Russia’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday the United States had questions to answer over its role in explosions on the undersea Nord Stream gas pipelines last year.

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has defended his government’s response to two catastrophic earthquakes, saying it was impossible to prepare for the scale of the disaster.

The US believes a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down over its territory is part of a wider fleet that has spanned five continents.

Authorities in New Zealand announced Wednesday that they had intercepted a 3.5-ton shipment of cocaine afloat in a remote swath of the Pacific Ocean.

Hope of finding survivors is quickly fading as stretched rescue teams in Turkey and Syria search for signs of life in the debris of thousands of buildings toppled by the world’s deadliest earthquake in more than a decade.

With hundreds of people trapped, rescuers have lamented the lack of international humanitarian assistance desperately needed after the devastating earthquake that killed thousands in northwest Syria.

Many of the rescue videos that have emerged from opposition-held north-western Syria since Monday have come from the small town of Jindayris, where around 50 buildings are reported to have collapsed.

Across the street from an Aleppo apartment building which was reduced to rubble by the quake, 25-year-old Youssef has waited for two days for news of his father, mother, brother, sister and her son.

Turkey’s president has hit back at mounting anger over the state’s response, saying: “It is not possible to be prepared for a disaster this big.”

Bodies of people killed in the earthquake in southern Turkey on Monday are being left out on the street as the hunt continues for survivors.

President Joe Biden challenged Republicans to lift the U.S. debt ceiling and support tax policies that were friendlier to middle-class Americans on Tuesday in a State of the Union speech that served as a blueprint for his 2024 re-election campaign.

Residents of five small gold-mining villages in southern Peru’s Arequipa region struggled Tuesday to salvage belongings after landslides caused by strong rains killed at least 12 people and dragged mud, water and rocks that turned precarious homes and other buildings into rubble.