the least problematic partner one can have a dialogue with, no matter how complicated it is.” Analyst Gigarosyan agreed. “Pashinyan is the best interlocutor [Baku and Ankara] could hope for because of predictability and also because he’s looking to turn the page,” he said. “He’s not looking for revenge.” And even though Pashinyan’s current approval ratings are well below 20 percent, his party may become a political phoenix and win the June 2026 vote. Armenian opposition parties are either centred around two former presidents from the “Karabakh clan” who are deeply mistrusted, or are too small and splintered to form sizeable coalitions and influence decision-making in the unicameral, 107-seat parliament. “They’re likely to win,” Giragosian said of Pashinyan’s party. “Not because of a strong degree of support, but because the opposition is hated and feared more.” Follow Al Jazeera English:...