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Just weeks before a high-stakes parliamentary election, Hungary’s main opposition party has accused Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government of deploying the state security apparatus to infiltrate and sabotage its internal operations, casting a shadow over the April 12 vote.

The allegations, which opposition leader Péter Magyar has branded “Orbán-gate,” stem from a sprawling report published by the Hungarian investigative journalism outlet Direkt36. Citing police investigation documents, the report details what it describes as a secret operation aimed at crippling the IT systems of Magyar’s Tisza Party, which is currently leading in opinion polls.

According to the police report obtained by Direkt36, the alleged plot unfolded as a classic espionage operation. Operatives reportedly attempted to recruit a young IT volunteer linked to the Tisza Party to gain backdoor access to the organization’s digital infrastructure.

The ultimate goal, the report alleges, was to place loyal insiders or “puppets” in positions of control inside the party’s IT structure. The plot was interrupted when police raided the homes of two men connected to the party who were reportedly preparing to use a homemade belt camera to expose the operative trying to recruit them.

Direkt36 reported that the raids were conducted under the guise of an investigation into child pornography, allegedly following pressure from Hungary’s domestic intelligence service. However, investigators found no evidence of child abuse material on the seized devices. Instead, authorities reportedly steered the investigation toward the men’s plan to secretly record the operative.

Magyar, whose rapid rise has presented Orbán with his most serious political challenge in over a decade, seized on the report as evidence of democratic backsliding. In social media posts cited by Euronews, he framed the alleged espionage as a direct attack on free elections in Hungary.

The scandal has quickly transcended partisan bickering, gripping the Hungarian public. A video featuring whistleblower Bence Szabó has gone viral across social media platforms, while prominent cultural figures, including writer György Dragomán, publicly weighed in on the case.

“It’s hard not to think that we live in the darkest political noir-spy-novel-technothriller reality,” he wrote.

Political scientist Gábor Török argued the case crossed a red line.

“To interfere in the life of an opposition party using state-owned, secret service tools, to organize IT specialists, and then use state organs to blackmail them, is not a part of a normal political life,” Török wrote on Facebook.

The Orbán government moved swiftly to contain the fallout, forcefully rejecting the opposition’s narrative and casting the affair as a matter of national security rather than domestic political sabotage.

Zoltán Kovács, the government’s international spokesman, released what he described as declassified elements of a national security briefing. 

Kovács alleged that figures tied to the Tisza Party have links to Ukrainian actors and underground hacker networks. Pro-government media outlets quickly amplified this counter-narrative, framing the situation not as a state-sponsored attack on the opposition, but as a foreign-backed operation aimed at destabilizing Hungary.

Thus far, the state apparatus has remained largely silent on the specifics of the Direkt36 investigation. The outlet noted that multiple agencies — including the National Bureau of Investigation, the Constitution Protection Office, the National Security Service, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Interior Ministry — declined to answer detailed questions regarding the alleged plot and the subsequent police raids.

The U.K. today announced a new round of sanctions targeting individuals and entities linked to Cambodia’s Prince Group, which is widely alleged to have operated a network of scam centers built on forced labor and human trafficking.

“A number of London properties will be frozen as a result of today’s sanctions,” said the announcement by the U.K.’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), which followed up on a sanctions package it coordinated with the U.S. in October 2025.

“This is in addition to the substantial U.K. assets already frozen by previous action against the network, including a £100 million [$133 million] office block in the City of London, two multi-million-pound mansions, and a helicopter.”

One of the key individuals listed in the new round of sanctions was Hu Xiaowei, who is also known as Hu Shi, Chen Xiao’er, and Wu An Ming, and holds Chinese, Cambodian, Cypriot, and St. Kitts and Nevis citizenship.

OCCRP has previously reported on Hu’s extensive portfolio of U.K. property and global business interests, including a £30 million ($40 million) mansion and a sports field, as well as his multiple identities and deeper links to Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi, who in January was arrested in Cambodia and extradited to China.

Describing Hu as a “long-term associate of Chen Zhi who has been unmasked as involved in the Prince Group’s financial network under three different aliases,” the FCDO said there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect that he has provided financial services, or made available funds to people and entities involved in human rights abuses.”

Hu has already technically been sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury in October, but only by one of his aliases, Chen Xiao’er.

Also included in the new U.K. sanctions package is Wang Xiaoyan, the wife of Zhu Zhongbiao also known as Jack Zhu, the chairman of Jinbei Group, a casino operator in Prince Group’s umbrella of companies that U.S. Treasury alleged operated some of its “most notorious” compounds.

OCCRP has reported on Wang Xiaoyan, who holds Cypriot citizenship, and her U.K. properties, which include luxury apartments in London’s Canary Wharf and Battersea Power Station, along with Zhu Zhongbiao’s sizable portfolio of Dubai luxury real estate.

A £8.5 million ($11.3 million) home owned by Wang Xiaoyan in Hampstead Heath, northwest London, was among the properties seized by the U.K.

Among the other sanctioned Prince Group-linked entities is Cambodian and Chinese national Li Thet, also known by his birth name of Li Tian, who the FCDO described as a “key lieutenant of Chen Zhi, who has managed Prince Group’s international financial network, including in Taiwan.” Li was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in October 2025 along with Singapore companies under his direct control.

Li, who also holds Vanuatu citizenship, is the owner of two homes on the Isle of Man that were raided by police earlier this year. Companies on the island owned by Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi are currently the subject of what police called a “large-scale international money laundering investigation.” 

A £9 million ($12 million) penthouse owned by Li in Victoria, London, confirmed through property records seen by OCCRP, was also seized as part of the sanctions. The penthouse has iconic views over London’s Saint James’s Park and Buckingham Palace.

Hu Xiaowei, Wang Xiaoyan, and Li Thet did not immediately reply to emailed OCCRP requests for comment. In a previous statement to OCCRP, Hu Xiaowei’s assistant said that he had been “unjustly sanctioned” by the US Treasury and had appealed.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

Chromebooks are scattered all around the classrooms of Floyd M. Jewett Elementary School in Mesick, Michigan.

Towers of them are teetering atop bookshelves. They’re piled up in corners of classrooms. They’ve even cropped up in one classroom’s dish rack.

But there’s one place you won’t find them: in students’ hands.

Last month, Mesick Consolidated Schools banned digital devices in its elementary school of about 250 students. The decision wasn’t an agonizing one. The ban came at astonishing speed, almost overnight, after a conversation between Mesick Superintendent Jack Ledford and Jewett Principal Elizabeth Kastl.

Ledford recalled asking Kastl how much teachers read to students in grades K-5. And he recalled her reply: “That has almost vanished.” Kastl’s response helped seal the deal.

Teachers had to have students off devices by the end of the week. School printers went into overdrive. Then the district went cold turkey.

Mesick’s midyear ban underscores a growing backlash against screen time in school, a battle that parents and educators are taking up nationwide. Fears about digital devices’ impact on learning have fused with ongoing concerns about a multiyear decline in national test scores that predates the pandemic. A stream of government hearings, op-eds and social media posts have only magnified the sense of urgency.

Ledford and Kastl think the need for drastic action is warranted. About 18% of Jewett’s third-graders scored as “proficient” or higher on the state reading test last spring — half the state average and half what it was a decade ago.

In Mesick, a rural town known for its annual mushroom festival, 66% of students are economically disadvantaged. The district has done all the “normal things” to improve persistently low reading scores, Ledford said, like switching to an evidence-based curriculum. But he now views screens as an adversary to learning.

“When we’re competing with screens, we’re going to lose,” he said.

But blanket bans at school won’t affect kids’ screen time at home. And research about how screens affect students is inconclusive, although it does suggest that teachers should exercise caution. Not everyone is convinced that a complete prohibition on screens is the best way to help struggling learners.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s education school, said he understands the appeal of an all-or-nothing approach, but cautions that it avoids the reality that some technology does have a place in the classroom.

“It’s like taking a hammer when you need a scalpel,” he said. “A lot of the use of technology in schools is not appropriate. But rather than sitting down and thinking about, ‘What are appropriate uses of technology in classrooms serving young children?,’ this approach would just obliterate all uses.”

Lawmakers in at least 16 states have proposed bills that would limit education technology in public schools, following a spate of state-approved cellphone bans for schools.

Ledford said he’s been influenced by writers like Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychologist who is a prominent supporter of school cellphone restrictions and has more recently criticized the proliferation of tech in education. At the same time, a mid-March visit to Mesick’s classrooms shows the ed-tech backlash can be somewhat divorced from the reality of a school day.

For some at Jewett, the school day doesn’t feel that different. A few teachers said they hadn’t used screens very much. For others, the routine has changed substantially — and for the better, they believe, with students more engaged and learning less “gamified.”

When asked about her school’s screen ban, a girl wearing a Lilo & Stitch shirt in an intervention class for struggling readers, just growls. But her intervention instructor, Julie Kearns, said the students are simply adjusting.

The student “definitely seems like she enjoys” reading a book more than wearing headphones and peering at a screen, Kearns said.

As Kearns watched, the girl bounced in her chair while reading a passage about soccer.

Why a school banished screens and bought books

In classrooms, a screen ban for students doesn’t mean all screens are gone.

One Friday in March, third-grade teacher Hanna Brechenser presented images of Indigenous communities on the Smartboard — the modern day version of a projector — to help foster a classroom conversation. Teachers also still have desktop computers.

This is Brechenser’s fifth year teaching and her second in Mesick. She said she had already tried to limit screen time in the classroom before the ban. Her class mostly used their Chromebooks a few times a week for a math fluency exercise and digital library access.

Both Kastl and Ledford believe teachers may not have been aware of just how much of a crutch screens were in some classes.

Mesick went 1:1 with students and devices around 2015, Ledford said, when schools were under pressure by tech evangelists and politicians to add more technology so students would be prepared for jobs in the digital world. That was the argument at the time, anyway.

“I had started in my walkthroughs just noting, what are the students doing?” Kastl said. “More often than not, I was coming back with a list of students on devices. So the perception of how your day actually looks versus what we were seeing on the data piece are probably disjointed.”

Mesick’s new policy has been helpful for Brechenser because she doesn’t have to police students so much on their devices.

Brechenser’s students have physical books from the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, “Twilight”, and “The Baby-sitter’s Club” stacked on their desks. That’s the other side of Mesick’s new screen ban: The district has set aside $30,000 for physical books to bulk up classroom libraries, along with beanbag chairs so students will have special spaces to read.

Students adjusted quickly, Brechenser said. “At first, they were kind of shocked, but we just have a lot more silent reading time.”

Still, it’s hard to miss signs of the amount of time students spend on screens outside of school: A “K-Pop Demon Hunters” water bottle. A Sonic the Hedgehog T-shirt. The image of a snake Brechenser put on the Smartboard prompted one student, Alaric, to say it reminded him of one in a Harry Potter movie he watched before school.

Alaric, 9, said he doesn’t really miss his Chromebook, though he’d been reading something on the online library he can no longer access thanks to the screen ban.

He gets plenty of screen time at home playing Xbox, he said. He hasn’t thought about cutting down on that.

“Because I love Fortnight,” he giggled.

In reading instruction, students get a digital detox

Where Mesick’s screen-free initiative feels most significant is in the 30-minute small-group sessions for Jewett’s struggling readers.

Mesick uses Read Naturally, an intervention program designed to build fluency. Before the screen ban, students would read a short passage aloud from a computer, then listen through bulky headphones as the software read the passage back to them. Students would then read the passage to themselves three times before reading it aloud again. Paraprofessionals would go from student to student to assist.

Now, Sharon Brown and other literacy aides sit with their students and work through printed reading passages together. Brown can more easily point out when students stop tracking words with their fingers. She can help sound out words. Though she closely helped students on the computers, she finds herself more thrilled to engage this way, to see progress up-close. This is why she is in education.

“It’s our passion to sit and watch these kids go from struggling readers to eventually testing out … and not having to come back and see us,” she said.

With one second-grader, she has an engaging conversation about the reading’s topic, mammals, before they begin. He asks if a shark is a mammal, and if it evolved from dinosaurs.

Brown can see improvements, particularly with some of her first graders. Students are reading more words per minute, based on data they track every session.

“They are so engaged,” she said. “It’s been amazing to us that we’re going, ‘Wow, this has actually been so fun.’”

The way students use technology is an important consideration when thinking about limiting or banning screens, said Dr. Joanna Parga-Belinkie, a pediatrician and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Educators and parents should focus on using technology in ways that are interactive and in group settings, instead of having students looking at screens on their own.

“When you are focusing on screens and technology and the use of them you might be not focusing on human relationships,” she said.

Samantha Daniels, the mother of three children in the district, said that last school year, some of the software the district used would offer students games if they read enough.

She’d watch her son, a first-grader, try to rush through the reading to get to the game. He struggled a lot with reading, becoming easily frustrated like many young readers.

“It would be about getting to that [game], versus us enjoying what we’re reading and what we’re learning,” she said.

But now, he’s starting to pick up books on his own, she said.

There are some difficult practical adjustments to a midyear change as big as this one. A lot of classroom resources are based online, or have some kind of an online component. Kastl asked teachers to stop using those components.

Ultimately, every hour of screen time represented “an hour that we’ve lost direct teacher instruction where they’re actually getting that responsive feedback from a human,” Kastl said.

“That’s when you move the needle.”

Will eliminating screens help young readers?

Ledford doesn’t think he’s taking a gamble by eliminating screens at the elementary school, even though students take state assessments on computers. He thinks it’s much easier to teach students technology skills than social skills.

In fact, he already has plans to scale back technology use by older students, too.

Ledford moved rapidly to ban screens, but he expects improvements in reading scores to happen more gradually. Still, he’s laser-focused on the connection between screens and literacy. To him, education should unlock the ability to read for students because it affects everything else the district is trying to do for kids.

“We’re failing in literacy,” Ledford said. “If we fail in literacy, how can we effectively teach science or social studies or any of the subjects?”

Getting rid of screens will not solve all of Mesick’s problems, like a leaky roof or clapped-out HVAC system. Kastl has also observed a deeper potential issue: a drop-off in parent involvement after schools closed during the pandemic.

In many cases, Kastl said, “Parents don’t know what actually happens inside their kids’ school building.”

But parents know about the screen ban, and they’re excited about it. They’ve said they’ve noticed their children take more interest in reading.

Kids are also socializing more during free periods, a bright spot for the principal’s son, Sam Kastl.

Sam, 11, used to spend indoor recess — a regular occurrence in northern Michigan’s severe winters — playing games on his Chromebook. He thought the screen ban was “going to be annoying.” Classmates who used to ask him if his mom would declare a snow day started asking him to convince her to bring back devices.

But those requests went away pretty quickly. Students now play board games together instead of games on their Chromebooks alone — just like how reading intervention students now study in a group instead of solo. Another student taught Sam how to draw. Everyone’s adjusted pretty well, from his vantage point.

On the day Chalkbeat visited their school, Sam and his fifth-grade classmates built a fort out of blankets during class time. Then they climbed inside to read with flashlights.

The post Can Screen Bans Help Solve the Reading Crisis? appeared first on Truthdig.

An international law enforcement operation has disrupted a massive migrant smuggling network that sold specialized “go kits”—complete with deadly tire inner tubes passed off as life jackets—to transport vulnerable people across the English Channel.

During synchronized raids across Germany and Belgium on Wednesday, police arrested four Syrian nationals identified as high-value organizers. According to Europol, the action brings the total number of arrests linked to the ring to 21, following the earlier apprehension of 17 lower-level operatives. Authorities also seized inflatable boats, weapons, gold bars and nearly 60,000 euros in cash.

The sweeping, yearlong investigation was coordinated by Europol and Eurojust, working alongside the Belgian Federal Police, the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA), and authorities in France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Prior to Wednesday’s raids, the coalition had already intercepted 16 vehicles transporting the kits toward the French coast between April and December 2025—enough equipment to illegally transport roughly 1,000 people.

Investigators revealed a deeply cynical and highly lucrative business model. The syndicate imported nautical equipment from Asia via Turkey, stockpiling it in Germany to assemble the custom smuggling packages. Valued at more than 10,000 euros ($11,529) on the black market, each kit contained a low-quality inflatable boat, an underpowered engine, pumps, petrol and boxes of tire inner tubes.

To maximize profits, smugglers operating on the French coast purchased the kits and provided the cheap inner tubes to migrants instead of proper safety vests.

The financial returns on this human misery are staggering. Individual migrants pay between 1,000 and 2,000 euros for ($1,153 and $2,305) the perilous journey. With an average of 66 people crammed into a single flimsy vessel, the criminal networks net an estimated 100,000 ($115,295) euros in profit per launch.

“The fact that they are being put into the open sea in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes demonstrates the complete disregard these criminal networks have for the safety of those they transport,” said Craig Turner, the NCA’s deputy director of investigations.

In 2025, more than 41,000 migrants successfully reached the U.K. aboard 670 boats. However, the crossings remain notoriously lethal, with at least 31 people dying during the journey last year, according to Europol and Eurojust.

The arrested organizers now face extradition to Belgium to be prosecuted for human smuggling. The operation falls under the mandate of Europol’s new European Centre Against Migrant Smuggling, which officially launched earlier this month to target the logistical and financial foundations of transnational trafficking networks.