By JUSTIN SPIKE and CHRIS MEGERIAN, Associated Press

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visits President Donald Trump in the White House on Friday, his priority will be convincing the U.S. administration to turn a blind eye to Hungary’s dogged commitment to buying Russian oil, a potential test of how deep the affinity goes between the two friendly leaders.

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Orbán, once an outspoken opponent of Russia’s dominance of Hungary during the Cold War, has in the last decade made a dramatic shift toward Moscow that has baffled his opponents and many earlier allies.

Widely considered Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most reliable advocate in the European Union, Orbán has maintained warm relations with the Kremlin despite its war against Ukraine. He has also curried favor with Trump and his MAGA movement, which views Hungary as a shining example of conservative nationalism despite the erosion of its democratic institutions.

But now, as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches its fourth anniversary, Orbán is under increasing pressure from both Brussels and Washington to end Hungary’s reliance on Russian oil, a resource seen as critical for funding Moscow’s war.

Last month, the Trump administration levied sanctions on Russian state-affiliated energy giants Lukoil and Rosneft that could expose their foreign buyers — like India, China and Hungary — to secondary sanctions.

Yet the Hungarian leader hopes his personal relationship with Trump will score him points at Friday’s meeting, the first between the two leaders since Trump retook office in January. In comments to state radio last week, Orbán made clear he would try to “make the Americans understand” that Hungary needs a carve out for its continued purchases of Russian energy.

Orbán says no alternatives to Russian oil

At the heart of Orbán’s appeals for an exemption is his claim that Hungary, landlocked in the heart of Central Europe, has no viable alternatives to Russian crude, and that replacing those supplies would trigger an economic collapse. Critics dispute that claim.

Yet Trump has indicated Orbán’s arguments may have stuck a chord. In October, he called Orbán a “very great leader,” and said Hungary was “sort of stuck” when it came to Russian oil purchases. Trump said Hungary has “one pipeline” — the Druzhba, which delivers Russian crude through Ukraine and into Central Europe.

However, another pipeline, the Adria, which originates at Croatia’s Adriatic coast, also delivers non-Russian crude to Hungary’s main refinery — a route Orbán’s critics and the Croatian oil transport company argue could handle Hungary’s energy needs.

Daniel Fried, an Atlantic Council fellow who is a former U.S. ambassador to Poland, dismissed Orbán’s complaints that Hungary doesn’t have other options for energy.

“Don’t insult everyone’s intelligence,” Fried said, noting that Poland, also in Central Europe, spent years preparing for alternatives. “Hungary has done none of this. They’ve whined and complained.”

While most EU member states sharply reduced or halted imports of Russian fossil fuels after Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Hungary and neighboring Slovakia have maintained their pipeline deliveries. Hungary has even increased the share of Russian oil in its energy mix from 61% before the war to around 86%, according to a report by independent researchers.

Peter Rough, a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, said that though Hungary has enjoyed a competitive advantage over other European states by procuring Russian supplies, “Clearly, President Trump’s decision to wield the sanctions hammer against Russian oil … has gotten Hungary’s attention.”

“Budapest has resisted diversifying its energy mix for years, despite persistent urging,” Rough said. “The alarm bells must now be ringing in Budapest.”

Budapest summit?

In October, Trump announced he would meet again with Putin for negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine, and that Hungary’s capital would provide the venue. The decision was seen as a win for Orbán, and as an attempt by Trump to provide a political boost for his ally who in April is set to face the most challenging election of his last 15 years in power.

Orbán praised the decision to hold the meeting in Budapest, and suggested the choice could be seen as a “political achievement.”

But the meeting was soon scuttled, with Trump saying he didn’t want a “wasted meeting” with Putin, who showed no signs of backing off his maximalist demands on the war.

Yet officials in Budapest are still hopeful a Trump-Putin meeting could materialize. On Wednesday, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in a press briefing that high on the agenda for Friday’s meeting “will be the possibility of making peace in Ukraine.”

“If U.S.-Russian preparatory work is successful, Hungary is ready to host a peace summit,” he said.

Hungary, a NATO member, has refused to supply neighboring Ukraine with weapons or allow their transfer across its borders. Orbán has threatened to veto certain EU sanctions against Moscow, and held up the bloc’s adoption of major funding packages to Kyiv.

Orbán has often taken an adversarial stance toward Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and consistently cast as warmongers his European partners that favor assisting Kyiv in its defense. Yet Orbán’s many critics in the EU view Hungary’s position as favoring the aggressor in the war and splintering European unity in the face of Russian threats.

With few friends in Europe, the Hungarian leader is banking on favor from Trump. Fried, the Atlantic Council fellow, said that after Orbán’s heavy investment in Trump’s MAGA ecosystem, with his meeting on Friday “he’s going to find out what it’s worth.”

Megerian reported from Washington.

By LISA MASCARO, Associated Press Congressional Correspondent

WASHINGTON (AP) — Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi will not seek reelection to the U.S. House, bringing to a close her storied career as not only the first woman in the speaker’s office but arguably the most powerful in American politics.

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Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco for nearly 40 years, announced her decision Thursday.

“I will not be seeking reelection to Congress,” Pelosi said in a video address to voters.

Pelosi, appearing upbeat and forward-looking as images of her decades of accomplishments filled the frames, said she would finish out her final year in office. And she left those who sent her to Congress with a call to action to carry on the legacy of agenda-setting both in the U.S. and around the world.

“My message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power,” she said. “We have made history. We have made progress. We have always led the way.”

Pelosi said, “And now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”

The decision, while not fully unexpected, ricocheted across Washington, and California, as a seasoned generation of political leaders is stepping aside ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Some are leaving reluctantly, others with resolve, but many are facing challenges from newcomers eager to lead the Democratic Party and confront President Donald Trump.

Pelosi remains a political powerhouse and played a pivotal role with California’s redistricting effort, Prop 50, and the party’s comeback in this month’s election. She maintains a robust schedule of public events and party fundraising, and her announced departure touches off a succession battle back home and leaves open questions about who will fill her behind-the-scenes leadership role at the Capitol.

An architect of the Affordable Care Act and a leader on the international stage, Pelosi, who’s 85, came to politics later in life, a mother of five mostly grown children. She has long fended off calls for her to step aside by turning questions about her intentions into spirited rebuttals, asking if the same was being posed of her male colleagues on Capitol Hill.

In her video address, she noted that her first campaign slogan was “a voice that will be heard.”

FILE – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., arrives to speak about the House coronavirus bill on Capitol Hill in Washington, March, 13, 2020. (AP Photo/Scott Applewhite, File)

And with that backing, she became a speaker “whose voice would certainly be heard,” she said.

But after Pelosi quietly helped orchestrate Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, she has decided to pass the torch, too.

Last year, she experienced a fall resulting in a hip fracture during a whirlwind congressional visit to allies in Europe, but even still it showcased her grit: It was revealed she was rushed to a military hospital for surgery — after the group photo, in which she’s seen smiling, poised on her trademark stiletto heels.

Pelosi’s decision also comes as her husband of more than six decades, Paul Pelosi, was gravely injured three years ago when an intruder demanding to know “Where is Nancy?” broke into the couple’s home and beat him over the head with a hammer. His recovery from the attack, days before the 2022 midterm elections, is ongoing.

Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, Pelosi faced a potential primary challenge in California. Left-wing newcomer Saikat Chakrabarti, who helped devise progressive superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political rise in New York, has mounted a campaign, and state Sen. Scott Wiener is also reported to be considering a run.

While Pelosi remains an unmatched force for the Democratic Party, having fundraised more than $1 billion over her career, her next steps are uncertain. First elected in 1987 after having worked in California state party politics, she has spent some four decades in public office.

Madam speaker takes the gavel

Pelosi’s legacy as House speaker comes not only because she was the first woman to have the job but also because of what she did with the gavel, seizing the enormous powers that come with the suite of offices overlooking the National Mall.

FILE – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California holds the gavel at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 3, 2019. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

During her first tenure, from 2007 to 2011, she steered the House in passing landmark legislation into law — the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms in the aftermath of the Great Recession and a repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy against LGBTQ service members.

With President Barack Obama in the White House and Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada leading the Senate, the 2009-10 session of Congress ended among the most productive since the Johnson era.

But a conservative Republican “tea party” revolt bounced Democrats from power, ushering in a new style of Republicans, who would pave the way for Trump to seize the White House in 2016.

Determined to win back control, Pelosi helped recruit and propel dozens of women to office in the 2018 midterm elections as Democrats running as the resistance to Trump’s first term.

On the campaign trail that year, Pelosi told The Associated Press that if House Democrats won, she would show the “power of the gavel.”

Pelosi returns to the speaker’s office as a check on Trump

Pelosi became the first speaker to regain the office in some 50 years, and her second term, from 2019 to 2023, became potentially more consequential than the first, particularly as the Democratic Party’s antidote to Trump.

FILE – President Donald Trump turns to House speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., as he delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, as Vice President Mike Pence watches, Feb. 5, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik File)

Trump was impeached by the House — twice — first in 2019 for withholding U.S. aid to Ukraine as it faced a hostile Russia at its border and then in 2021 days after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Senate acquitted him in both cases.

Pelosi stood up the Jan. 6 special committee to probe Trump’s role in sending his mob of supporters to the Capitol, when most Republicans refused to investigate, producing the 1,000-page report that became the first full accounting of what happened as the defeated president tried to stay in office.

After Democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, Pelosi announced she would not seek another term as party leader.

Rather than retire, she charted a new course for leaders, taking on the emerita title that would become used by others, including Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California during his brief tenure after he was ousted by his colleagues from the speaker’s office in 2023.

By BRUCE SCHREINER, HALLIE GOLDEN and DYLAN LOVAN, Associated Press

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — The grim task of finding victims from the firestorm that followed the crash of a UPS cargo plane in Louisville, Kentucky, entered a third day Thursday as investigators gather information to determine why the aircraft caught fire and lost an engine on takeoff.

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The inferno consumed the enormous plane and spread to nearby businesses, killing at least 12 people, including a child, and leaving little hope of finding survivors in the charred area of the crash at UPS Worldport, the company’s global aviation hub.

The plane with three people aboard had been cleared for takeoff Tuesday when a large fire developed in the left wing, said Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation. But determining why it caught fire and the engine fell off could take investigators more than a year.

The plane gained enough altitude to clear the fence at the end of the runway before crashing just outside Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, Inman said. The cockpit voice recorder and data recorder have since been recovered, and the engine was discovered on the airfield, he said.

The crash and explosion had a devastating ripple effect, striking and causing smaller blasts at Kentucky Petroleum Recycling and hitting an auto salvage yard. The child who was killed was with a parent at the salvage yard, according to Gov. Andy Beshear.

Some people who heard the boom, saw the smoke and smelled burning fuel were still stunned a day later.

Stooges Bar and Grill bartender Kyla Kenady said lights suddenly flickered as she took a beer to a customer on the patio.

“I saw a plane in the sky coming down over top of our volleyball courts in flames,” she said. “In that moment, I panicked. I turned around, ran through the bar screaming, telling everyone that a plane was crashing.”

The governor predicted that that death toll would rise, saying authorities were looking for a “handful of other people” but “we do not expect to find anyone else alive.”

University of Louisville Hospital said two people were in critical condition in the burn unit. Eighteen people were treated and discharged at that hospital or other health care centers.

The airport is 7 miles from downtown Louisville, close to the Indiana state line, residential areas, a water park and museums. The airport resumed operations on Wednesday, with at least one runway open.

The status of the three UPS crew members aboard the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, made in 1991, was still unknown, according to Beshear. It was not clear if they were being counted among the dead.

UPS said it was “terribly saddened.”

The Louisville package handling facility is the company’s largest. The hub employs more than 20,000 people in the region, handles 300 flights daily and sorts more than 400,000 packages an hour.

Jeff Guzzetti, a former federal crash investigator, said a number of things could have caused the fire as the UPS plane was rolling down the runway.

“It could have been the engine partially coming off and ripping out fuel lines. Or it could have been a fuel leak igniting and then burning the engine off,” Guzzetti said.

The crash bears a lot of similarities to one in 1979 when the left engine fell off an American Airlines jet as it was departing Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, killing 273 people, he said.

Guzzetti said that jet and the UPS plane were equipped with the same General Electric engines and both planes underwent heavy maintenance in the month before they crashed. The NTSB blamed the Chicago crash on improper maintenance. The 1979 crash involved a DC-10, but the MD-11 UPS plane is based on the DC-10.

Flight records show the UPS plane was on the ground in San Antonio from Sept. 3 to Oct. 18, but it was unclear what maintenance was performed and if it had any impact on the crash.

Golden reported from Seattle. Associated Press reporters Ed White in Detroit; Rebecca Reynolds in Louisville, Kentucky; Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Jonathan Mattise and Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee; and Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed.

YAZOO CITY, Miss. (AP) — An explosion at a hydrogen and nitrogen product manufacturer in Mississippi on Wednesday caused an ammonia leak and forced nearby residents to evacuate, officials said.

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Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in a post on the social platform X that emergency officials from across the state were responding to the anhydrous ammonia leak at CF Industries’ plant north of Yazoo City.

No deaths or injuries have been reported, he said.

“Thank you to all of Mississippi’s first responders and emergency managers for quickly responding to the leak,” he said.

Photos and video posted online show a large plume of yellowish smoke rising above the facility, which includes an ammonia plant and four nitric acid plants, among other things.

The facility is able to store about 48,000 tons of ammonia, although the exact amount there when the explosion took place was not immediately clear.

CF Industries said in a statement that there are no injuries, and “all employees and contractors on site at the time of the incident have been safely accounted for.”

Andre Robinson, who lives about a half-mile from the facility, said he and his son were getting ready to make gumbo when he heard what sounded like a sonic boom or a tree crashing on his house.

“There was a boom and then the house shook,” he said.

When he looked outside, Robinson said he saw smoke rising from the facility and started to smell a strong scent of ammonia.

“We’re used to the ammonia smell, but not that bad,” he said, adding that his family has since evacuated to Jackson.

Part of U.S. Route 49E was temporarily closed, according to the Mississippi Department of Transportation.

The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said in a post on X that “air monitoring operations are underway and will continue as long as necessary to ensure public safety.”

Anhydrous ammonia is used as a fertilizer to help provide nitrogen for corn and wheat plants, according to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. If a person touches it when it is in gas or liquid form, they could be burned.

Yazoo City is a small community about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Jackson.