welcome to bbc news. more now on the news that a massive earthquake has killed more than 500 people in turkey and syria, and i canjoin my colleague for more. welcome to all of you watching on pbs and around the globe. we are bringing you special coverage of breaking news this hour. a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake has struck northern syria and also south eastern turkey. official figures say officialfigures say more official figures say more than 650 people have been killed, that figure will rise. the earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.8 struckjust before dawn. the epicentre was in the turkish province of gaziantep. buildings collapsed, hundreds of miles away. there were also reports of many of the casualties in northern syria, across the border. the tremor was also felt in lebanon, gaza, jordan, cyprus and iraq. turkey has declared a state of emergency. syria s government, meanwhile, has also held an emergency meeting in order to decide how they will respond. witnesses from
chinese spy balloon and when they realized they must tell the president about it. this comes as u.s. navy divers and other military personnel are scouring the ocean floor off the coast of myrtle beach, south carolina. and we re getting new video in to cnn. a resident in south carolina shot this and said he believes it could be debris from the balloon. to be clear, cnn cannot independently verify whether or not this is, in fact, debris from that chinese spy balloon. we re reaching out to the navy for comment. in the meantime, republicans are condemning president biden for failing to take action on the balloon sooner. cnn s alex marquardt joins us now with more. alex, you re learning more about this timing, when it came down to the decision-making that was taking place inside the biden administration. we heard the president stating to reporters emphatically yesterday that he made this call on wednesday that the balloon be shot down as soon as it was safe to do so. but there s m
administration acted indecisively and waited too long, letting the balloon float across the continental u.s. for days. president biden says the military advised him there would be less danger to the public in shooting down the balloon once it got over the ocean. lawmakers are reacting sharply and along party lines. i want to start by doing something that i don t do very often, which is commending joe biden for actually having the guts to shoot this down. that was the right thing to do. that is absolutely what the president should have done. unfortunately he didn t do that until a week after it entered u.s. airspace. they re saying we should have shot down the balloon the minute we saw it. i would use two words in answering these gop criticisms. they are premature, and they are political. presidents have the ability to go before a camera, go before the nation and basically explain these things early on, and his failure to do so, i don t understand that. i don t understan