hello and welcome to inside politics. i m john king in washington. thank you for sharing the sad news day with us. a massive earthquake shakes turkey and syria leaving thousands dead, buildings toppled. fear now that more will die waiting for rescues that won t happen in time. plus, super power spy games, right now american investigators are searching for the records of that chinese balloon, the weekend shoot down off the carolina coast, punctuating a tense moment between washington and beijing. and president biden enters tomorrow s state of the union with plan to spotlight his accomplishments but does so with americans, in a sour mood about his leadership, his management of the economy and his plan to wrangle inflation. up first tragic deaths and devastation, an enormous earthquake changing the landscape in syria and turkey be neath the feet of millions. the number of dead stands at 2300. it is sadly rising every hour. now, pulling people out is a constant, critica
people killed. in 1999, there was a 7.4 magnitude earthquake that 17,000 people were killed in, in northwest turkey, and after that the turks got smart about beefing up their building codes, but as we re seeing from the pictures today those efforts did not go far enough quickly enough. turkish authorities say there are more than 2800 buildings that have been damaged. of course there are hundreds, maybe thousands of buildings that have been damaged on the syriaen side of the border. imagine how high the death toll could rise, considering this happened in the overnight hours when the vast majority of people were sleeping. now you mentioned there is a frantic effort to try to find people who may be trapped under the rubble, but they are dealing with darkness at the moment. they are also dealing with very poor weather. right now it s in the low 40s in most areas that were affected, but it s expected to drop down to freezing by the morning and wednesday and thursday it will be below freezin