From the New York Times, I'm Serena Tavredici, and this is the Daily.

The scale of death in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria is now raising questions about

who is to blame. In Turkey, the government has placed that blame squarely on builders

and property developers, accusing them of choosing profits over safety. But the reality

is far more complicated.

Today, my colleague Ben Hubbard, on why a good part of the responsibility, may rest with

the Turkish government itself.

It's Tuesday, February 28.

So Ben, we're now at more than 50,000 dead in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. And

for weeks, the question we've all been asking is, how is it possible that so many people

could have died? You've been investigating that question in Turkey, where the loss of

life was by far the greatest. Tell us what you've learned so far.

The first thing we need to acknowledge is that this was a very powerful quake and it

struck a very, very large territory. So that's what we're starting with. And when I got

to the earthquake zone after this had happened, one of the first things that struck me is

that not everything is knocked down. You have this sort of puzzling mosaic of some areas

where the buildings, at least from the outside, look more or less fine. And then all of a sudden

you'll find one that's completely flat. There was one particular site that we went to

where there was a work crew working trying to rescue some people who were trapped in the rubble.

And there just happened to be a bunch of volunteer construction workers who were standing

around sort of willing to help out. They were there with their hard hats and their equipment.

And they were inspecting the site. And they were commenting on how the rebar that was there

...