Hungarian authorities evacuated on Friday around 8,000 people after the discovery of a 500-kilo (1,100-pound) unexploded bomb dating from World War II in Budapest.

The device was discovered close to a railway bridge over the river Danube in the north of the city on Wednesday, and identified on Thursday as a U.S.-made bomb, the Defense Ministry said.

U.S. poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 93, has turned down a literary award partly funded by the Hungarian government due to concerns about human rights in the central European country, his publisher said Friday.

The Janus Pannonius International Poetry Prize was set up in 2012 by the Hungarian PEN Club, a branch of the worldwide PEN writers' associations.

Hungary's government announced Friday a set of austerity measures to keep its general government deficit below 3.0 percent of gross domestic product, as it recognized for the first time that the country would be in recession this year.

"The government has decided to take the necessary measures to keep the budget deficit figure under 3.0 percent of GDP in 2012, 2013, and 2014," Economy Minister Gyorgy Matolcsy told a press conference.

Maronite Patriarch Beshsara al-Rahi traveled to Hungary on Sunday morning on an official visit where he is set to meet a number of senior officials.

Speaking at the airport ahead of his flight, the patriarch stated: “We need to reach a parliamentary electoral law that appeases all sides.”

Vandals have desecrated 57 tombs containing the remains of around 250 people at a Jewish cemetery in Hungary, Jewish groups said Monday.

"This is clearly motivated by racism," Laszlo Rona, who heads the association of Jewish communities in Kaposvar in southwest Hungary where the incident took place over the weekend, told the MTI national news agency.

Hungarian Nazi war crimes suspect Laszlo Csatary, 97, number one on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's wanted list, has been taken into custody and charged, Budapest prosecutors said Tuesday.

Csatary, accused by the Wiesenthal Center of having helped organize the deportation of some 15,700 Jews to the Auschwitz death camp during World War II, "has been taken into custody," the public prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Hungary's media council has fined a radio station 250,000 forints (875 euros, $1,100) for poking fun at endangered species, saying it set a bad example to children, it emerged Thursday.

Presenters on Neo FM's satirical show "Boomerang" had quipped in February that the extinction of the panda "wouldn't bother anyone since all they do is sit around and eat," while Galapagos tortoises "have lived long enough anyway."

The renaming of a small town square after Hungary's wartime leader and Adolf Hitler ally is stirring emotions, with critics denouncing it as evidence of the country's drift to the far right.

Fifty-five years after his death, Miklos Horthy will once again have a park in his name when part of leafy Freedom Square in Gyomro, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) east of Budapest, is renamed on Friday.

Hungary said two of its nationals were kidnapped in Syria on Saturday by unknown gunmen, adding that Budapest may dispatch agents to the region to collect further information.

"The Foreign Ministry and TEK (Hungary's Anti-Terrorism Center) confirmed that two men working in Syria were kidnapped on Saturday at dawn by unknown gunmen," said Peter Szijjarto, a spokesman for Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in a statement to MTI, the Hungarian state news agency.

Hungarian diabetics who fail to stick to their diet will be deprived of more modern treatments from July, under a government decree published Monday aimed at cutting health spending.

Diabetics undergo a blood test on average every three months and those who score high levels of glycaemia more than twice a year could be turned away from treatments with analog insulin -- more efficient but also more expensive -- and left with the less efficient human insulin, under the new rules.