World

Thousands of collapsed buildings, widespread destruction, and deep anguish were reported alongside over 2,300 dead and thousands more injured after a pair of earthquakes—an initial 7.8 tremor on the Richter scale in the early morning and another that measured 7.5—devastated Syria and Turkey on Monday.

Amid dozens of aftershocks—and the quakes being also felt in Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories—the full scale of the destruction and the ultimate death toll remains unknown, though early estimates of the dead and wounded were rising by the hour.

A mother and her seven children aged two to 14 died on Monday after a faulty dryer apparently set ablaze their house in eastern France, authorities said.

The fire, the deadliest such blaze involving children in France in a decade, broke out shortly after midnight in the rented family home in Charly-sur-Marne, a town around 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Paris in the Champagne region.

Six months after being stabbed, British author Salman Rushdie on Tuesday publishes his new novel "Victory City", an "epic tale" of a 14th-century woman who defies a patriarchal world to rule a city.

Written before the US knife attack that nearly took the Indian-born author's life, the novel purports to be a translation of a historical epic originally written in Sanskrit.

Hunter Lars Bjork points to fresh tracks in the snow as he lumbers through a whited-out forest in central Sweden, where the biggest wolf hunt in modern times is drawing controversy.

"We have quite a lot of wolves here, we're actually sitting in a new wolf territory where we are now," Bjork, a predator expert at the Swedish Hunters' Association, tells AFP as he settles into a small hunting lodge a few kilometres (miles) outside the town of Vasteras.

Britain faces its largest ever strike by health workers on Monday as tens of thousands of nurses and ambulance workers walk out in an escalating pay dispute which the health minister said would place further strain on the National Health Service (NHS).

Nurses and ambulance workers have been striking separately on and off since late last year but Monday's walkout involving both, largely in England, will represent the biggest in the 75-year history of the NHS.

The Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a strong supporter of President Vladimir Putin, worked for Soviet intelligence while living in Switzerland in the 1970s, Swiss newspapers reported, citing declassified archives.

According to the Sonntagszeitung and Le Matin Dimanche weeklies, the Swiss police file on the man who today serves as the spiritual head of the Russian Orthodox Church "confirms that 'Monsignor Kirill', as he is referred to in this document, worked for the KGB."

"It is dizzying," Eric Vanoncini acknowledged to the classroom full of anxious teachers as reams of text generated by the ChatGPT bot unfurled on the large screen behind him.

"It risks upending the world of education as we know it."

Beijing confirmed on Monday a balloon spotted flying over Latin America is Chinese, while the United States worked to recover what it claimed was an unmanned spy craft it shot down at the weekend.

China has expressed fury at Washington's decision to shoot down a device that it insists was an unmanned weather surveillance aircraft that had veered off course last week.

A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria early on Monday, killing more than a thousand people as they slept, levelling buildings and sending tremors that were felt as far away as Cyprus, Egypt and Iraq. Hours later, a second earthquake of magnitude 7.6 centered on the same region in southeastern Turkey struck, the country's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority said. Follow FRANCE 24's liveblog for the latest developments.

One of the largest quakes to strike Turkey in a century wiped out entire sections of major cities in a region filled with millions of people who have fled the civil war in Syria and other conflicts.