Türkiye will soon begin drilling a challenging oil-targeted ⁠well ⁠in the western Black Sea, Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar ⁠said Wednesday, the latest in the country’s efforts to expand domestic hydrocarbon reserves.

“We will start an oil-targeted drilling operation in the western Black Sea soon. It will ⁠be a ⁠difficult drilling operation and will take some time,” Bayraktar told private broadcaster CNBC-e.

Türkiye has expanded its offshore exploration capabilities in recent years, increasing its deep-water drilling fleet to six vessels. One of the vessels is currently operating in Somalia, while others are conducting exploration and production-development activities in the Black Sea.

Ankara has previously said ⁠it plans six exploration wells across the western, central and eastern Black Sea in ⁠2026 as it seeks new oil ⁠and natural gas discoveries.

Black Sea output to double

Bayraktar said Türkiye plans to double the production capacity from its vast Black Sea reserve by the end of this year.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the discovery of 320 billion cubic meters of gas in August 2020. The estimate was later revised upward to 405 billion cubic meters. Further discoveries in 2021, 2022 and 2025 brought the total estimated Black Sea gas reserves to 785 billion cubic meters.

Gas reached the shore in April 2023, and locally produced gas was fed into the national transmission network in late August the same year, after processing at a facility at a port in northern Zonguldak province.

As of May this year, Sakarya accounted for 92% of Türkiye’s total domestic gas production. Current production stands at around 9.5 million cubic meters per day, enough to meet the natural gas needs of approximately 4 million households.

This year’s output increase will lift that figure to 8 million households, Bayraktar said.

Production is then targeted to quadruple by 2028. At that point, Türkiye expects to produce around 16 billion to 17 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from its Black Sea fields, equivalent to roughly 80% of the gas it currently imports from Russia.

The Black Sea gas project is a central part of Türkiye’s strategy to reduce its dependence on imported energy while diversifying supply sources and infrastructure.

Türkiye has also expanded LNG regasification capacity and aims to raise its daily gasification capacity to 200 million cubic meters. It has increased pipeline connections with neighboring countries and is seeking to develop additional routes for gas imports and exports.

Transit hub

Bayraktar said Türkiye had been pursuing a comprehensive strategy for gas exploration since 2016 under its National Energy and Mining Policy, with the Black Sea discoveries emerging as one of the main results.

The government is also seeking to diversify energy supply routes and strengthen Türkiye’s role as an energy transit hub. It is discussing a potential pipeline route that could carry Qatari gas through Türkiye to European markets.

Bayraktar said Türkiye was also looking to increase oil flows through its territory from the Gulf region. If Iraq and Kuwait were able to route part of their production away from the Strait of Hormuz, he said Türkiye could potentially handle as much as 2.5 million barrels per day for delivery to Europe.

COP31, energy transition

Bayraktar’s comments came as Türkiye prepares to host this year’s U.N.-backed climate summit in southern Antalya in November.

He said Türkiye’s main message at the COP31 would be to move from commitments to concrete action on climate change, while acknowledging the challenge posed by global energy security pressures.

The minister pointed to oil prices that surpassed $100 a barrel Wednesday amid escalation in attacks between Iran and the United States. That, along with an increase in global coal use, makes it more difficult to prioritize the climate agenda, said Bayraktar.

At the same time, Bayraktar said Türkiye needed to pursue energy security and the transition to cleaner energy simultaneously.

He said Türkiye was targeting a 35% share of electrification by 2035 and was preparing for a sharp increase in electricity demand driven by urbanization, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and cooling needs.

Türkiye will need significant investment in its electricity transmission network through 2035, he added, as it seeks to connect areas with abundant generation to regions where demand is rising.

Works on 2nd, 3rd nuclear plants moving quickly

Bayraktar also said ⁠⁠that work with Canada on Türkiye’s planned ⁠second and third nuclear power plants was moving quickly, adding that he hoped for ⁠a clearer ⁠picture on the matter in the coming months.

Türkiye is months away from the planned launch of the initial reactor of its first nuclear power plant, Akkuyu. The four-reactor plant is being built by Russia’s state-owned nuclear company Rosatom in the southern Mersin province.

Akkuyu’s four reactors will have a combined installed capacity of 4,800 megawatts (MW). Once all units are operational, it is expected to supply about 10% of Türkiye’s electricity demand.

Ankara plans to construct two additional plants, one in Sinop on the Black Sea coast and in the Thrace region.

Bayraktar said ⁠Ankara was still in talks with China, Russia and South Korea ⁠on the nuclear power plant ⁠projects in northwestern Türkiye.

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Türkiye’s national flag carrier served 5.4% more passengers in the first eight months of 2026 compared to a year ago, according to data released on Tuesday.

The number of passengers Turkish Airlines (THY) carried in the January-August period reached 64 million, the company said in a filing with the Public Disclosure Platform (KAP).

The carrier served 10 million passengers in August, an increase of 5.6% from the same month last year, the data showed.

The number of international passengers increased 6.1% year-over-year in the first eight months to 41.8 million, while domestic passenger traffic rose 4.3% to 22.2 million.

Last month, international passenger numbers rose 5% to 6.4 million, while domestic passenger traffic increased 6.8% to 3.6 million.

THY’s passenger load factor climbed to 84.7% in the January-August period from 82.7% a year earlier. The factor reached 88% in August, up from 86.6% a year earlier.

The international load factor stood at 84.5%, while the domestic load factor was 86.5%. The international load factor last month was 87.6%, while the domestic load factor stood at 91.3%.

The number of destinations served by Turkish Airlines increased to 358 from 353, while its fleet expanded by 13% to 566 aircraft from 501.

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An artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic has decided to leave the industry, accusing both U.S. companies of recklessness and of “playing with our lives” in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.

Jacob Coxon spent the past three years pretraining AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its fiercest rival Anthropic. Pretraining is the stage where AI models absorb vast quantities of data.

“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote Tuesday on the social media platform X.

Superintelligence is the theoretical point when AI’s capabilities exceed human intelligence.

The 27-year-old Briton’s warnings add to signs of mounting safety concerns within top AI companies.

Coxon cautioned that the power of the AI technology should not be underestimated. He said these would soon be able to “hack everything” and have the ability to “acquire real power and resources.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he said. “This is not a marketing stunt.”

Over 10% chance of killing humanity

He separately told The Wall Street Journal that under the “most aggressive scenarios” things could already spiral out of control by the end of next year. A central danger is that AI can develop on its own, making it harder to control, he said.

Anthropic safety executive Evan Hubinger, who is partly responsible for ensuring AI remains aligned with human interests, backed up Coxon.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” he said, adding that he personally thought the risk of AI killing humanity over the coming decade was more than 10%.

Hubinger said Anthropic is “trying its best,” but does not yet have a plan to ensure an AI system that surpasses human capabilities would obey its creators. He said there was a “low” risk of that happening with current models.

On Sunday, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, called for “extreme caution.” He wrote in a blog post that he was concerned nobody was prepared for a rapid advance in AI capabilities.

“International coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world,” Pachocki said.

AI models are not regulated by federal law in the United States.

In September, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic Rep. Greg Casar introduced a bill seeking to suspend AI development until a federal regulator is created.

Pachocki said history has reached a moment in which machine intelligence was beginning to surpass that of humans.

The OpenAI executive described in greater detail why modern AI systems were harder to control. He said AI has been allowed to “grow” rather than being designed.

AI systems were a product of complex processes. “Our large-scale training runs are experiments and we are sometimes surprised by their results.”

And the more machines’ capabilities surpassed human ones, the more difficult it would be to understand what they were capable of.

At the same time, Pachocki sees an argument for continuing rapid research, as developing AI intelligence could defend against the dangers posed by other AI.

It would be needed, among other things, to protect infrastructure and develop entirely new defense mechanisms.

Wake-up call

Coxon’s resignation comes as Anthropic prepares for its market debut, following a summer marked by unauthorized hacks carried out by so-called AI agents, which independently broke into other companies’ systems in test runs in a wake-up call for the industry.

AI leaders say so-called “recursive self-improvement,” a stage where AI systems could essentially design and train the next generation of AI with little human involvement, is drawing near.

Coxon considers Anthropic’s efforts genuine but said he believes no company can responsibly develop an AI that surpasses humans without government intervention or a coordinated slowdown.

“At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first – they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk,” he said.

In February, Anthropic removed a pledge from its safety charter to halt the development of its models if it failed to control their risks.

It argued that if it unilaterally paused its work, its less cautious rivals would dominate the industry, making it less safe overall.

At the end of July, more than 1,000 tech industry employees, including Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, called on Washington to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of the most advanced AI systems.

The AI agents are programs that are intended to carry out tasks independently for users.

In a test at OpenAI, one model found a way to get from an ostensibly isolated test environment onto the open internet and then hacked the computer system of the AI platform Hugging Face.

It did this while trying to find a solution to a task assigned, but the incident showed just how far AI systems can go off on their own unexpectedly without their developers noticing.

It also recently emerged that OpenAI’s AI agents had already misused a German-language wiki page on a large scale in the spring to coordinate among themselves. The EU said it was looking into the incident.

OpenAI halted training of its latest models for two weeks in August before resuming it under tighter controls.

A current protective mechanism used by AI developers is requiring models with AI to explain their actions in human language.

In test runs, the AI agents used the communication option to exchange answers to questions they were asked with each other via notes on the wiki page.

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China’s consumer and producer prices accelerated slightly in August but remained subdued, official data showed on Wednesday, as the world’s second-largest economy grapples with weak domestic demand.

The consumer price index (CPI), a key measure of inflation, came in at 0.8% in August, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The figure was up from 0.5% in July and in line with a forecast from a Bloomberg survey of economists.

Beijing has battled a persistent slump in domestic spending since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CPI has remained below the current target of 2% for more than three years, slipping into negative territory several times during that period.

The sluggish activity has presented challenges to leaders aiming to maintain growth momentum, even as exports and various high-tech sectors perform strongly.

Prices paid at the factory gate also picked up in August, the NBS figures showed, expanding 3.8% year-over-year.

That was faster than July’s 3.5% and topped the 3.6% forecast in the Bloomberg survey.

The readings come a day after data showed China’s imports and exports surged last month.

Overseas shipments have been boosted this year by heightened global demand for technology products amid the artificial intelligence boom.

Beijing is targeting economic growth of 4.5% to 5% this year, a pace that would outstrip most developed economies but rank among the lowest in decades for China.

The economy expanded just 4.3% in the second quarter, missing forecasts and marking its weakest pace in more than three years.

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Flights from British airports resumed early Wednesday following a major air traffic control failure, but operators warned a full return to normal operations would take time as scrutiny of the reliability of Britain’s aviation systems intensified.

The hours-long outage Tuesday, which resulted ​in the cancelation of more than 1,000 flights and left hundreds of thousands ​of ⁠passengers stranded, has ramped up pressure on air traffic control provider NATS and its boss Martin Rolfe.

Transport Minister Heidi Alexander will later Wednesday hear from Rolfe after she summoned him to explain what happened, amid concerns that the infrastructure and technology are not up to scratch.

The shutdown comes three years after the last system meltdown in August 2023, when canceled flights on one of the busiest travel days of the year cost airlines 100 million pounds ($135 million).

A radar-related technical issue also disrupted flights in July 2025, affecting major airports including Britain’s largest, Heathrow.

“I am seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job,” Alexander said on the social media platform X.

NATS boss under pressure

Ryanair, ⁠Europe’s biggest airline, has been calling for Rolfe to resign since 2023, while Wizz Air’s U.K. managing director also said he should consider his position.

Ryanair said Britain’s airspace underperformed other countries.

“We’ve had minor issues in other places, but nothing at the scale that we see, and consistently see, in the U.K.,” Ryanair’s chief operating officer Neal McMahon told the BBC.

Rolfe, who apologised to those affected by the issue, denied that Britain was worse than other countries and said the country’s air traffic service was well regarded from a safety and resilience perspective.

“We have, at ⁠this point, ruled out cyber(attacks),” Rolfe told the BBC when asked about the cause, adding he believed it would be different to previous outages.

As operations restarted, Heathrow said passengers should check with their airline before heading to the airport ​as schedules would have changed due to the problems on Tuesday.

“We are expecting knock-on impacts as aircraft ​and crew reposition,” the U.K.’s busiest hub said in a statement.

“We… are working closely with our local NATS team and airline partners to recover normal operations as quickly as possible.”

London ⁠Gatwick, Britain’s ‌second busiest ‌airport, and the city’s Luton and Stansted also said they were operating ⁠but told passengers to check with their airline first.

Ryanair said ‌around 150,000 of its passengers had been affected Tuesday and it canceled more than 200 flights, while British Airways ​said it had canceled or diverted ⁠100 flights with tens of thousands impacted.

NATS is a public-private partnership which ⁠is partially owned by airlines including British Airways and easyJet, pension funds and the government.

Criticizing the 175 million pounds ⁠of dividends NATS paid ​to its owners last year, Ryanair’s McMahon said NATS should reinvest its profits into technology and boost its staff numbers.

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Singapore’s political leaders are getting a raise for the first time in 15 years, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said Tuesday, adding more than 60% to what are already the world’s highest ministerial salaries.

Singapore has justified high-end salaries for its political leaders, arguing they attract talent and deter graft, but the issue is thorny in the city-state, where the median wage worker made 5,775 ​Singapore dollars ($4,558) a month in 2025.

Wong told Parliament that under a revised salary framework, the benchmark annual pay for a minister at the lowest grade will rise to 1.8 million Singapore dollars ($1.42 million), from 1.1 million Singapore dollars ($868,330).

The prime minister’s benchmark salary will jump to 3.6 million Singapore dollars ($2.8 million) from 2.2 million Singapore dollars ($1.7 million), he said.

The government ministers who will receive raises are elected lawmakers who lead ministries and help make national policies, while allowances for other lawmakers will also increase.

But Wong said ministers and other political officeholders will not immediately move to the new salary benchmark. Instead, they will get a one-time adjustment up to 9% beginning Oct. 15, with the increase depending on performance and responsibilities.

Wong expects most ministers at the lowest grade to earn about 1.35 million Singapore dollars ($1.06 million) by the end of the current term. Salaries thereafter will vary by performance and responsibilities, rather than automatically reaching the benchmark of 1.8 million Singapore dollars, he said.

He didn’t say how much his salary would be, although a 9% adjustment would raise it to 2.4 million Singapore dollars ($1.89 million).

Political pay is a sensitive issue in Singapore as ministers earn far more than most citizens and the prime minister’s salary is among the highest for national leaders worldwide.

In comparison, the British prime minister makes $230,000 while U.S. President Donald Trump earns $400,000, according to data from non-profit PoliticalSalaries.com, which ranks the Singapore prime minister as the highest-paid world leader.

The data set shows the Hong Kong chief executive is the second-highest earner globally with $719,000 annually, followed by the Swiss president at $606,000.

“The sums involved are more than what most citizens earn, so I understand why Singaporeans scrutinize them closely and why many feel strongly about the matter,” Wong said, adding that he would donate his increment to charity for the next five years.

The government has defended the system as necessary to attract capable people from the private sector and public service and to maintain a clean government.

Singapore chose to deal with political remuneration openly, with no hidden salary components or perks outside the published framework, Wong said.

“Good government did not come naturally to Singapore. It was built deliberately over many years. And there is nothing automatic about sustaining this,” he said.

Wong said the pay issue could not be avoided simply because it was uncomfortable. Ministerial salaries had increasingly fallen behind comparable earnings in the private sector and civil service, making a review necessary, he noted.

The salary framework uses the median income of Singapore’s top 1,000 citizen earners as a reference point, with a 40% discount applied to reflect the nature of political service.

The new salary scheme would give Wong and future prime ministers “a better chance of persuading capable Singaporeans to step forward, and of building the strongest possible team for Singapore,” he said.

The new framework will be reviewed every five years, the government said.

Lawmakers will debate the issue in Parliament on Thursday.

The current political salary framework was established following a 2011 review and debated in Parliament in 2012. Salaries were cut by about 36% under that review as the public expressed concern over political pay.

Wong said it was “easier politically” for him ​to leave things as they were but that “would not be the right thing to do” as salaries in the private sector, ​civil service, judicial service and public sector had moved higher since 2012.

A subsequent review in 2017 recommended adjustments, but the government decided not to implement them. A second review due ⁠in 2023 ‌was deferred until ‌now because of economic uncertainty.

Referring to the top earners’ benchmark, ​Chong Ja Ian, a political scientist at ⁠the National University of Singapore, said: “Given rising income disparity, this could mean that ministers associate more ⁠with the very rich rather than the experiences of ordinary Singaporeans.”

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