“Happy 93rd birthday to my darling Dad,” Marina wrote on Facebook on Tuesday (July 10).

“Nobody can fully know what it took to get back in the game, go out there and fight and then roll your sleeves up to work to save our beloved Malaysia.

“I’m proud of many things you’ve achieved but nothing has made me prouder than seeing you still willing to listen and learn from your new colleagues,” she added.

Marina ended the note with several tongue-in-cheek hashtags that echoed Malaysian’s awe over the nonagenarian’s stamina and tenacity, including “#puttingusalltoshame” and “#ihopeiinheritedthesame”.

However, even the doting daughter does not know what is Dr Mahathir’s secret fountain of youth as she wrote “#idontknowwherehisenergycomesfrom”.

While Dr Mahathir has dismissed rumours that he goes for stem cell therapy, he is a firm believer in staying active and leading a healthy lifestyle.

“I would prefer to rest, of course, but I would like to advise people not to rest when they grow old,” he told Bernama on Monday (July 9) when queried during a recent trip to Tokyo on how he remained healthy.

Dr Mahathir, who has the distinction of being the oldest Prime Minister in the world, explained that muscles would deteriorate if they were not used.

“If you lie down all the time, the muscles (eventually) cannot even carry your weight, you cannot stand, you cannot walk. So it’s not good when you are old (that) you just lie down and do nothing,” he said, pointing out that it was the same with one’s brain.

“If you don’t use your brain, you don’t think, you don’t solve problems, you don’t read, you don’t write, the brain regresses and you become senile…so always be active,” said Dr Mahathir who was born on July 10, 1925.

The record downpours that began last week have stopped and receding flood waters have laid bare the destruction that has cut a swathe through the west of the country.

In the city of Kurashiki, the flooding engulfed entire districts at one point, forcing some people to their rooftops to wait for rescue.

By Tuesday morning, rescue workers were going door-to-door, looking for survivors — or victims — of the disaster.

“It’s what we call a grid operation, where we are checking every single house to see if there are people still trapped inside them,” an official with the local Okayama prefecture government told AFP.

“We know it’s a race against time, we are trying as hard as we can.”

In the Mabi district of Kurashiki, the water left behind a fine yellow silt that has transformed the area into moonscape.

Cars driving through kicked up clouds of dust. People walking around wore medical masks or covered their mouths with small towels to protect themselves against the particulates.

Stores were still closed, and inside one barber’s shop the red sofas, customer chairs, and standing hairdryers were all covered with the same silt.

Fumiko Inokuchi, 61, was inside her home, sorting though the damage caused by floods that submerged the entire first floor.

She escaped the house on Saturday, crossing the street to take shelter in a three-storey care home for the elderly, from where she watched in horror as the waters rose.

“I saw my house sink underwater and I couldn’t do anything at all, there was just nothing I could do. I felt helpless,” she said, retrieving a photo of her children playing baseball.

“I got married here, and we built this house two years afterwards. We raised our three small sons to adulthood here, there are so many memories,” she said, her eyes welling with tears.

New dangers from heat

The crisis is the deadliest rain-related disaster in over three decades, and one that has sparked national grief.

On Monday Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cancelled a four-stop foreign trip as the death toll rose.

Top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Tuesday that at least 141 people had been killed. Media said dozens more remained missing and the tally was expected to rise further.

Around 75,000 police, firemen and troops have been deployed in the search and rescue operation across parts of central and western Japan, Suga said, warning that hot weather posed new risks.

Thousands of people remain in shelters after authorities issued evacuation orders for as many of five million residents, and local authorities in some areas were offering drinking water and bathing services for those in homes without their own supply.

“It will be over 35 Celsius in some areas… Please be careful about heatstroke if you’re doing reconstruction outdoors, and continue to be vigilant about landslides,” Suga said.

The government said it would tap around $20 million in reserve funds to provide aid to those affected by the disaster. Abe was expected to visit the areas in coming days.

A former advisor to George W. Bush who now sits on the US Court of Appeals in Washington, Kavanaugh began his career as a clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, and will succeed him on the nine-seat bench when he retires at the end of the month.

“Judge Kavanaugh has impeccable credentials, unsurpassed qualifications, and a proven commitment to equal justice under the law,” Trump said as he announced his much-anticipated decision in a prime-time address from the White House.

“There is no one in America more qualified for this position and no one more deserving,” Trump said, urging the Senate to swiftly confirm his nominee.

Kennedy long served as the tie-breaking swing vote between the Supreme Court’s conservatives and liberals, and his departure handed Trump an opportunity to place a decidedly conservative stamp on the bench.

The US leader kept the suspense running for days over his choice for the crucial vacancy, narrowing the selection down to a shortlist of four judges, all with solid right-wing credentials.

“Justice Kennedy devoted his career to securing liberty. I am deeply honored to be nominated to fill his seat on the Supreme Court,” the 53-year-old Kavanaugh said as he received the nomination.

“My judicial philosophy is straightforward. A judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law,” he said.

“A judge must interpret statutes as written. And a judge must interpret the constitution as written, informed by history and tradition and precedent.”

A Yale University graduate, Kavanaugh has demonstrated his conservative credentials on numerous occasions, including when he opposed Obamacare, the sweeping universal health insurance plan unveiled under Trump’s Democratic predecessor Barack Obama.

In the 1990s, he led an investigation into the suicide of Bill Clinton aide Vince Foster, who was linked to the Whitewater controversy that began as a probe into the presidential couple’s real estate investments.

Kavanaugh later contributed to prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s report into Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

After moving into the White House in 2001, Bush recruited Kavanaugh as legal counsel before later naming him to the appellate court.

In 2012, Kavanaugh was part of a panel that scrapped an Environmental Protection Agency measure aimed at reducing air pollution in the United States.

He recently voiced disagreement with a court decision allowing a teenage unauthorized immigrant to get an abortion.

A practicing Catholic active in various religious organizations, Kavanaugh is a married father of two girls.

The species, baptized Ingenia prima, was about three times the size of the largest Triassic dinosaurs from its era. It was discovered in the Balde de Leyes dig site in San Juan province, 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) west of the Argentine capital Buenos Aires.

The find was published in the specialist Nature Ecology & Evolution journal on Monday and revealed in Argentina by San Martin University’s Scientific Dissemination Agency.

“As soon as we found it, we realized it was something different. We found a shape, the first giant one among all the dinosaurs. That’s the surprise,” said Cecilia Apaldetti, a government and San Juan University researcher.

Excavators found several vertebrae from the neck and tail as well as fore and hind leg bones.

The species “exhibits a growth strategy that was unknown until now and indicates that gigantism originated much earlier than was thought,” said Apaldetti, the study’s co-author.

These were “herbivore dinosaurs, quadrupeds, easily recognizable by their very long neck and tail, and from the sauropod group,” she added.

Before this discovery, it was thought that gigantism developed during the Jurassic period, around 180 million years ago.

Late Triassic

Fellow co-author Ricardo Martinez believes the Ingenia prima is from “a Late Triassic period, possibly 205 million years” ago.

The Triassic period extended from around 250-200 million years ago and the Jurassic from 200-145 million years ago.

The team has been studying the Triassic period, when dinosaurs were just beginning to appear. The first ones were small but as they evolved they tended towards gigantism to defend themselves against predators.

According to scientists, Ingenia prima was the first dinosaur species to reach gigantism and even though it was a long way from the 70 tonnes (tons) that the biggest sauropods weighed from the end of the Cretaceous period (145-66 million years ago), the speed of bone tissue accumulation was greater than that of species from its era and the biggest giants that lived in Patagonia, in the south of Argentina.

The dinosaur’s bone fragments displayed cyclical and seasonal growth, with a different kind of tissue to other sauropods, which allowed it to grow very quickly.

It’s believed that the species grew to eight to 10 meters (26-33 feet) tall — the specimen found was a growing youth measuring six to seven meters — and weighed around 10 tonnes, equal to two or three African elephants.

Another of the species’ features was air cavities in its bones, making it lighter and promoting growth.

The Balde de Leyes site, which spans several thousand hectares (acres), was first discovered in 2001 and since 2014 has produced hundreds of specimens. At the end of the Triassic period it was a type of savannah.

The train, with over 360 people on board, was travelling from the Edirne region on the Greek and Bulgarian borders to Istanbul’s Halkali station on Sunday when six carriages derailed in the Tekirdag region.

Deputy Prime Minister Recep Akdag said 24 people died, in a sharp rise from the previous toll of 10.

The state-run Anadolu news agency quoted Akdag as saying search operations through the derailed train carriages had been completed Monday morning.

Turkish media quoted Health Minister Ahmet Demircan as saying 338 people required hospital treatment after the accident with 124 still hospitalised.

The transport ministry said that the train, carrying 362 passengers, had derailed as recent heavy downpours caused the ground beneath the track to erode away.

Rescuers help injured people seated near derailed wagons after a train accident at Corlu district in Tekirdag on July 8, 2018. // AFP PHOTO

Transport Minister Ahmet Arslan said that the latest checks on the rails had been made in April, Anadolu reported.

Turkish media, including the Hurriyet daily, published pictures showing the erosion had been so bad that part of the track had been in the air with no ground left to support it.

Television pictures showed several train carriages sprawled on their sides, and shocked injured passengers being taken away on stretchers as rescue workers picked through the wreckage.

The train derailed outside the village of Sarilar in the Corlu district of Tekirdag.

– ‘Every available means’ –

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed his condolences over those who lost their lives in the accident that he said has “deeply upset the whole nation”.

The accident, one of Turkey’s worst train disasters of recent years, threatens to cast a shadow over a lavish ceremony scheduled in Ankara later Monday to mark the inauguration of Erdogan for a new presidential mandate and the transition to a new system of government.

Erdogan said all state institutions were “using every means available to help”, vowing that there would be a comprehensive investigation into the “tragic accident”, the presidency said.

Turkey’s audiovisual authority RTUK later said the government had issued a temporary ban on broadcasting images from the scene. This was lifted on Monday morning.

Turkish authorities under Erdogan have over the last years sought to modernise Turkey’s once ramshackle rail network, building several high speed inter-city lines.

Turkish passengers have in general preferred taking planes or buses for inter-city travel but this has been changing with the new high-speed lines.

The train involved in the accident appeared to be one of the slower passenger trains travelling on a single track line.

Turkey’s rail network has been hit by several fatal accidents in recent years.

In January 2008, nine people were killed when a train derailed in the Kutahya region south of Istanbul due to faulty tracks.

And in Turkey’s worst recent rail disaster, 41 people were killed and 80 injured in July 2004 when a high-speed train derailed in the northwestern province of Sakarya.