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Turkey-Syria Earthquake Death Toll Passes 24,000 As Aid Trickles In

Turkey-Syria earthquake toll passes 24,000 as aid trickles in

(CTN NEWS) – ANTAKYA, Turkey – After a significant earthquake struck a vast region on the border between Turkey and Syria, rescue teams in Turkey on Saturday managed to take out a family of five who had spent five days trapped inside their collapsed home.

However, the number of fatalities was close to 25,000.

In the severely damaged town of Nurdagi in the Gaziantep province, they initially managed to free mother and daughter Havva and Fatmagul Aslan from a pile of debris, according to HaberTurk.

When the crews eventually got to the father, Hasan Aslan, he insisted that Zeynep and Saltik Bugra be saved before his other daughter.

Rescuers then celebrated and sang, “God is Great!” as the father was taken out.

Members of the Indonesian National Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) board an Air Force passenger jet before their departure to provide assistance to earthquake-hit areas in Turkey and Syria at Halim Perdanakusuma air base in Jakarta, Indonesia, Saturday, Feb. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

Nearly 132 hours after the earthquake, a 7-year-old girl was saved in the province of Hatay. Two hours later, a 3-year-old daughter and her father were recovered from the rubble in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province.

Despite dwindling prospects amid bitter cold, the rescues raise the total number of individuals saved on Saturday to 12.

What day is it today? According to NTV television, 16-year-old Kamil Can Agas questioned his rescuers after being extracted from the debris in Kahramanmaras.

The teenager’s cousins and members of the joint Turkish and Kyrgyz search teams all hugged and shouted, “He is out, brother,” as they did so. He has left. He is present.”

Days after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake on Monday that destroyed thousands of structures, killed more than 24,500 people, injured another 80,000, and left millions homeless, the rescues gave glimmers of joy amidst the terrible loss.

Turkish rescue workers carry Kamil Can Agdas to an ambulance after pulled him out from a collapsed building five days after the earthquake, in Kahramanmaras, southern Turkey, early Saturday, Feb. 11, 2023. (Ismail Coskun/IHA via AP Photo)

Hours later, a second earthquake almost as strong as the first and probably caused by it inflicted more havoc.

However, not everything turned out well. Early on Saturday morning, rescuers found a 13-year-old girl trapped among the rubble of a collapsed building in Hatay province and successfully intubated her.

She passed away, however, before the medical staff could remove her from the debris and amputate a limb, according to the Hurriyet newspaper.

Even though experts claim that those trapped can survive for up to a week, the likelihood of finding more survivors rapidly decreased.

Rescuers switched to using thermal cameras to find life among the debris, a hint of the frailty of any lingering lives.

A 99-person team from the Indian Army’s medical support team started attending to the injured in a makeshift field hospital in the southern city of Iskenderun, where a big hospital had been destroyed, as relief continued to arrive.

Aerial photo showing collapsed buildings in Kahramanmaras, southern Turkey, Saturday, Feb. 11, 2023. Rescuers in Turkey miraculously continued to pull earthquake survivors out of the rubble on Saturday. (IHA via AP)

Sukru Canbulat, a guy with severe injuries to his left leg, including deep bruising, contusions, and lacerations, was wheeled into the hospital in a wheelchair.

He said he was saved from his fallen apartment building in the neighboring city of Antakya just hours after the Monday earthquake, wincing in pain.

He was nevertheless freed without obtaining sufficient medical attention for his injuries after receiving only basic first aid.

Canbulat listed his deceased family, saying, “My daughter is dead, my sibling died, my aunt and her daughter died, and the wife of her son,” who was 812 months pregnant. “I buried (everyone I lost), then I came here.”

On Saturday, a sizable improvised cemetery was being built outside of Antakya. Backhoes and bulldozers excavated pits in a field on the city’s northeastern fringe as trucks and ambulances carrying black body bags kept arriving.

Soldiers in charge of traffic on the congested nearby road warned drivers not to snap pictures.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a survivor speak as he visits the city center destroyed by Monday earthquake in Kahramanmaras, southern Turkey, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023.(Turkish Presidency via AP, File)

Simple wooden planks embedded vertically in the ground served as grave markers for the hundreds of graves, which were separated by no more than three feet (one meter).

Due to orders not to share information with the media, a Ministry of Religious Affairs employee in Turkey who wished to remain anonymous revealed that on Friday, the cemetery’s opening day, some 800 remains were brought there.

He said that as many as 2,000 had been interred by Saturday noon.

People who are currently emerging from the rubble are lucky to be alive. He remarked that most of the folks arriving here are dead.

The vast area has continued to stay below freezing, and many people are without shelter. Although the Turkish government has donated millions of hot meals, tents, and blankets, it is still having difficulty reaching many people who are in need.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan poses with a commander during his visit to the earthquake-hit city of Gaziantep, southern Turkey, Thursday, Feb. 9, 2023.(Turkish Presidency via AP, File)

When visiting earthquake-stricken Diyarbakir, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that colleges would switch to distance learning until the summer to provide room in state-run dormitories for displaced survivors.

Survivors in the city of Kahramanmaras wandered among hundreds of tents, waited in line for hot meals, and cuddled around campfires where a stadium had been converted into a makeshift camp.

Numerous Syrian refugees in Antakya have been given shelter in the grounds of a standing building on the city’s outskirts by an international organization that aids Syrian refugees in Turkey.

According to Ahmed Abou el-Shaar, the founder of the Molham charity, “the issue is that there is not a single home that is inhabitable in Antakya; thus, the only shelter is the street.”

Men walk among the debris of collapsed buildings in Hatay, southern Turkey, Thursday, Feb. 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Can Ozer)

The catastrophe increased hardship in an area plagued by Syria’s 12-year civil war, forcing millions of people to flee their homes and rendering them dependent on handouts. Millions more people fled the war and sought asylum in Turkey.

Many sections of Syria are now isolated due to the violence, which makes it more difficult to deliver relief. According to the UN, the first assistance convoy due to the earthquake arrived in northwest Syria on Friday, the day after a pre-disaster aid shipment did.

According to the U.N. refugee agency, up to 5.3 million people in Syria are now without a home.

President Bashar Assad and his wife have visited sick earthquake victims in a hospital in the Syrian president’s home city of Latakia on the coast.

Turkish rescuers work to pull out Ergin Guzeloglan, 36, from a collapsed building five days after an earthquake in Hatay, southern Turkey, early Saturday, Feb. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Can Ozer)

According to Syrian state television, Assad and his wife Asma visited Duha Nurallah, 60, and her son Ibrahim Zakariya, 22, on Saturday morning after they were rescued from the wreckage the previous evening in the adjacent coastal town of Jableh.

According to state news agency SANA, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the World Health Organization, arrived in Aleppo in northern Syria on Saturday with 35 tonnes of medical supplies.

In the following days, he said, a second plane carrying an extra 30 tonnes of medical supplies will land.

On Saturday, White Helmets, an opposition group in Syria, claimed it was “nearly hard to find anybody alive.”

There have been 2,166 fatalities in the northwest of Syria, including women and children. While there were 21,043 fatalities in Turkey as of Saturday, there were 3,533 fatalities in Syria.

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.

According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.

Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.

google

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.

Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.

Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.

To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.

On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.

Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

google

Pixa Bay

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.

TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.

When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.

And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.

Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.

A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

google

Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.

But today, it feels more like reality.

Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.

Could we remember Google in the same way that we remember Yahoo or Ask Jeeves in decades? These next few years could be significant.

SOURCE | CNN

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2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

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Washington — Trump Media,  The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.

The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.

The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.

The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.

trump

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.

Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.

trump

Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.

The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.

musk trump

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.

The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.

He also welcomed back a vast list of previously banned users, including Trump, and endorsed him for the 2024 presidential election.

SOURCE | AP

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The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

Supreme Court

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.

The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.

Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.

This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.

In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.

The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.

This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.

The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.

In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.

According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.

Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.

The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.

For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.

Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.

As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.

As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.

The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.

SOURCE: AP

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