this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. hello. it's adam in the studio. and chris in the studio. and we'll be joined by various guests throughout this episode of newscast, which has got a bit of a sad start because we're going to focus on the devastation caused by the massive series of earthquakes in southern turkey and northern syria, which happened on sunday night

into monday morning. the death toll inevitably keeps rising and is now into many, many thousands. and it's quite hard even saying that. but one of the people who's been bringing us so much of the hope and the tragedy and the drama and the temperature and the bad weather is our colleague anna foster, middle east correspondent, who'sjoining us on newscast now. anna, hello there. thank you for making time for us in what's been a very, very busy, tricky time for you. just give us a sense of where you are right now andjust, i mean, what it really feels like to be there. do you know what's really hard? and one of the things that i've found difficult but really important isjust trying to give an idea of the scale of this, because you can only see so much here that the camera shows you and you can see everything that's going on behind me. you can see this destroyed building. you can see the rescue workers and you can see the diggers. but, beyond the camera's view, it goes all the way as far

as the eye can see, all the way down this street. this was a neighbourhood. it was full of apartments. it's only one part of a huge city that has collapsed. and this is one city across a huge swathe of turkey that is suffering. this was the epicentre. so things here have been particularly bad. so i spoke to one man today from doncaster. this is where his brother lives, just down the road from here. so he got on a plane. he came as well. and he is now standing on the edge of a different pile of rubble over there, waiting for them to find his brother. i mean, it's unimaginable. unimaginable. he said he knows that the chances of him being alive are practically zero, but he still hopes, there's a bit of him that still hopes that he will be pulled out alive. it's just awful for so many people on such a big scale. anna, what i'm really interested in is just how this rescue effort and relief effort is really working. because all the pictures we see, itjust looks like a bunch of people just going and just scrabbling

through the rubble to try and find their relatives. it doesn't look in any way organised or like the government is there or that the international aid agencies have managed to arrive and kind of set up something formal yet to help people. how is it playing out? yeah, it's taken a lot of time to get people here. and also, it's worth saying that turkey has been braced for a big earthquake like this for a long time because it sits on a fault line and because they've had huge earthquakes before, they've sort of known it was coming, in a way. they've been paying earthquake tax. there are specific regulations that these buildings were supposed to have been built to. the older ones not, but the newer ones are not supposed to collapse. they are supposed to stay up in the case of an earthquake. and, in the first few days, people were numb and they were dazed. and then they were angry when the aid didn't come. and, when i'm finished talking to you, i'm about to go off with a group of young lads from gaziantep, which is about an hour and a half away. and they were telling me they are really frustrated.

they didn't think the government were doing enough. they didn't think the government were doing anything. so every day they are loading their car with stuff that they bought and they're bringing it in and handing it out and then going back again. and i think there is a growing sense of anger that the support it's really nice to talk to you. well done on your reporting. thanks a lot, guys. right. let's pick up on some of those themes about how actually help gets delivered to these places, because we can chat now to baroness amos, valerie amos, who was the united nations undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief and is now the boss of an oxford college. hello, baroness amos. hi, how are you? good, thank you. thank you forjoining us. i'm just wondering, when you're sat in new york at un hq and you first see, i don't know, on social media or an email comes through that there's been something big has happened in the world,

what actually happens? what do you do to swing into action or what did you do? sorry. well, it's always a really devastating thing. usually, depending on the country, there might well be un people on the ground already, which is the case here, because we all know that this part of turkey, particularly with getting aid into syria, there have been aid efforts here for a very long time. and i was part of the team that negotiated those cross—border operations from turkey into syria. but the thing that we always remember is that you'll have a lot of local staff on the ground, and of course, they're affected too, and it's terrible for them. you have a meeting immediately. look at the resources that you have, who is as close as possible to turkey and syria that can get over there quickly. there's something called surge, which is that you send out a message to all the staff and

say, who is available to go? and there are a lot of staff who will volunteer and you get them there as quickly as possible. there are organisations that help with the logistics, so getting stuff through airports, getting stuff onto aircraft, getting stuff into the country. very often, the challenge is, when you get into the country, if the roads are blocked, if there aren't enough trucks, that kind of thing, it's very hard sometimes to get the aid to the places that you want it to go. and then, of course, there'll be countries that will be sending aid. so that will be coming in, too. so the coordination of all of this is absolutely critical. speed is of the essence. coordination is essential. and i heard a little bit of anna's report there talking about people getting angry and frustrated. i've seen this time and time again because, the first day or two, it is the local people,

those who are affected, they're already traumatised. they're exhausted, but they're the ones that are making all the effort. and of course, they get angry because they're waiting for people to come in and help them. they're desperate for theirfamily members. and they know that, every second that ticks by, it gets harder and harder. i wonder to what extent the international response to devastation on this scale has got better over the last few decades, the last generation, the coordination, the pooling together of expertise from wherever it might lie around the world, you know, you refer to the frustration. i guess some frustration is inevitable because people in desperate circumstances want help immediately. and sometimes thatjust isn't practically possible. but are we collectively getting

better at responding to natural disasters like this? i think we all are getting better. i don't just want to talk about what i did in the past, but we did a major, major look at this when i was at the united nations. and we put in place a lot of things to improve our response because we just didn't think it was good enough. but i am always staggered by the politics that intervenes in this, in a situation where it is very much about just saving people. and also the international community can't just roll in and overlook a national government. you can'tjust come in and take over from the national effort. and that sometimes can take time, lots of negotiation, trying to ensure that people don't feel that they're being railroaded over. and it's a real balance that

you have to try and strike because you know that every minute counts. and it's about the search and rescue effort, but it's also about the fact that people won't have water, clean water, they won't have food. it's really cold in turkey, in syria right now. people will need blankets. they don't have anywhere to stay. so getting tents in and, even if you have a national government that is prepared, those resources might not be in the right place. the scale of this is absolutely horrific. how many thousands of people already that we know have died and those numbers will go up. for me, the thing that really brought it home was when i woke up listening to the radio this morning and hearing one of our colleagues saying, 0h, people are walking around all night because it's too cold to sit still and lie down and it's to keep warm. you just have to keep moving. and you thinkjust that on top of all of this as well, ijust wonder...

it's so hard to imagine. so, yeah, totally. but ijust wonder. so today the disasters emergency committee, the umbrella body for lots of the uk charities, launched their appeal, asking people to donate to help the relief effort. ijust wonder, would you draw a contrast between that and sort of like almost like the begging bowl aspect of that versus, say, all the pomp and pageantry that president zelensky of ukraine got in westminster the day before. i mean, it seems that, when there's a war on, it's all hands on deck, state occasion. but, when people need to be fed, clothed, housed and get blankets and water, it's kind of a bit like, oh, please, have you got any spare change? well, there are a couple of things that i would say in relation to that, because people's natural response, when they see a disaster like this, is to begin to gather the things that they think are important to try and send them. money is really, really important. why do i say that? because getting money into those communities as quickly as possible, trying as much as possible to support local

businesses now... they'll be absolutely devastated. but there will be some businesses in turkey where you can buy things. people try and get their lives and their businesses up and running as quickly as possible. of course, there is a cost to taking things, blankets and clothes and so on. there is a cost to sending those to turkey and syria. so launching an appeal for money so that you can better co—ordinate supplies, get them from a central place and send them is much quicker. so that's why the disasters emergency appeal has been launched. but remember, the government will also be putting money into this effort. it's really important that they do and we will also want them to support the efforts when we're able

in the longer term to try to develop these communities back again. so money, government support will be incredibly important. but i know from my own experience that we also want to help and i would encourage people who want to help to do that by giving money through the disasters emergency appeal, because they could then get it to the organisations that are on the ground and can support the effort. well, baroness amos, thank you forjoining us on this episode of newscast. thank you. and just to say one last thing, you know, the british people are incredibly supportive and i think we have to recognise that in these kinds of situations. already i've heard quite a few of the disasters emergency committee appeals on the tv and on the airwaves as well. so that's definitely rolling out in a big way over the next couple of days.

yeah. just people can't escape the scale of it, i suppose. right. rolling into our studio now is our next guest. and there are lots of things we can discuss with him because it is lord frost, david frost, who was the uk's chief brexit negotiator. he's been a minister, he's been a diplomat. he's done all sorts of things. david, welcome back to newscast. hi. great to be here. i was reminiscing about being in brussels last week and seeing the withdrawal agreement in the european council archives. do you have a copy of it at home? pride of place on a book shelf? in the back of your zooms! i've probably got one on the shelf somewhere, but i think my copy is a pretty horrible sort of dog—eared one, i'm afraid, so... you've seen the good one. yes, i've seen the best one. and obviously we were marking the third anniversary of brexit and the actual departure. is that something that you kind of thought about or marked or had a glass of whisky? you used to be the scottish whisky association boss. well, it's a moment. it's a moment. i mean, the truth is that we only really got out of the eu on 31st december 2020 when we got out of the sort of economic arrangements.

the end of the transition period. exactly. so i still think of that as the really critical moment when we could do things for ourselves. but it was a moment, and obviously there's a debate about brexit, which i suppose surprises me a bit, that people are still talking about it. and a pretty negative tone to it, i suppose, which is disappointing and i think not borne out by the reality. was it not, though, always inevitable that brexit would be a process rather than an event? in other words, that there would be, of course, these moments and these very significant legal moments, whether it be three years ago or two years ago. but the conversation about our relationship with our nearest neighbours was always going to be an ongoing one, and was always going to have kind of kinks and bumps in the road. yeah, you're right. obviously the eu is our biggest neighbour and we have to make that relationship work. and when we were in the eu we spent a lot of time

managing the relationship. it's a bit less time now. i think it's a different kind of relationship, but it always will be important. obviously it is a pity, i guess, that the northern ireland protocol issue is not rather more settled than it is. and i think there always will be discussionsjust like there is in any other trade agreement between the two parties about how it works. but yeah, so there we are. what do you think is driving this sense of bregret? i hate saying that word, because it's just such an ugly word. but this idea that voters who were previously in favour of leaving the eu nowjust aren't as in favour of it now that it's happened. what do you think might be driving that? so i think there are a couple of things going on. one isjust the fact that so many other bad things have happened. the pandemic, the ukraine war, the energy crisis, all that sort of thing hasjust, i suspect, depressed people's moods. generally, people are under a lot of financial pressure for all those reasons. it's affected the mood. the other is, i think, i would like to...

if i had a mild criticism of the government, it would be that they are not out, as a government, perhaps, sort of advocating and defending brexit and rebutting some of the arguments that get put. the defence of brexit and the restatement of the economic arguments, which is nowhere near as difficult as many people say. that's done by a few bloggers and people on twitter and so on, and the government sometimes feels a bit neutral on the subject. why do you think it's ended up like that? what's driving that? i thinkjust the attention is elsewhere, and i do appreciate that it's kind of odd to come out and keep saying brexit is a good thing all the time if you're the government. but it is the central policy, and i think it would be right for the government to say, to be pointing out that actually britain was the fastest growing of the major european economies last year and the year before, contrary to the kind of general mood of gloom, and to point up some of the reforms and changes that we've done.

and to be fair to him, the prime minister did do that on brexit day, and rightly so. the prime minister is a proper conviction brexiteer, who backed brexit at a time when it arguably was not in his political interest to do so. and you could make an argument, particularly with borisjohnson having famously written those pro and anti—telegraph columns prior to coming out for brexit, that rishi sunak is the first absolutely unquestionable, authentic brexiteer prime minister we've had since brexit. well, i would say... personally, i wouldn't put too much weight on the two boris johnson columns. he always seemed a pretty convinced brexiteer to me, and in some ways even sort of harder over than i was in the talks process. but yeah, i think the current prime minister definitely is. but he's approaching the issue in his own way and obviously he's got a pretty difficult set of problems. i wonder, is it easier for a conviction brexiteer

at the time of the referendum, which rishi sunak unquestionably was, to be, as some might see it, more pragmatic in negotiations with the eu because nobody can accuse him of being a remainer or a remoaner or whatever kind of insult you might be able to lob at somebody who was in a different place six, seven years. do you mean that he could do something that if he had been a remainer, he would be accused of being soft on brexit? but because he's a proper brexiteer, he could do something that... i'm just throwing that out as a hypothesis. i don't know what you make of that. i mean, it is possible. yeah, it is possible. ithink... i do actually think that whether one was a remainer or a brexiteer is receding a bit into the rear—view mirror. it feels more important for some ministers and individuals than for others somehow. and obviously we had liz truss, who felt like a brexiteer even though she was remainerand so on. do you think she was a sort of born again brexiteer? yeah, definitely. yeah, absolutely. and i think, you know, the real divide now is between those

who want to take advantage of the opportunities and are willing to see the scope of change and reform that that requires. and those who probably want to stay close—ish to the european model and not do things too differently. and that doesn't map on to remain—leave seven years ago. just do one last bit of nostalgia for me. so you wrote a review of a book about brexit the other day that was written by one of michel barnier�*s former advisers, and in the review you said, "oh, it's interesting, this guy hasn't written about literally the most awkward dinner i've ever, ever been to" and it sounds like it was boris johnson and ursula von der leyen and you and michel barnier. what was so bad about it? did ursula spill the soup? you'll have to wait for my book for the full accounts of this. is there going to be one? i mean, i think it was known to be bad at the time. yeah, there will be eventually. it's not imminent but it's in the process. i'm going to snap you two

gents out of nostalgia. back to now. because there's been two developments, haven't there, this week as far as brexit is concerned, particularly in the context of northern ireland? so we've seen the deadline for fresh assembly elections in northern ireland pushed back a year to january of next year with a 12—week limit after that, which buys some time for, i guess, sorting out the protocol. and then there's curiosity in the supreme court, the uk supreme court the other day, around whether or not the acts of union of 1800 were unlawfully conflicted by the withdrawal agreement and the supreme court concluding that they were not, that yes, it did amend the acts of union that brought together at the time great britain and ireland — all of ireland at the time — but it did so legally or lawfully as far as the supreme court was concerned, which backs up what the court of appeal in belfast had said. and i wonder, lord frost, how you read these two developments, and i suppose, ultimately, whether there is a route to sorting out the protocol in a way that the eu agrees with, the uk agrees with, and crucially, the democratic unionists agree with, so that power—sharing devolved government can get back under way.

yeah, i think the extension of the election deadline by a year, it's more than most people expected. but i think it probably makes sense. there's no point in kind of creating artificial moments and then moving it on. so why not? the court case is interesting. i don't think anybody thought it would come out in a different way. and certainly our normal constitutional doctrine would suggest it would come out where it did come out. so i don't think it's really a new thing. itjust confirms where people are. i do think that it focuses attention back on the negotiation. the government is not giving a lot away about this. and it's interesting that although there are leaks, it's hard to know what's really authoritative and what isn't from it. i mean, it's obviously better to come to a negotiated settlement if we can, but it's got to be one that does the job.

i do worry that the pause in the protocol bill going through parliament... this is the kind of nuclear option of saying we will sort of unilaterally overrule the process. we are giving ourselves the powers to override it. we had a big government reorganisation this week as part of the reshuffle. there were not that many personnel changed, but where they sit changed, and they've got all these new government departments. what do you think about that? is that an effective tool and is that a good way of reorganising things? i think generally one shouldn't be shuffling departments all the time. but you can build up a situation where, over years, because you're not shuffling it, it eventually gets out of sync with your priorities, and then you've just got to grasp the nettle. and i think that's what happened in this case, really. beis was too big and all the other departments were too small and you just had to reorder it a bit. and it seems sensible to me to have a dedicated energy

department at the moment, for example. so i mean, it's a sort of technical reshuffle rather than a political reshuffle. liz truss was back this week, although for some of us she never really went away because she was dabbling here and there this whole time. what did you think of her essay and her big, long interview? so i mean, it's a really interesting essay, obviously, and we learnt a lot or rather had confirmed quite a few things that we all suspected. such as? there was a... how shall we put it? there was some friction between the official treasury and the sort of machinery of economic policy and the wish to kind of get on and make changes to things. and that's not surprising. i think some of the interesting moments she doesn't comment on. and, you know, i would dearly love to know why she appointed jeremy hunt in that week, and allowed him to change her policy from one policy to another. and that was when the

game was up, i think. so she could have appointed somebody else and maybe survived? i think that, although there were undoubtedly extremely difficult periods, i think in somewhat different circumstances, the government could still have battled through that. but certain things happened that made it impossible. do you fear that, fairly or otherwise, because of what happened to liz truss, her government and her ideas so spectacularly, will make it very difficult for any future advocate of a similar kind of political world view to win the argument? because people will forever say, or at least say fora while, cor, blimey, look what happened the last time it was tried? i did worry that immediately after it all happened. i'm not so worried about it now, because i can see the growth, free market

ideas bubbling up again through the conservative partx — they're part of the dna of the party and they don't go away. and, you know, we've got this conservative growth group thing. we've got the arguments out there in the public domain. and, you know, to me, what was interesting was... is that a whatsapp group? are you pinging round messages between yourselves on this? if there is, i'm not on it! any group administrators listening to this...! but i do think that it was an interesting reaction to her article because there obviously there were a lot of people saying it just shows how disastrous the whole period was and how many misjudgments were made. but i did think there were some other interesting reactions from economic commentators, and that bit of the world said, pausing and thinking, maybe, you know, there's something in the argument that says, you know, she could have been told a bit more about ldis. maybe the markets weren't handled as perfectly. that was the pensions bit that blew up.

that's right. yeah. lord frost, thank you very much. i'm very intrigued to see if the next time we meet you will be a conservative mp and you wouldn't have the "lord" title. but i'm even more intrigued by what you're going to call your book one day. we shall see. thank you very much. cheers. and that's all for this episode of newscast. thank you very much for being part of it. we will be back with another one very soon. bye! newscast. from the bbc. hello. it looks like the weekend is not looking bad at all, it's just around the corner. dry weather on the way. how about friday?

it is going to be a bit cloudy, across northern and western parts of the country. the best of the sunshine in the south—east of the uk, and, in fact, this is where the skies have been clearing. you can see all the cloud piling into north—western areas, milder conditions here too over the south—westerly winds, and bits and pieces of rain through the early hours. but where the clear skies have developed across southern parts of england, the temperatures will be lowest first thing on friday, and rural spots could be as low as minus five degrees. more like plus five, i think, in the lowlands of scotland. you can see how this milder air is pushing into scotland, northern ireland, northern parts of england, and also into wales, but with that also comes a lot of cloud, and, at times, the cloud will be thick enough, here in the west, to produce a little bit of drizzle, but i think in western scotland it will be rain. on the other hand, in eastern scotland, with some sunny spells in aberdeen, it could be around 13 degrees. but after a colder start to the day in the south, it will be about nine or so, i think, in london, and after a bright start, the clouds will thicken, as well. let's have a look at the weekend, then. high pressure in charge

of the weather, so you would think all settled, sunny weather — well, not necessarily. first up, there's a lot of cloud stuck in this area of high pressure, and it will be slow to move across central parts of the uk, so i think saturday, at least at times, will be cloudy, a few glimmers of sunshine certainly on the cards. and temperatures quite uniform, typically between 11 and 13 celsius, and the high pressure still with us on sunday, when you are in the centre of the high, the winds are very, very light. around the edges of the high pressure, the winds tend to be stronger, so for northern ireland and western scotland, i think, more of a brisk wind, whereas lighter winds, and feeling just that little bit milder than in the sunny spells across east anglia. and the high pressure, this is into next week, monday, tuesday, the high pressure still very much dominating the weather, notjust around the uk, but across much of europe. so, sunny, ithink, until about tuesday, wednesday. very little change on the weather front. beyond that, some rain possibly on the way, but dry until then. bye— bye.

welcome to bbc news — i'm monika plaha. our top stories: four days on from the earthquake — 20,000 people are now known to have died in turkey and syria. still, relatives hope their loved ones might emerge alive. yesterday i tried to dig, myself, but you can't. you see the concrete like this, it pushes. we have no power to lift it. this was an entire neighbourhood and it is completely destroyed. hundreds of apartments, thousands of people — of apartments, thousands of people and the majority of them are still— people and the majority of them are still buried. there are stories too of miraculous survival. we'll hear from doctors looking after the syrian baby born in the rubble.

in other news, nicaragua frees more than 200 opposition