Screen grab from a video posted by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on October 24, 2025, shows what he says is U.S. military forces conducting a strike on a vessel being operated by Tren de Aragua trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean Sea in on October 23, 2025. (X/@SecWar)

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A military helicopter carrying Injured victims of an earthquake that killed hundreds and destroyed villages in eastern Afghanistan takes off in Mazar Dara, Kunar province, Afghanistan, Monday, Sept. 1, 2025.
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Hurricane Milton crashed into the U.S. State of Florida as a Category-3 storm Wednesday (October 9, 2024), pounding the coast with ferocious winds of over 100 mph (160 kph), heavy rain and producing a series of tornadoes around the state. Tampa avoided a direct hit.

The cyclone had maximum sustained winds of 120 mph (205 kph) as it made landfall at 8:30 p.m. near Siesta Key, the National Hurricane Center said. Siesta Key is a prosperous strip of white-sand beaches home to 5,500 people about 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of Tampa.

More than 1.5 million homes and businesses were without power Wednesday night in Florida, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports. The highest number of outages were in Hardee County, as well as neighboring Sarasota and Manatee counties.

Before Milton even made landfall, tornados were touching down across the State. The Spanish Lakes Country Club near Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, was hit particularly hard, with homes destroyed and some residents killed.

“We have lost some life,” St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson told WPBF News, though he wouldn’t say how many people were killed.

Tampa Bay suffers

The Tampa Bay area has not taken a direct hit from a major hurricane in more than a century, but the storm was still bringing a potentially deadly storm surge to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast, including densely populated areas such as Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota and Fort Myers.

The National Weather Service said flash flooding was occurring in the Tampa Bay area, including St. Petersburg, where over 16 inches (41 centimeters) of rain had fallen.

Heavy rains were also likely to cause flooding inland along rivers and lakes as Milton traverses the Florida Peninsula as a hurricane, eventually to emerge in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday.

About 125 homes were destroyed before the hurricane even made landfall, many of them mobile homes in communities for senior citizens, said Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

About 90 minutes after making landfall, Milton was centered about 20 miles (30 kilometers) northeast of Sarasota and had weakened slightly with maximum sustained winds of 110 mph (175 kph), becoming a Category 2 storm, the hurricane center reported. It was moving east-northeast at 16 mph (26 kph).

Milton slammed into a Florida region still reeling from Hurricane Helene, which caused heavy damage to beach communities with storm surge and killed a dozen people in seaside Pinellas County alone.

Evacuation warnings

Earlier, officials issued dire warnings to flee or face grim odds of survival.

“This is it, folks,” said Cathie Perkins, emergency management director in Pinellas County, which sits on the peninsula that forms Tampa Bay. “Those of you who were punched during Hurricane Helene, this is going to be a knockout. You need to get out, and you need to get out now.”

By late afternoon, some officials said the time had passed for such efforts, suggesting that people who stayed behind hunker down instead. By the evening, some counties announced they had suspended emergency services.

Milton was expected to remain a hurricane as it plowed across the state, including the heavily populated Orlando area, through Thursday.

Close on the heels of Helene

The storm threatened communities still reeling two weeks after Hurricane Helene flooded streets and homes in western Florida and left at least 230 people dead across the South. In many places along the coast, municipalities raced to collect and dispose of debris before Milton’s winds and storm surge could toss it around and compound any damage. Surge was projected to reach as high as 9 feet (2.7 meters) in Tampa Bay.

The famous Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which spans the mouth of Tampa Bay, closed around midday. Other major bridges also closed.

At a news conference in Tallahassee, Governor Ron DeSantis described deployment of a wide range of resources, including 9,000 National Guard members from Florida and other States; over 50,000 utility workers from as far as California; and highway patrol cars with sirens to escort gasoline tankers to replenish supplies so people could fill up their tanks before evacuating.

“Unfortunately, there will be fatalities. I don’t think there’s any way around that,” Mr. DeSantis said.

Authorities have issued mandatory evacuation orders across 15 Florida counties with a total population of about 7.2 million people. Officials warned that anyone staying behind must fend for themselves, because first responders were not expected to risk their lives attempting rescues at the height of the storm.

Disney World shuts down

By early afternoon, airlines had canceled about 1,900 flights. SeaWorld was closed all day Wednesday, and Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando shut down in the afternoon.

More than 60% of gas stations in Tampa and St. Petersburg were out of gas Wednesday afternoon, according to GasBuddy. Mr. DeSantis said the State’s overall supply was fine, and highway patrol officers were escorting tanker trucks to replenish the supply.

In the Tampa Bay area’s Gulfport, Christian Burke and his mother stayed put in their three-story concrete home overlooking the bay. Burke said his father designed this home with a Category 5 in mind — and now they’re going to test it.

As a passing police vehicle blared encouragement to evacuate, Burke acknowledged staying isn’t a good idea and said he’s “not laughing at this storm one bit.”

Emergency services work at a building hit by an air strike in Damascus, Syria. File
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Israeli strikes in central Syria killed at least seven people late Sunday (September 8, 2024), including three civilians, a war monitor reported.

Since the start of the civil war in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes there, targeting pro-Iranian groups in particular.

“The number of dead in the Israeli strikes on the Masyaf region stands at seven, namely three civilians, including a man and his son who were in a car, and four unidentified soldiers,” said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a vast network of sources inside the country.

The attack also wounded at least 15 others and destroyed military facilities in the area, the Observatory said. 

“Thirteen violent explosions rang out in the zone housing scientific research centres in Masyaf where pro-Iranian groups and weapons development experts are present,” the group said in an earlier statement.

The Syrian state news agency Sana had previously reported five killed and 19 wounded near Masyaf, citing a medical source.

“Around 11:20 pm (2020 GMT) on Sunday (September 8, 2024), the Israeli enemy carried out an air attack from the northwest of Lebanon targeting a number of military sites in the central region,” Sana reported, citing a military source. “Our air defence shot down some missiles.”

Israeli air raids in Syria have intensified since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.

Israeli authorities rarely comment on individual strikes in Syria, but have repeatedly said they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence there.

“At the end of August, three pro-Iranian fighters were killed in the central region of Homs in strikes attributed to Israel,” the Observatory said.

A few days later, the Israeli military said it had killed an unspecified number of fighters belonging to Hamas ally Islamic Jihad in a strike in Syria near the Lebanese border.

With much of Gaza reduced to rubble by 10 months of war, counting the dead has become a challenge for the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, as the death count nears 40,000.

Israel has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the daily figures put out by the ministry and US President Joe Biden did so too in the early stages of the war.

But several United Nations agencies that operate in Gaza have said the figures are credible and they are frequently cited by international organisations. 

Data collection

Two AFP correspondents witnessed health facilities enter deaths in the ministry’s database.

Gaza health officials first identify the bodies of the dead, by the visual recognition of a relative or friend, or by the recovery of personal items.

The dead person’s information is then entered in the health ministry’s digital database, usually including name, gender, birth date and ID number.

When bodies cannot be identified because they are unrecognisable or when no one claims them, staff record the death under a number, alongside all the information they were able to gather.

Any distinguishing marks that may help with later identification, whether personal items or a birthmark, are collected and photographed.

Central registry

Gaza’s health ministry has issued several statements setting out its procedures for compiling the death count.

In public hospitals under the direct supervision of the territory’s Hamas government, the “personal information and identity number” of every Palestinian killed during the war are entered in the hospital’s database as soon as they are pronounced dead.

The data is then sent to the health ministry’s central registry on a daily basis.

For those who die in private hospitals and clinics, their information is taken down on a form that must be sent to the ministry within 24 hours to be added to the central registry, a ministry statement said.

The ministry’s “information centre” then verifies the data entries to “ensure they do not contain any duplicates or mistakes”, before saving them in the database, the statement added.

Gaza residents are also encouraged by Palestinian authorities to report any deaths in their families on a designated government website. The data is used for the ministry’s verifications.

The ministry is staffed with civil servants that answer to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority as well as to the Hamas-led government in Gaza.

‘High correlation’

An investigation conducted by Airways, an NGO focused on the impact of war on civilians, analysed the data entries for 3,000 of the dead and found “a high correlation” between the ministry’s data and what Palestinian civilians reported online, with 75 percent of publicly reported names also appearing on the ministry’s list.

The study found that the ministry’s figures had become “less accurate” as the war dragged on, a development it attributed to the heavy damage to health infrastructure resulting from the war.

For instance, at southern Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, one of the few still at least partly functioning, only 50 out of 400 computers still work, its director Atef al-Hout told AFP.

Israeli authorities frequently criticise the ministry’s figures for failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians. But neither the army nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deny the scale of the overall count.

The press office of Gaza’s Hamas government estimates that nearly 70 percent of the roughly 40,000 dead are women (about 11,000) or children (at least 16,300).

Several UN agencies, including the agency in charge of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), have said the ministry’s figures are credible.

“In the past — the five, six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip — these figures were considered as credible and no one ever really challenged these figures,”, the agency’s chief Philippe Lazzarini said in October.

A study by British medical review The Lancet estimated that 186,000 deaths can be attributed to the war in Gaza, directly or indirectly as a result of the humanitarian crisis it has triggered.

The war in Gaza was triggered by the October 7 attack by Hamas, which resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

People gather at the scene of a collapsed two-storey building in Jos, Nigeria, on July, 12, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

A two-story school collapsed during morning classes Friday in north-central Nigeria, killing 22 students and sending rescuers on a frantic search for more than 100 people trapped in the rubble, authorities said.

The Saints Academy college in Plateau state’s Busa Buji community collapsed shortly after students, many of whom were 15 years old or younger, arrived for classes.

A total of 154 students were initially trapped in the rubble, but Plateau police spokesperson Alfred Alabo later said 132 of them had been rescued and were being treated for injuries in various hospitals. He said 22 students died. An earlier report by local media had said at least 12 people were killed.

Dozens of villagers gathered near the school, some weeping and others offering to help, as excavators combed through the debris from the part of the building that had caved in.

One woman was seen wailing and attempting to go closer to the rubble as others held her back.

Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency said rescue and health workers as well as security forces had been deployed at the scene immediately after the collapse, launching a search for the trapped students.

“To ensure prompt medical attention, the government has instructed hospitals to prioritize treatment without documentation or payment,” Plateau state’s commissioner for information, Musa Ashoms, said in a statement.

The state government blamed the tragedy on the school’s “weak structure and location near a riverbank.” It urged schools facing similar issues to shut down.

Building collapses are becoming common in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with more than a dozen such incidents recorded in the last two years. Authorities often blame such disasters on a failure to enforce building safety regulations and on poor maintenance.