Turkey-Syria earthquake: Death toll crosses 25,000; close to 80,104 injured in Turkiye alone

Mortal remains of Indian national missing since Turkey earthquake, found

A 48-year-old man was arrested and later let off on bail for allegedly molesting a junior colleague in his office, police here said on Saturday. The accused was let off on bail after he joined the investigation, said police.

Rescue teams in Turkey on Saturday pulled to safety a family of five who survived inside their collapsed home for five days following a major earthquake in a sprawling border region of Turkey and Syria. The death toll, however, was approaching 25,000.

A special investigation team (SIT) will probe the alleged murder of journalist Shashikant Warishe in Maharashtra's Ratnagiri district, the state government announced on Saturday. Chief Minister Eknath Shinde called Warishe's murder earlier this week an attack on democracy even as the opposition claimed that the government was not serious about the worsening law and order situation.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had sinus surgery at a Tokyo hospital on Saturday to treat chronic sinusitis that has caused him to have a stuffy nose since last year. He was diagnosed having chronic sinusitis with polyps, he told reporters Friday.

Rajya Sabha member Vikramjit Singh Sahney on Saturday urged the Reserve Bank of India not to further increase interest rates as it could impact home buyers and MSMEs. The Reserve Bank of India on February 8 hiked borrowing costs by 25 basis points while keeping the door open for more hikes as core inflation remained high.

The Arvind Kejriwal government on Saturday asked the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) to stop its anti-encroachment drive in Mehrauli, officials said. Revenue Minister Kailash Gahlot has ordered a fresh demarcation exercise in the area, they said.

Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Saturday took a swipe over the Animal Welfare Board of India withdrawing its appeal to celebrate February 14 as 'Cow Hug Day', asking whether the government was "cow-ed" by the jokes made at its expense or was it merely 'cow-ardice.'

Delhi's Power department has removed the Arvind Kejriwal government's four nominees, including AAP leader Jasmine Shah, from the boards of power discoms and replaced them with senior officials, on the directions of Lieutenant Governor V K Saxena.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday said his government will always work hard to provide the best possible infrastructure as he retweeted Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai's tweet on Bengaluru-Mysuru Express Corridor.

After the massive earthquakes that struck southern Turkey and western Syria on February 6 and killed thousands, NASA on Saturday said it is working to share its aerial views and data from space to aid relief and recovery workers, as well as improve its ability to model and predict such events. Scenes collected before and after the earthquake were used by a team of scientists from the Earth Observatory of Singapore and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to create something called a damage proxy map for Turkey. These maps compare before and after radar images of a given event to see how the landscape has changed. "NASA's hearts and minds are with those impacted by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "NASA is our eyes in the sky, and our teams of experts are working hard to provide valuable information from our Earth-observing fleet to first responders on the ground," he added. One of NASA's key capabilities is an expertise with synthetic aperture radar, or SAR. Viewing Earth in all weather conditions, day or night, SAR is used to measure how the ground moves and built landscape changes after this type of event. "We don't know everyone who is using this information or how, but we are fortunate to have heard back from a few groups. For instance, the World Central Kitchen - which is providing food to those who've been displaced - have let us know they make use of it," said Lori Schultz, NASA's disaster coordinator for this earthquake. In addition to assessing damage, NASA scientists use space- and ground-based observations to improve the agency's ability to understand related events that cascade from the original natural disaster. While not in use yet, NASA scientists are hoping to add a new tool to assess the aftermath of the quake. The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation, or EMIT, instrument was launched to the International Space Station in July 2022. As part of its observations of the composition of material in Earth's atmosphere, it can assess methane emissions. When passing over the earthquake site, measurements of increased or new emissions could point to events not otherwise easily spotted from space.

Under Operation Dost, India sent 841 cartons of medicines, protection safety tools, and diagnostics to quake-hit Turkey and Syria, according to official sources on Friday. The official sources told media that India had dispatched 841 cartons of medicine, protection safety tools, and diagnostics with a weight of 6.19 tons have been sent to Turkey and Syria.

Rescue workers made a final push to find survivors of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria that rendered many communities unrecognizable to their inhabitants and led the Turkish president to declare it “the disaster of the century.” The death toll topped 24,000. The earthquake affected an area that is home to 13.5 million people in Turkey and an unknown number in Syria and stretches farther than the distance from London to Paris or Boston to Philadelphia. Even with an army of people taking part in the rescue effort, crews had to pick and choose where to help.

As many as 5.3 million people in Syria may have been left homeless by the earthquake," the Syria representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sivanka Dhanapala, told a press briefing. "We are also leading in the protection sector here. Throughout Syria, we have a network of community centres, satellite centres, outreach volunteers, and this helps us reach vulnerable populations. We've set up hotlines for all sorts of protection-related issues, which we use," he added. Roads have been damaged due to earthquake and that is hampering humanitarian access to the affected people. He said the UN estimated that 5.37 million people affected by the quake would need shelter assistance across the country. The UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency has been rushing aid to the badly impacted parts of the country. The agency's key focus is on shelter and relief items, ensuring that collective centers the displaced have gone to have adequate facilities, as well as tents, plastic sheeting, thermal blankets, sleeping mats, winter clothing and so on. He pointed out that the most vulnerable among the affected are the elderly, those with disabilities, and some children who've been separated from their parents.

The US' latest move to ease the sanctions imposed on Syria to support earthquake relief efforts is "misleading and aims to give a false humanitarian impression," the Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. On Thursday, the US Treasury Department issued a so-called six-month sanctions exemption for Syria-bound humanitarian aid, saying the US sanctions in Syria "will not stand in the way" of live-saving efforts. The Syrian Ministry responded in the statement on Friday that the US' decision "stipulates alleged exemptions for humanitarian purposes, and the facts on the ground proved its falsehood". The US' coercive measures and US' policies have deprived the Syrian people of their natural wealth, it added, urging the US to end immediately, without hesitation, conditions or exceptions, the sanctions and to stop its cruel practices and violations of international law and the principles and purposes of the UN Charter, Xinhua news agency reported. The Syrian government has repeatedly said that the sanctions were unjust and targeted the livelihoods and the well-being of the Syrian people, particularly after the earthquake that hit the country on Monday. According to figures released by the Syrian Health Ministry on Friday, Syria's death toll from the Monday earthquakes rose to 1,387 and the injuries to 2,326. Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said that the earthquake in Syrian government and rebel-held areas had killed 4,500 people.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said authorities should have reacted faster to this week's huge earthquake. Erdogan on Friday visited Turkey's Adiyaman province, where he acknowledged the government's response was not as fast as it could have been. "Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be," he said. Erdogan is standing for re-election in a vote scheduled for May 14 and his opponents have seized upon the issue to attack him. The election may now be postponed due to the disaster.

Rescuers pulled out children from the rubble of the Turkey-Syria earthquake as the toll crossed 24,000, reported The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). The confirmed death toll from the deadliest quake in the region in two decades stood at more than 24,000 across southern Turkey and northwest Syria four days after it hit. The stench of death hung over Turkey's eastern city of Kahramanmaras- the epicentre of the first 7.8-magnitude tremor that upturned millions of lives in the pre-dawn hours of Monday. It is located in a remote region filled with people already displaced by war, reported France24.