this is bbc news. i'm rich preston. our top stories: three days after the earthquakes in turkey and syria, more than 12,000 are dead. it's feared thousands more are still trapped as rescuers work through the night to try to recover more people. turkey's president erdogan acknowledges mistakes were made in the initial response as the extent of the devastation becomes ever clearer. the rescuers say that they will come back tomorrow and the next day. they will return to sites like this for as long as it takes to return loved ones to their relatives. cheering. ukraine's president zelensky on his first visit to the uk since the russian

invasion, thanks british politicians for their support but urges the uk to give them fighterjets. writing on the helmet reads, "we have freedom. give us wings to protect it." applause drama at disney as 7000 jobs are set to go. the entertainment giant says it must cuts costs as streaming customers fall for the first time. and praise continues to pour in for nba superstar lebronjames after he becomes the competition's all—time leading points scorer. welcome to our viewers on pbs in america and around the globe. we begin in turkey and syria, where more than 12,000 people are now known to have died

in the earthquakes which hit the region early on monday morning. in turkey, there's growing anger at the speed of the rescue effort — with many complaining they've had no help trying to pull people from the rubble. while in syria, state—controlled media is reporting that some 300,000 people have been forced to leave their homes. more from syria shortly, but first, let's hear from our middle east correspondent anna foster, who was among the firstjournalists to reach the epicentre in turkey and reports now from karamanmaras. the devastating power of the earth seen from the air. swathes of this city lie in ruins. buildings, homes, lives have been destroyed. in many cities, the search now isn't for survivors, it's only for the dead. when the rubble shows a sign,

the digger stops. behind this blanket, an arm reveals a body. slowly, carefully, it's uncovered. and then, the moment of realisation. screaming a father lost. screaming the goodbye is painful and public. screaming and here in maras, ambulances are now hearses. siren wails

they have spent the whole day here searching for bodies, and the light is starting to fade now, but the rescuers say that they will come back tomorrow and the next day. they will return to sites like this for as long as it takes to return loved ones to their relatives. they are rare now, but there are still moments of hope. a little girl healthy and alive after three days buried. the rescuers celebrate. she says her siblings are down there too. today, president erdogan came to visit those who have lost everything. but there is growing anger that help is coming too slowly and there isn't enough of it. he says it is impossible to prepare for disasters on this scale. translation: we had some problems - in some places like airports in the beginning. we had problems on the roads,

but it's better today and it will be even better tomorrow. bodies now fill this sports hall. more are arriving all the time. among them, yunus�*s fiancee. they were just weeks away from getting married. translation: i was planning to dress her with her weddingi dress, but now i will dress her in a funeral shroud. i am like the walking dead, i am a living dead. i lost my feelings. each of these bundles marks a future cut short, a family separated. every hour, the death toll rises, and even now, it is impossible to know how many lives this quake has claimed. anna foster, bbc news, marash. well, the situation in northern syria was desperate even before earthquake struck.

the region is home to millions of refugees displaced by more than a decade of civil war. some emergency aid has been flown in from iran and the gulf states but the syrian government has also asked the european union for help. 0ur international editor jeremy bowen reports. something to celebrate at last in a place without much good news. a family of six was rescued alive from the rubble in idlib, the last part of syria still controlled by rebels. the rescuers, a group called the white helmets that the uk helps to fund, are experts. they've been digging out survivors of the assad regime's air strikes for much of syria's long war. the geological faults that brought down these buildings cut right across the front lines and zones of influence that have devastated syria since 2011. this is aleppo, syria's biggest city, back in regime hands

since the rebels here were defeated in 2016. now, syria has a huge natural disaster on the back of the man—made catastrophe that broke the country. in aleppo hospital, every bed has its own tragedy. only three members of this man's family survived when their home collapsed. 13 of them were killed. "they were," he says, "my father, my mother, my brother, "his wife, and their four children. "and the wife and two kids of the brother "who was rescued with me also died." faced with such disaster, the un, which already helps care for millions of syrians, appealed for some national solidarity. we are hoping that everybody puts the interest of the people first. we keep the politics aside, all authorities move away from the issue, from the politics, and put the interest of the people first.

in damascus, the capital, citizens are rallying around giving blood. so far, grassroots relief efforts seem to be the best hope. but it's not clear whether aid collected or delivered in damascus will make it across the front line into rebel—held idlib province. back in aleppo, russian troops, whose intervention salvaged the rule of the assad family, are helping the syrian red crescent alongside algerian rescue workers. the damascus regime says its allies, also including iran, are flying in aid. allies and who controls what won't matter much to families who are homeless or nervous about sleeping in damaged buildings. an earthquake tests any nation's resilience. war has taught a generation of syrians that they have to fend for themselves. in idlib province,

the white helmets rescued another child, a boy. people do their best. broader aid efforts, let alone rebuilding, will need a miracle to overcome the blight, hatred and distrust of a generation of war. jeremy bowen, bbc news. earlier, we looked at how rescuers go about searching for survivors in collapsed buildings, and i spoke sinead imbaro, a canine search specialist and trainer with florida task force six. she worked on trying to find survivors at the surfside tower collapse in florida in 2021. i asked her to tell us about her search dog, magnus ares. magnus is a canine search dog, he searches for live human victims. he also is a trailing dog so he's not only scent

specific but he's air scenting as well so he goes both disciplines which is a very special. we will come in a moment to how you get around training a dog like magnus but you've got lots of experience on the ground in situations like we are seeing in turkey and as i've mentioned the surfside building collapse. talk us through what it is like when you first land on the ground and how practically go around organising your search operation. since it was in our hometown miami, it was pretty... i shouldn't say easy but it was pretty well organised as far as our teams knowing what to do. as far as the situation in turkey, it is going to be a little bit different because of the weather conditions and the environment. so as soon as the dogs land or as soon as the search teams land, they will be informed of the operations and areas that they need to search and will be given the guideline

on what to do. what is it magnus is specifically searching for? what smells is he trying to sniff out? he is sniffing out human live odour but he's also sniffing out the breath, that's what makes it different than searching out human remains. once he locates that human odour, he will stay at that and indicate with a bark and that will signal us to come and investigate that area and we use our cameras and equipment to further look down into that area to see if there's any forms of life. magnus is your dog but you train other dogs as well for law enforcement and other rescue services, how do

you train a dog like magnus to do what he does? it just starts out with the basics of teaching him to bark and then making it a fun day for them to locate the human, so we teach them to bark and the human will go and hide in a barrel, the dog will seek out the human in the barrel and then from there, we will cover the barrel up so he can't see the person and then he will have to seek the person out from then on. we've transitioned that barrel from the ground up into the rubble pile and then we will extinct that barrel and begin hiding our victims, our quote unquote victims in the pile where the dog can seek out that human odour. we have seen the pictures coming out of turkey and syria, it is a highly precarious situation for people to be working again,

you are obviously concerned about the safety of your dog, what are you looking out for? what situations are you willing to send him in and won't send him an? that's tough. we have engineers here that will tell us what areas are safe for both of us to venture in. if we, as the handler can't venture any further, we will send our dog to the point where it is deemed safe, and that is where obedience controls come in, that we can call them back, but we look for huge voids, look for sharp object, like rebar, glass, etc, and we want to try our best to care for these guys when they are up on the pile which is very hard, we can't have any equipment on them just due to the fact that they may get caught up on it so they are going on naked whereas we are covered in gloves and boots and helmets and we have masks on, for air—quality whereas they have absolutely nothing.

what a good dog. in other news, ukraine's president zelensky has been visiting european allies for the first time since his country was invaded by russia last year. he's been asking them to send more military help. he's now in paris, where he met president macron and the german chancellor 0laf scholz, urging them to deliver the equipment ukraine needs "as soon as possible". earlier, president zelensky was in the uk where he addressed both houses of parliament at westminster. london has stood with kyiv since day one. from the first seconds and minutes of the full—scale war, great britain, you extended your helping hand when the world had not yet come to understand how to react. the world needs your leadership, britain, just as it needs ukrainian bravery. applause

stay with us on bbc news. still to come, king of the court: lebronjames becomes the nba's all—time leading points scorer. there's mr mandela, mr nelson mandela, a free man, taking his first steps into a new south africa. iran's spiritual leader, ayatollah khomeini, has said he's passed a death sentence on salman rushdie, the british author of a book which many muslims say is blasphemous. the people of haiti. have flocked to church to give thanks for the ousting of their former president - ba by doc duvalier. because of his considerable value as a stallion, shergar was kept in a special secure box in the stud farm's central block. shergar was driven away in a horse box

the thieves had brought with them. there stepped down from the plane a figure in mourning, elizabeth ii, queen of this realm and of all her other realms and territories, head of the commonwealth, defender of the faith. this is bbc world news. our top stories: the earthquakes in turkey and syria have killed more than 12,000 people. it's feared thousands more are still trapped. president zelensky of ukraine addresses the uk parliament and appeals for fighterjets to use against the russians. the entertainment giant disney has announced it'll be laying off 7,000 employees in ceo bob iger�*s first major decision since he was asked back to lead the company late last year.

the lay—offs follow similar moves by other us tech giants which have laid off thousands of workers as the economy sours and companies dial back a hiring spurt that began during the height of the pandemic. earlier, our north america correspondent david willis explained why these cuts are taking place. this has everything to do with the so—called streaming wars. disney's disney+ subscription service has faced competition from rivals such as netflix, amazon and so on. as a result of which it's had to spend a lot of money on content in order to attract subscribers. and that of course has weighed heavily on the bottom line. indeed, since disney+ was launched back in 2019, country's streaming services have lost around about $10 billion, it's been assessed. so it takes a lot of visits to the magic kingdom to make up that sort of shortfall

and, as a result, even though the theme parks are doing extremely well, the company has announced the plan to try and save $5.5 billion — in part by cutting these 7,000 jobs. i understand that most of these job losses will be in the division that makes films and tv series. so in other words, disney will cut back on content, and concentrate instead on the franchises that have proved so lucrative in the past — such as star wars, the marvel superheroes and, of course, pixar animation. david, this does come just after disney's old boss has returned to the company. that's right, we're talking about bob iger. he led disney for 15 years, and one of the things whilst he was in the ceo position was champion the development of streaming services at disney.

those same services that are under pressure right now. he resigned as ceo in 2020 and then the company's share price fell dramatically, and that led to the ousting of mr iger�*s hand—picked successor, a man called bob chapek, and to mr iger�*s return last november, and he has been put on contract to run the company now for the next two years. but he is under pressure, not only from shareholders, but from the billionaire investor, an activist investor by the name of nelson peltz, who has been highly critical of the way disney has been run in recent years. he is looking to gain a seat on the board. all of this puts pressure on bob iger to act. so just two months back as ceo, he is cutting these 7,000 jobs on top of the more than 30,000 jobs that were cut by disney a couple of years ago, most of them in its

theme park division. david willis there. let's get some of the day's other news. a bus has crashed into a day care centre near the canadian city of montreal, killing two children and injuring six others. the driver has been arrested and charged with homicide and dangerous driving. canada's prime minister, justin trudeau, said he was devastated, and couldn't imagine what the families were going through. newly released documents have revealed a memphis police officer took photos of tyre nichols while he sat injured, bleeding and in need of medical help. mr nichols died three days after after he was beaten by police officers last month. 0fficer demetrius haley is one of the five former policemen who've been charged with second—degree murder over mr nichols�* death. us officials say there have been at least four previous spy balloons that had drifted over american sites that were of interest to china. they say three happened under donald trump's administration and a fourth early on injoe biden�*s. the latest was shot down by

us fighterjets on saturday. to us fighterjets on saturday. south america now. the brazilian government has launched an operation to remove thousand of illegal gold miners from the amazon. they've been blamed for causing a public health emergency, bringing diseases and violence to the yanomami — a large indigenous community which lives in the brazilian amazon rainforest. sofia bettiza reports. this forest is yanomami territory, the biggest indigenous reservation. they are among the most isolated tribes in south america. but their lives have been devastated by minors. they are accused of causing a humanitarian crisis. raping and killing inhabitants. poisoning their water with mercury and destroying the forest. fishing and drinking from these waters, once pristine, is now

impossible. cases of malnutrition and malaria, a disease brought by outsiders, have skyrocketed. so now, brazil's government is deploying police and soldiers to evict the miners. it is no easy task. there are tens of thousands of them, and many are running away. but these men have just been caught. their weapons seized. and the aircraft destroyed. translation: what is happening to the yanomami people is happening in several indigenous territories. we happening in several indigenous territories. ~ ., happening in several indigenous territories. ., , ., territories. we need to use our voice to denounce _ territories. we need to use our voice to denounce what - territories. we need to use our voice to denounce what is - territories. we need to use our| voice to denounce what is going on. ., ., .,, on. illegal goldmining rose sharl on. illegal goldmining rose sharply in _ on. illegal goldmining rose sharply in brazil _ on. illegal goldmining rose sharply in brazil under - on. illegal goldmining rose sharply in brazil under the | sharply in brazil under the ex—president, jair bolsonaro. he pushed to open protected indigenous reservation to miners, but the new left—wing government has vowed there will be no impunity for their

crimes. and that they will do everything it takes to protect the yanomami people from genocide. sofia bettiza, bbc news. praise continues to pour in for the nba superstar lebronjames after the 38—year—old became the competition's all—time scoring leader. he eclipsed kareem abdul—jabbar for the nba points record by reaching 38,388 career points, just one more than kareem abdul—jabbar�*s total. earlier, i wasjoined by staff writer at theathleitc.com sabreena merchant, and i asked her if this makes lebronjames the greatest basketball player of all time. i think people who thought michaeljordan was the greatest player of all time haven't changed their opinion much, even after lebron�*s feat of passing kareem abdul—jabbar in becoming the all—time leading scorer in nba history. people who point to jordan or some other player are generally pointing to their record in championships, and even though lebron has the most points in league history, he is still two titles

short of michaeljordan. so until he reaches that figure, i think the goat debate is still alive and well. well, i am glad you brought up michaeljordan, because lots of people, you know, with rose—tinted spectacles on, look back at the players they remember. i'm one who grew up watching michaeljordan and there is more to this than just points, isn't there? it is about personality, and how they play on the pitch, and how they interact with her team—mates as well. absolutely, and i think what a lot of people admired about michaeljordan was his ruthlessness and the ability to execute down the stretch of games, and he was the crunch—time assassin. the images of him winning game ending shots are iconic in nba history. for a large stretch of his career, lebronjames was identified more as a passer than a scorer, and even though he often contributed to the right play that would help his team win, it creates a different image of him than michaeljordan, who was more purely a scorer. aside from how well we lovingly remember our favourite players,

lebronjames does get the points in his favour. what is it about him that enables him to play at this level of game? lebronjames is simply good at everything that there is to do on a basketball court. he is one of the greatest passers to ever play in the league, he's one of the greatest scorers to ever play in the league, his talent, his acumen, his ability to stay healthy — he's never suffered a major a career—threatening injury. even during the course of a single season, he's missed at most, you know, 30% of the season. so just the fact that he has been able to keep his body in good shape and maintain this longevity for 20 years. he has essentially been one of the top five players in the sport for each and every one of those seasons. all of that contributes to his ability to have this record, which really is a testament to him having one of — if not the — greatest career of all time in nba history. a $20 million lot is set to hit a new york auction house featuring a babe ruth rookie card among other prized items. more than a century old, the 1916 card is expected to bring in $3 million — it's from babe ruth's rookie season with the red sox

before the slugger was traded to the new york yankees. that is it from us for now. thank you forjoining us. bye—bye. hello there. there was a hard frost across england and wales, but plenty of sunshine on wednesday here. but we had gale—force gusts of winds and rain further north. this is how we closed out the afternoon in highland. and that weather front that was responsible for this continues to sink its way steadily south and east. no significant rain by the time it pushes south—east as it bumps into this area of high pressure, a band of cloud, light drizzle from east anglia down to cornwall, slowly clearing towards the channel. behind it, some sunshine coming through. a brisker north—westerly wind will continue to feed in showers, particularly

the north—west of the great glen and winds still gusting 40—50mph at times so a noticeable strong westerly wind. temperatures around 7—9 degrees, one or two places if we are lucky just seeing 10 celsius as a high, 50 fahrenheit. as we close out thursday into the early hours of friday, we start to see a contrast. more cloud pushing into the far north, some showery outbreaks of rain here, but milder, temperatures holding up above freezing. with clearer skies, temperatures falling just below freezing once again across england and wales so we can't rule out frost and fog again or friday. but higher pressure dominates for england and wales, still a bit more of a breeze up into the far north—west and this westerly feed of air will continue to be a story, so it will be a slightly milder feel generally across the country. we're likely to see temperatures into double digits. the weather front toppling across the high will bring outbreaks of showery rain into scotland. more cloud, high cloud across northern england and wales as well, highs generally of 9—13 degrees. now, as we move into

the weekend, that milder air will continue to be the story. the high pressure reallyjust sitting across europe and clinging onto central and southern england, with weather fronts toppling across that high. so that means we'll always run the risk of more cloud and outbreaks of rain with a stronger wind across the far north and west. there'll be quite a lot of cloud generally on saturday, but it will be largely fine and dry for england and wales, and a little bit milder. 9—13 degrees the high. similar story as well as we go to sunday — watch out for that early morning mist and fog once again.

this is bbc news. the headlines: rescue workers are still searching for survivors in southern turkey and northern syria following monday's earthquakes. more than 12,000 people have been killed and it's feared thousands more are still trapped. the turkish president, recep tayyip erdogan, has defended his government's response to the quakes. president zelensky of ukraine has addressed the uk parliament in a brief trip to england. he appealed for fighterjets to use against the russians. mr zelensky has moved on to france where he held talks with president macron, and the german chancellor, 0laf scholz. the walt disney company has announced that it's cutting 7000 jobs in a restructuring plan. the entertainment group said the cuts were aimed at helping its struggling streaming division, disney plus.

the service has been losing money in the face of strong