Quake Zone: Drone footage from Turkey shows building after building collapsed, some with rescue workers on the pile, many with none.

  The counted number of dead this morning is 17,000 in Turkey and Syria, and still rising. The first 72 hours has passed since the two major earthquakes and hope will fade quickly for people still trapped in the rubble. Cold weather has made the situation worse. Most affecting is the video of tiny children being pulled out alive.

The War Room:  In an announcement that Britain will train Ukrainian pilots in NATO standard jet fighters, British prime Minister Rishi Sunak hinted that the Brits might supply Ukraine with planes as well. “With regard to aircraft, we have already said nothing is off the table, and the first step on that has to be to have people who can fly what are very sophisticated pieces of kit,”  Sunak said during a joint appearance at a southern England military base with Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky, who had made a surprise visit.

  Zelensky said that without new weapons for Ukraine, “There will be stagnation, which will not lead to anything good.” In a later speech, Zelensky said new jets are “wings for freedom.”

Tweet This: The House oversight Committee has gone to work investigating Republican claims that Twitter colluded with the Biden administration and the FBI to suppress a New York Post article about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he abandoned in a repair shop.

  Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer claims the  FBI followed instructions to censor the Hunter Biden story because they were “terrified of Joe Biden not winning the election.” 

  A lawyer who worked for Twitter at the time said no such thing happened. But the Republicans are pressing forward with their theory that Twitter was colluding to tamp down conservative views.

  Journalist Matt Taibbi, who was allowed to see twitter’s internal messages, said, “there is no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story.”

  Democrat members of the committee in turn noted examples of Donald Trump pressuring Twitter to take down posts he didn’t like, which the witnesses confirmed.

Podblast: Along similar lines, Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast is a primary spreader of disinformation, according to a recent survey.

  Researchers at the Brookings Institute pored over 36,603 podcast episodes from 79 political talk shows and found that nearly 20 percent of Bannon’s “War Room” episodes contained a false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statement. Bannon was for a time the chief strategist for then President Donald Trump.

  Overall, the researchers found that about 70 percent of the podcasts they reviewed posited at least one false or misleading claim. Conservative podcasters were 11 times as likely as the liberals to share a verifiably false claim. 

Deflated: The US believes the Chinese balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina was part bigger fleet of intelligence inflatables that have been flown over five continents.

 “The United States was not the only target of this broader program,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. China claims it was a weather balloon.

  Some analysts say that China has discovered “near space” — 12 to 60 miles above earth — as “a new front for militarization.” China is adding new tech to old tech, developing stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons that could be either spy or weapons platforms.

The Obit Page: Bob Orben, a professional joke writer who fed lines to everyone from Dick Gregory to Jack Paar, Red Skelton and even President Gerald Ford, died on February 2 in Alexandria, Virginia at 95.

  Orben wrote jokes for comedians, a newsletter of jokes, and books of jokes. But one of his toughest assignments was to make the lumbering Gerald Ford funny.

  Most of the jokes Ford told while he was President don’t hold up because no one remembers the references anymore. But in 1975, working off an accusation by Lyndon Johnson that Ford was “so dumb that he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time,” Ford said, “It’s a great pleasure — and great honor — to be at Yale Law’s Sesquicentennial Convocation, and I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.”

The Spin Rack: Russia’s Vladimir Putin is suspected of approving the sale of antiaircraft missiles that Russia-backed separatists used to shoot down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over eastern Ukraine in 2014, a Dutch-led international team found. The investigators say there’s no evidence that Putin ordered the actual downing of the jet. — Utah Sen. Mitt Romney at the State of the Union confronted New York rep. George Santos and told him, “You don’t belong here,” according to witnesses. Romney later confirmed it and Santos said to reporters that the senator’s condemnation was, “not very Mormon of him.” — 4.9 million bottles of Fabuloso Multi-Purpose Cleaner have been recalled because of potential bacteria contamination. — In a streamlining of operations that will save $5.5 billion, the Walt Disney Company is firing about 7,000 employees, 4 percent of its global work force. — At least nine Republican-led state legislatures want to restrict or criminalize drag shows. There’s a proposal in the Tennessee legislature, for instance, that would categorize “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest,” as “adult cabaret performance,” essentially defining it as a strip show. They would make it a crime for a drag artist to perform on public property or in a location where a minor can see the show. — Speaker Kevin McCarthy appearing on Fox News excused the members of Congress who heckled President Biden at the State of the Union, calling them merely “passionate.”

Below the Fold: Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene is the talk of the nation for wearing a long white coat with a white alpaca fur collar to the State of the Union address. Fashion critics noted that she looked like Cruella DeVille and, darlings, no one wears white after Labor Day.

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