The 40-kg meteorite measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide traveling 56,000 mph slammed through the moon’s surface on March 17, 2013.

The explosion from the impact, glowing like a 4th magnitude star, was so bright that it could have been seen from Earth with the naked eye. However the flash of light lasted only for a second and was rather difficult to detect.

Ron Suggs an analyst at the Marshall space flight center was the first to notice the explosion on a digital video recorded by one of the monitoring programs.

“It jumped right out at me. It was so bright” he acknowledged.

“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.

“It exploded in a flash nearly ten times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”
Unlike Earth, the moon has no atmosphere to protect it. As there is no oxygen, it poses the question of how they explode.

“Lunar meteors don’t require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site,” NASA explains.

As the crater from the impact could be as wide as 20 meters, comparing it to the brightness of the explosion might give certain explanations to scientists about “lunar meteor showers”.

For the past eight years NASA scientists have been observing the moon as part of a lunar monitoring program to identify new kinds of space debris that can threaten our planet. The US space agency says that this is a ‘good candidate’ for research.

The lunar impact might have been part of a much larger event, Cooke noted. NASA and the University of Western Ontario’s sky cameras detected an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors on Earth. These speeding fireballs rushed along nearly identical orbits between Earth and the asteroid belt. He notes that the Earth and the moon were pelted by meteoroids at about the same time and supposes that these two events were connected.

The NASA lunar monitoring program began in 2005. “Lunar meteor showers” are quite common, since the beginning of the program scientists have detected more than 300 impacts. According to NASA’s observations, half of all lunar meteors come from known meteoroid streams such as the Perseids and Leonids. The rest are from sporadic space debris.

Russia plans to launch its next unmanned mission to the moon in 2015. It will mark the country’s return to the Earth’s natural satellite after a 40-year hiatus. The Russian space agency has said that three lunar exploration missions will be launched from Cosmodrome Vostochny under construction in the country’s Far East region. The first mission is to be dubbed the ‘Luna-Glob-1’.

The DOJ IG said it found “Burke’s conduct in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to be inappropriate for a Department employee and wholly unbefitting a U.S. Attorney.”

Read more

 21st Century Wire says…. Once again the Obama administration is turning a crisis into an opportunity, further tightening it’s grip on individual freedom.  Critics say, that the “media shield law”, could actually remove protection from those seeking to gather information for news reports…

RT

United States President Barack Obama is encouraging Congress to take up a media shield law that was abandoned at the start of his administration, but critics of the bill say it might make it even easier for journalists to be subpoenaed by the government.
-

After the Associated Press revealed on Monday that they are the target of a US Department of Justice probe, Obama asked lawmakers to consider a would-be media shield law that fell apart in Washington after the start of his first presidency in 2009.

The AP wrote this week that the Justice Department subpoenaed two months of phone records likely in an attempt to try and find out with whom the news agency spoke with before publishing a May 2012 article that exposed a Yemeni terror plot foiled by the Central Intelligence Agency. Attorney General Eric Holder called the disclosure of classified information to the AP one of the biggest leaks ever suffered by the US and said publically that it put the American people at risk. On Thursday, Pres. Obama commented that “leaks related to national security can put people at risk,” but suggested that reviving a media shield law that died in Congress could perhaps strike the balance between the public’s right to know and the safety of the nation.

“So the whole goal of this media shield law that was worked on, and largely endorsed by folks like the Washington Post editorial page and prosecutors, was finding a way to strike that balance appropriately,” said the president. “And to the extent this case … has prompted renewed interest about how do we strike that balance properly, I think now is the time for us to go ahead and revisit that legislation. I think that’s a worthy conversation to have and I think that’s important.”

Now as the White House shifts focus from one scandal to another, free speech advocates are concerned that the shield law, as written, wouldn’t do much more than current legislation in terms of thwarting future subpoenas sent to journalists. Trevor Timm, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote in a blog post this week that the media shield law touted by Pres. Obama during his days as a senator in Illinois failed to take shape after he secured his spot in the Oval Office.

“As a Senator, Obama was a vocal supporter of a robust shield law; he co-sponsored a bill in 2007 and campaigned on the issue in 2008,” Timm wrote. “But when the Senate moved to pass the bill as soon as Obama came into office, his administration abruptly changed course and opposed the bill, unless the Senate carved out an exception for all national security reporters.”

When Obama entered the White House in early 2009, he walked away from a Senate where a shield law he advocated for had just started to take shape. Before long, though, his own administration asked for Congress to make adjustments before it ended up on the president’s desk. That original law would, in theory, put in place safeguards that would help prevent journalists from being compelled to testify who their sources are. Once in the White House, though, Obama did an about face.

In September 2009, Charlie Savage wrote for the New York Times that those safeguards “would not apply to leaks of a matter deemed to cause ‘significant’ harm to national security.”

“Moreover, judges would be instructed to be deferential to executive branch assertions about whether a leak caused or was likely to cause such harm, according to officials familiar with the proposal,” Savage wrote.

One of the bill’s authors, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York), had sharp words for the president at the time. “The White House’s opposition to the fundamental essence of this bill is an unexpected and significant setback. It will make it hard to pass this legislation,” the senator said. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pennsylvania), a co-sponsor, called the changes “totally unacceptable.”

“If the president wants to veto it, let him veto it,” Sen. Specter told the Times in 2009. “I think it is different for the president to veto a bill than simply to pass the word from his subordinates to my subordinates that he doesn’t like the bill.”

Ultimately, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the shield law after some minor tweaking in December 2009, but as Savage explained in the Times this week, “a furor over leaking arose after WikiLeaks began publishing archives of secret government documents, and the bill never received a vote.”

The Obama administration was brandishing a confident swagger back then, heading into the elections against a hobbling GOP opponent, and Benghazi had yet to unfold in all of its ugliness.

Syrian army soldiers take control of the village of Western Dumayna, some seven kilometers north of the rebel-held city of Qusayr on May 13, 2013. (AFP Photo / Joseph Eid)

As Hillary Clinton was jetting around on the US State Department budget promoting her ‘Friends of Syria’ Middle East and European tours, and as the CIA were busy like bees working in the gray shadows of Benghazi, Washington and London were laying the groundwork for their new WMD case is Syria.

As last summer drew to a close, President Barack Obama confidently announced he was drawing a ‘Red Line’ in Syria regarding the use of chemical weapons, meaning that any evidence of their use on either side of that conflict would lead to consequences, the obvious inference being automatic US military intervention.

Fast forward to the present, and Washington appears to have been caught in the vortex of its own spin machine, with White House Press Secretary Jay Carney recently forced to ‘clarify’ the President’s infamous ‘Red Line’ decree with what can only be described as desperate political cover. Here Carney attempted to explain away the previous ultimatum and re-explain the President’s position:

“What the president made clear is that it was a red line, and that it was unacceptable, and that it would change his calculus… What he never did – and it is simplistic to do so is to say that ‘if X happens, Y will happen’. He has never said what reaction he would take.”

It’s hard to run a global empire and still pander to sensitive liberal concerns at home. The White House seems to be at pains coming to terms with what the Neoconservative Bush government already knew a decade ago – that there really is no good, safe way to do a military intervention. In the end, the façade of political spin cannot provide ethical cover for invading and toppling another sovereign state. You can’t finesse your way into it, you have to just go for it in full view – lie if you have to, fabricate evidence if need be, and be damned with the political fallout…

Read more at RT

It deployed technological efforts familiar from the 2012 campaign, collecting 1.4 million signatures on a gun-control petition delivered to Capitol Hill last week and producing a widely viewed Internet videomocking congressional Republicans for questioning humans’ contribution to climate change.

The group also raised $4.9 million through March and is awaiting an influx of cash from liberal donors connected to George Soros’s Democracy Alliance to expand its staff beyond the few dozen now on its payroll.

But despite its extensive voter-data files and White House connections, OFA has yet to make much of a mark on the nation’s political landscape. Many of its efforts have been centered in liberal strongholds and Democratic-leaning swing states, with little impact on more conservative areas.

“A real, sustained grass-roots movement — you can’t make that up in a minute,” said Marshall Ganz, a community-organizing expert and public policy senior lecturer at Harvard University. “It’s a long-term investment in grass-roots leadership.”

But OFA Executive Director Jon Carson said that while the group itself is young, many of its members are longtime political activists. “Our volunteers did not hatch out of an egg in 2008,” he said. “They’ve been fighting on issue campaigns for their whole lives.”

OFA is focused on promoting the president’s agenda to reform immigration, strengthen gun control, strike a budget deal and address climate change. Carson said the combination of OFA rallies and local news coverage is helping change voter attitudes, which in turn places pressure on lawmakers to back Obama’s legislative goals.

Read more

Don’t miss this event – Freedom of the press and internet speech is now under direct threat from the government. How, why and who’s doing it – and what you can do about it – will be covered in detail at this important all day symposium event…

‘Exposing The Leveson Common Purpose’

First the Oscars, now for the economy. The first lady Michelle Obama spoke to Eastern Kentucky University graduates over the weekend, but it could easily have been a speech to a room full of graduates somewhere east of the Volga…

RICHMOND, Ky. (AP) – First lady Michelle Obama urged Eastern Kentucky University graduates on Saturday night to reach out to people with different political beliefs, saying the country would benefit from the conversations.

“If you’re a Democrat, spend some time talking to a Republican,” Mrs. Obama told about 600 education, business and technology graduates at the third and final commencement ceremony of the day. “And if you’re a Republican, have a chat with a Democrat. Maybe you’ll find some common ground, maybe you won’t.”

The first lady suggested that they visit senior centers to benefit from the experiences of people with plenty of “life experience under their belts.” She also pointed them to religious congregations different than their own, saying they might hear something in a sermon “that stays with you.” And she predicted they would learn something if they reached out “with an open mind and an open heart.”

“And goodness knows, we need more of that,” she said. “Because we know what happens when we only talk to people who think like we do. We just get stuck in our ways.”

The first lady received thunderous applause from several thousand people attending the ceremony in a state that voted overwhelmingly against her husband, President Barack Obama, in his two successful runs for the White House.

She exhorted the graduates to apply the same resilience and work ethic they showed in school to their lives beyond campus to cope with life’s ups-and-downs.

“How are you going to respond when you don’t get that job you had your heart set on?” she said.

To the soon-to-be teachers in the crowd, she urged fortitude when their students don’t respond to their lessons – and urged the same fortitude for the business students when their bosses pile work on them.

Those are the times that will “force you to claw and scratch and fight” to endure, she said.

The White House said the first lady was drawn to EKU as part of her initiative to support veterans and military families. EKU has gained national recognition for its efforts to help veterans advance their education, including its Veterans Success Center, which provides one-stop-assistance for advising, counseling and job placement services.

A campus group took potshots at Obama administration policies ahead of Mrs. Obama’s visit, handing out fliers bemoaning the challenging job prospects for the new graduates.

“Good luck landing your first job,” said the flier from the EKU chapter of Young Americans for Liberty. “Only 47 percent of you will be able to find a job in your preferred field, so I hope you’re still on good terms with your parents.”

-

“CBS News President David Rhodes and ABC News President Ben Sherwood, both of them have siblings that not only work at the White House, that not only work for President Obama, but they work at the NSC on foreign policy issues directly related to Benghazi.”

So stated political consultant and media commentator Richard Grenell on Saturday’s Fox News Watch (video follows with transcript and commentary…

Let’s also show you why CNN did not go very far in covering these hearings because the CNN deputy bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Hillary Clinton’s deputy, Tom Nides. It is time for the media to start asking questions why are they not covering this. It’s a family matter for some of them.

JON SCOTT, HOST: So they don’t want to bring embarrassment upon folks who, who they’re close to?

GRENELL: Who directly are related to this story. Absolutely. They’re covering for them. There’s no question about it.

For the record, Ben Sherwood’s sister, Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, is the Special Assistant to Barack Obama.

Virginia Moseley’s husband, Tom Nides, is the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources.