Russia Cuts Off Natural Gas To 2 NATO Nations; EU Calls Move 'blackmail'

HT Daily News Wrap

Russia cuts off natural gas to 2 NATO nations; EU calls the move 'blackmail', Congress may still act on some of Prashant Kishor’s ideas, don’t need political front with sole agenda of removing BJP from power: KCR, and other top news in this bulletin.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said India and Russia became partners of choice out of necessity when the United States was not in a position to be New Delhi’s partner. But now that the US is working towards strengthening ties with India, there is a growing strategic convergence between the United States and India, Blinken said at a Congressional hearing by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations. His opinion on the India-US relationship was sought by Senator William Hagerty during the hearing. The India-US relationship is one of the most debated issues in the aftermath of New Delhi’s decision to not sever trade ties with Russia even after it attacked Ukraine. “This partnership has the potential to be one of the most important and foundational partnerships that we have going forward over the next decades. This has actually been a success story of multiple administrations. Going back to the end of the Clinton administration, through the Bush administration…,” Blinken said adding the US, India’s engagement through Quad. US President Joe Biden has spent a lot of time with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and so has Blinked with his Indian counterpart, he said. Russia’s state energy giant Gazprom has cut off natural gas to two North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries- Poland and Bulgaria, as the war in Ukraine entered the third month. Gazprom said on Wednesday that the decision was taken because both countries, which are part of the European Union (EU), refused to pay in Rubles (Russian currency). In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin had announced that his government will no longer accept payments in currencies other than the Ruble in retaliation for the sanctions imposed by Western countries against Moscow over its offensive on Ukraine. The Kremlin warned on Wednesday that natural gas will be cut off to other countries as well if they do not agree to the payment agreement, news agency AP reported. Gazprom’s move comes just hours after the Polish government announced a new set of sanctions against the company, Russian businesses and oligarchs. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told Parliament on Wednesday that he believed that Poland’s support for Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on Moscow were the real reasons behind the gas cut. On the other hand, Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov called Gazrpom’s suspension blackmail, adding his government will not succumb to such a racket. Ever since Elon Musk has bought Twitter, he has been tweeting out ideas that he would like to see on the social media platform and after he toyed with the idea of free speech on Twitter, Musk on Thursday wrote Twitter DMS should have end-to-end encryption like Signal so that the messages can not be hacked. Direct messages that one Twitter user can send to another are now not encrypted. While this was a technical idea he put forward, the other was more idealistic. Musk thinks for Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which “effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he explained. Musk engaged with Twitter users over the idea of political neutrality and said his goal is to “maximise area under the curve of total human happiness, which means the ~80% of people in the middle” and to do so, he has to upset both the rightwingers and the Left. “Attacks are coming thick and fast, primarily from the left, which is no surprise, however I should be clear that the right will probably be a little unhappy too,” he wrote. Prashant Kishor and the Congress may have ended their negotiations about the former joining the party, but according to at least two senior leaders , the party will look to implement several of the suggestions and insights that were made by the election strategist during a series of meetings and presentations to the top leadership of the party. The party is looking to focus on better analytics and data generation before the 2024 elections and may hire professionals who can help it do this ahead of the 2024 general elections, they added. Meanwhile, a person familiar with happenings on both sides said the door was still open for a deal, and that Kishor and the Congress may well revive their discussions after the Gujarat elections. There were other suggestions in the meetings as well that have widespread support within the party. ”In one of the slides that he showed, he told us that apparently, we gave tickets to 170-odd candidates that lost thrice from the same seat,’’ said one of the two persons cited above who attended one of Kishor’s presentations. ”We were astounded; I may know that about my state but this is not information that anyone in the party now has for the entire country.” Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Wednesday said India does not need a political front or realignments with the sole agenda of removing the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) from power at the Centre. He called for an alternative people’s agenda for the country’s progress and development. Rao’s comments came even as he has held a series of meetings as part of efforts to forge an alliance against the BJP for the 2024 national polls. He met his Jharkhand counterpart, Hemant Soren, in March as well as Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar separately in Mumbai on February 20. Thackeray’s Shiv Sena and the NCP made it clear they will not join an Opposition front without Congress, which is a part of their government in Maharashtra. The Congress is also a part of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-led government in Jharkhand. After his meetings in Mumbai, KCR vowed to fight against “the divisive, communal forces” and play a role in national politics to bring about a change in the country’s governance