Our daily voyage around the world

🇹🇷🇸🇾 The death toll from Monday’s series of earthquakes in Turkey and Syria rose past 21,000 yesterday. The incident is now the world’s deadliest earthquake since the 7.0-magnitude tremor that struck Haiti in 2010, killing between 92,000 and 316,000 people and displacing 1.3 million more. The World Bank yesterday announced plans to provide $1.78 billion in aid to Turkey to help relief and recovery efforts.

🇨🇭 Swiss trader Trafigura Group is missing up to $577 million worth of nickel. The metal is missing due to suspected fraud, which was first discovered when the Trafigura Group opened a shipping container supposedly full of nickel… and found a lower-value material inside instead. Trafigura said the perpetrators of the suspected fraud were companies it believed to be controlled by metals trader Prateek Gupta, who reportedly sent fake containers filled with low-value materials over the years while simultaneously falsifying documents to make it seem like the shipments contained nickel (which fetches $30,000 per ton).

🇺🇦 SpaceX is limiting Ukraine’s ability to use Starlink satellite internet. Starlink has provided Ukraine's military with broadband communications since Russia invaded last February, with at least 25,000 terminals active in the country as of November. But SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said yesterday that Ukraine recently used Starlink to control unmanned aircraft – and the space company has pledged to never to use the service “for offensive purposes.” The change doesn’t mean that all 25,000 terminals will be deactivated, just that Ukraine won’t be able to use Starlink to control its military drones.