Russia's energy giant Gazprom has informed Bulgarian state gas company Bulgargaz that it will halt gas supplies as of Wednesday, the energy ministry said on Tuesday.

Bulgaria, almost completely reliant on Russian gas imports, has taken steps to find alternative arrangements for the supply of natural gas and to deal with the situation, the energy ministry said in a statement.

Bulgaria would be the second country after Poland to have its gas cut off by Europe's main supplier since Moscow started, what it calls, a "special military operation" in Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded that countries he terms "unfriendly" agree to implement a scheme under which they would open accounts at Gazprombank and make payments for Russian gas imports in euros or dollars that would be converted into rubles.

He had threatened to cut gas supplies if the demands would not be fully met.

Bulgaria consumes about 3 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas per year and imports over 90% of it from Russia.

The ministry said Bulgaria has fully fulfilled its obligations under the current contract and has made all required payments, pointing out that the new payment scheme breached the arrangement.

"The new two-stage payment procedure proposed by Russia is not in line with the existing contract until the end of this year and poses significant risks to Bulgaria, including making payments without receiving any gas supplies from the Russian side," the ministry said. The ministry said, for the time being, no restrictions on gas consumption in the Balkan country were required./REUTERS

The British government has been asked to clarify its policy on the purchase of surveillance cameras from a Chinese tech company amid concerns about the oppression and human rights violations of the country’s Uyghur minority.

Fraser Sampson, the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, welcomed reports regarding Health Secretary Sajid Javid blocking further purchases from Hiksvision after a procurement review raised ethical concerns.

In a letter to the Communities Secretary Michael Gove and the Cabinet Office Minister Michael Ellis, he said if that was the reason for the decision there was no justification for not extending the ban to all government departments and local authorities.

Professor Sampson said that he had repeatedly challenged Hikvision – which is part-owned by the Chinese state – about its involvement in abuses against the Uyghurs, but after eight months was yet to receive any reply.

He noted the government had formally recognized that "widespread, systematic human rights violations” were taking place in China’s Xinjiang province, including the extra-judicial detention of more than a million Uyghur Muslims and other minorities.

He said there was "extensive and invasive surveillance” targeting minorities – as well as forced labor and the suppression of births – which relied heavily on the use of surveillance technology.

"There are serious unanswered questions about Hikvision’s involvement in appalling human rights abuses in China,” he said.

"The company seems unwilling or unable to provide assurances about the ethics of some of its operations and about security concerns associated with its equipment.

"If companies won’t provide the information needed to do proper due diligence in relation to ethics and security, then they clearly should not be allowed to bid for contracts within government, or anywhere else in the public sector for that matter.”

A report last year by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee recommended that equipment manufactured by companies like Hikvision should not be permitted to operate in Britain.

It said the firm’s cameras had been deployed throughout Xinjiang and that it provided the "primary camera technology” used in the internment camps.

It said independent reports suggested its cameras were in use in areas throughout Britain – including Kensington and Chelsea, Guildford, and Coventry – in locations such as leisure centers and even schools.

The committee expressed concern that they were collecting facial recognition data which could then be used by the Chinese government.

A government spokesperson said: "We take the security of our citizens, systems and establishments very seriously and have a range of measures in place to scrutinize the integrity of our arrangements.”/DPA

Russia is suspending natural gas deliveries to Poland beginning Wednesday morning after Poland refused its demand to pay for its supplies in Russian rubles, Polish officials said Tuesday.

Poland's state gas company, PGNiG, said it was notified by Russian gas giant Gazprom that deliveries through the Yamal-Europe pipeline would stop Wednesday.

Climate Minister Anna Moskwa stressed that Poland was prepared for such a situation after working for years to reduce its reliance on Russian energy sources. She said the country has been effectively independent when it comes to Russian gas for some time.

"There will be no shortage of gas in Polish homes," Moskwa tweeted.

The minister repeated that message at a news conference. "Appropriate diversification strategies that we have introduced allow us to feel on the safe side in this situation," she said.

Europe imports large amounts of Russian natural gas to heat homes, generate electricity and fuel industry. The imports have continued despite the war in Ukraine.

Around 60% of imports are paid in euros, and the rest in dollars. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that going forward, "unfriendly" foreign buyers would have to pay the state-owned Gazprom in rubles.

Putin's demand was apparently intended to help bolster the Russian currency amid the war in Ukraine. European leaders said they would not comply, arguing the rubles requirement violated the terms of contracts and their sanctions against Russia.

The Yamal pipeline carries natural gas from Russia to Poland and Germany, through Belarus. Poland has been receiving some 9 billion cubic meters (bcm) of Russian gas annually.

Poland's gas company PGNiG said that Russia's demand to be paid in rubles represented a breach of the Yamal contract.

Poland has been a strong supporter of neighboring Ukraine during the Russian invasion. It is a transit point for weapons the United States and other Western nations have provided Ukraine.

This week, the Polish government confirmed that it was sending tanks to Ukraine's army. On Tuesday, it announced a sanctions list targeting 50 Russian oligarchs and companies, including Gazprom.

Flow charts published on the website of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas showed drastic drops in gas flows at entry points in Kondratki, a town in eastern Poland, and Vysokaye, which is in Belarus.

The Russian news agency Tass cited Gazprom as saying that Poland must pay for its gas supplies under a new procedure.

Poland has been working since the 1990s to wean itself off of Russian energy and was already on track to end its reliance on Russian gas this year. It recently moved to stop imports of Russian coal.

The government in Warsaw has urged other European countries to lessen their dependence on Russian energy sources./AP

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is spending $44 billion to acquire Twitter with the stated aim of turning the social media platform into a haven for “free speech.”

There's just one problem: The social platform has been down this road before, and it didn't end well.

A decade ago, a Twitter executive dubbed the company “the free speech wing of the free speech party” to underscore its commitment to untrammeled freedom of expression. Subsequent events put that moniker to the test, as repressive regimes cracked down on Twitter users, particularly in the wake of the short-lived “Arab Spring” demonstrations.

In the United States, a visceral 2014 article by journalist Amanda Hess exposed the incessant, vile harassment many women faced just for posting on Twitter or other online forums.

Over the subsequent years, Twitter learned a few things about the consequences of running a largely unmoderated social platform – one of the most important being that companies generally don't want their ads running against violent threats, hate speech that bleeds into incitement, and misinformation that aims to tip elections or undermine public health.

“With Musk, his posturing of free speech – just leave everything up – that would be bad in and of itself,” said Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University. “If you stop moderating with automated systems and human reviews, a site like Twitter, in the space of a short period of time, you would have a cesspool.”

Google, Barrett pointed out, quickly learned this lesson the hard way when major companies like Toyota and Anheuser-Busch yanked their ads after they ran ahead of YouTube videos produced by extremists in 2015.

Once it was clear just how unhealthy the conversation had gotten, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey spent years trying to improve what he called the “health” of the conversation on the platform.

The company was an early adopter of the “report abuse” button after U.K. member of parliament Stella Creasy received a barrage of rape and death threats on the platform. The online abuse was the result of a seemingly positive tweet in support of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who successfully advocated for novelist Jane Austen to appear on a British banknote. Creasy’s online harasser was sent to prison for 18 weeks.

Twitter has continued to craft rules and invested in staff and technology that detect violent threats, harassment and misinformation that violates its policies. After evidence emerged that Russia used their platforms to try to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, social media companies also stepped up their efforts against political misinformation.

Big question

The big question now is how far Musk, who describes himself as a “free-speech absolutist,” wants to ratchet back these systems – and whether users and advertisers will stick around if he does.

Even now, Americans say they’re more likely to be harassed on social media than any other online forum, with women and people of color reporting a disproportionate amount of that abuse. Roughly 80% of users believe the companies are still doing only a “fair or poor” job of handling that harassment, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults last year.

Meanwhile, terms like “censorship” and “free speech” have turned into political rallying cries for conservatives, frustrated by seeing right-leaning commentators and high-profile Republican officials booted off Facebook and Twitter for violating their rules.

Musk appeared to criticize Twitter’s permanent ban of former U.S. President Donald Trump for messages that the tech company said helped incite the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year.

“A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech,” Musk tweeted days after Trump was banned from both Facebook and Twitter.

Trump’s allies, including his son Donald Trump Jr., have even pleaded for Musk to buy out the company.

“If Elon Musk can privately send people into space I’m sure he can design a social network that isn’t biased,” Trump Jr. said in the caption of a video posted to Instagram last April.

Kirsten Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame, said Twitter has consistently worked at being a “responsible” social media company through its moderation system, its hires in the area of machine learning ethics and in whom they allow to do research on the platform.

The fact that Musk wants to change that, she added, suggests that he's focused on “irresponsible social media.”

New social media apps targeted at conservatives, including Trump’s Truth Social, haven't come remotely close to matching the success of Facebook or Twitter. That's partly because Republican politicians, politicians and causes already draw large audiences on existing, and much better established, platforms.

It's also partly due to floods of inflammatory, false or violent posts. Last year, for example, right-wing social media site Parler was nearly wiped off the internet when it became evident that rioters had used the app to promote violent messages and organize the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol. Apple and Google barred its app from their online stores, while Amazon stopped providing web-hosting services for the site.

Musk himself regularly blocks social media users who have criticized him or his company and sometimes bullies reporters who have written critical articles about him or Tesla. He regularly tweets at reporters who write about his company, sometimes mischaracterizing their work as “false” or “misleading.”

His popular tweets typically send a swarm of his social media fans directly to the accounts of the reporters to harass them for hours or days.

“I only block people as a direct insult,” Musk tweeted in 2020, responding to a tweet from a reporter.

Evan Greer, a political activist with Fight for the Future, said Musk’s lack of experience in moderating an influential social media platform will be a problem if he successfully takes over the company.

“If we want to protect free speech online, then we can’t live in a world where the richest person on Earth can just purchase a platform that’s millions of people depend on and then change the rules to his liking,” Greer said./AP

ATurkish company, Fly Bvlos Technology, established via the Gebze Technical University (GTU) Technopark, has signed an export deal with a U.K.-based company for its unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

Named "Jackal," the UAV was developed by Bvlos Technology in cooperation with Maxwell Innovations.

With the agreement signed with British Flyby Technology, the U.K. will be the first country to acquire this particular drone from Turkey.

A total of five UAVs with a carrying capacity of 15 kilograms (33 pounds) and a range of 130 kilometers (80.8 miles) will be exported to the U.K. under the scope of the deal.

The signing ceremony was held at the GTU Congress and Culture Center and was attended by GTU Rector Muhammed Hasan Aslan, Fly Bvlos General Manager Murat Islıoğlu and Flyby Technology founder Jon Parker along with the related parties.

Jackal has a special design that can be used in cargo and logistics services in the aviation industry. Since it is a UAV capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL), Jackal can land and take off in any area without the need for a runway.

The UAV is also designed to fly in harsh weather conditions, in all kinds of scenarios, for tasks such as delivering humanitarian aid, monitoring and observation and sensitive data logistics.

Parker, stating that their company is a school that provides pilot training worldwide, said that the new generations should be trained with new-generation vehicles.

Stating that the UAV they purchased was the latest technology, Parker said: “We purchased five vehicles in our first order. This cost a total of $1.2 million. However, when we consider the future, this is a very small investment.”

“Turkey is really on the way to becoming a superpower in this regard,” he said.

GTU’s Aslan also commented that the GTU Dronepark is the "first" in Turkey and noted that the aviation cluster on drone technologies was brought together there and the Turkish Drone Consortium was established within this structure.

Noting that the Jackal UAV was produced as a result of this construction, Aslan said: “We are happy and proud. We expect other companies to join this consortium. We want this consortium to grow.”

By becoming a bridge between the university and Turkey’s industrialists, Aslan said, “particularly in this field,” they try to “ensure the production of much newer, advanced technological drones and products.”

“At the same time,” he went on to say, “we aim to increase the project capacity of our university and to make our university's name to be heard globally.”

Murat Islıoğlu, for his part, pointed out that it was not easy to achieve this success in four months and that it was important to sell the UAV to a European country.

"Jackal is designed for cargo and logistics transportation for the aviation industry. However, since the software and hardware belong entirely to our company, several missions can be developed if needed. We are at a point where we can develop and service this in any field that may be needed,” he said.

Islıoğlu said they aim to bring together the newly trained pilots with this aircraft.

He added that the U.K. chose Jackal for the transportation of smart or expensive medicine between hospitals and for cargo use./DS

Security forces on Tuesday detained 26 people in separate operations against the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ), the culprit of the July 15, 2016 coup attempt.

In one operation based in Istanbul, the Chief Prosecutor’s Office issued arrest warrants for 53 suspects, accused of taking part in the terrorist group’s secret network in the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). Some 23 among them were detained in operations in 16 provinces, while a manhunt is underway to capture the others. Wanted and captured suspects include three noncommissioned officers from the Land Forces Command, noncommissioned officers expelled from the Air Forces Command on suspicion of links to FETÖ and former military cadets.

Suspects were identified through a string of evidence against them, including their contacts with fellow FETÖ members through public payphones, a common method employed by the secretive group, and confessions of FETÖ members arrested in earlier operations. Payphones have proven to be the terrorist group's undoing since the coup attempt was quashed. Focusing their probe on payphones in busy places, investigators managed to identify a large number of "imams" who phoned the infiltrators to arrange secret meetings.

FETÖ is still active in Turkey years after the coup attempt, in which it employed its military infiltrators. But it faces more exposure nowadays, thanks to an increasing number of members collaborating with authorities to shed light on its secretive network. In the capital Ankara alone, 1,244 people out of the 4,724 detained for links to the terrorist group collaborated with investigators last year. Their confessions, in exchange for a lenient sentence in terrorism cases against them, helped authorities to uncover nearly 20,000 FETÖ suspects previously unknown to the authorities. FETÖ members captured in operations in the years before the coup attempt were less willing to collaborate with authorities, the figures show. But this changed after the coup attempt, where several members of the group had confessed that they have seen “the true face” of the group for the first time. FETÖ, even after two coup attempts in late 2013, managed to keep its followers it exploited under the guise of a charity movement with religious undertones. Collaborators, however, draw the wrath of prominent members of the group who have fled Turkey before and after the 2016 coup attempt, and who can be deciphered on social media. Emre Uslu, a fugitive FETÖ member who currently resides in the United States, where FETÖ leader Fetullah Gülen also lives, had recently uncovered the identity of a former FETÖ member who collaborated with authorities on social media. Uslu had sought to incite fellow FETÖ members against the collaborator, “now living in Cologne, Germany.”

In the northwestern province of Edirne, security forces captured three FETÖ suspects who were trying to illegally cross the border into Greece. The suspects were discovered in a military zone closed to civilian crossings in the Meriç district.

Greece has been the favorite gateway for suspects linked to the group, though most prefer land routes in Turkey's northwest. The European country attracted more FETÖ fugitives after it refused to extradite soldiers involved in the 2016 coup attempt to Turkey after they hijacked a military helicopter and took shelter in Greece.

Over 8,000 FETÖ members have crossed into Greece in the past three years, according to authorities. Ankara has criticized the country for ignoring its calls for international cooperation against the terrorist group./DS