Turkey resorts to mass burials after massive earthquake

KAHRAMANMARAS, Turkey — There is an almost assembly-line quality to the burials in this southern Turkish city near the epicenter of one of the world's deadliest natural disasters in years. The exigencies of mass death have left little other choice since Monday's magnitude 7.8 earthquake transformed the area into a charnel house of mangled bodies and crushed masonry.

And so, with every day as climbs higher — on Thursday, it leaped past the 20,000 threshold across southern Turkey and— excavators lumber like ungainly beasts across the pine-forest cemetery on Kahramanmaras' outskirts, scooping out 200-foot-long trenches to receive victims.