National News

Hagel is expected to be confirmed.

As we reported, Senate Republicans took the unprecedented step of filibustering his nomination. On Valentines Day, they voted 58 to 40 to continue debate on his nomination.

Today, the Senate voted 71 to 27 in favor of cloture.

As they detailed in a letter to President Obama, Republicans oppose Hagel in part because of what they say is an untenable position on Iran.

Fifteen Republicans called for Obama to withdraw the nomination. The White House refused.

Reuters reports the nomination is now expected to come before the full Senate either later today or Wednesday. Hagel needs at least 51 votes to be confirmed.

Kerry said that the United States’ tradition of freedom of speech — even if it includes offensive speech — is a virtue.

He said, according to Reuters:

“As a country, as a society, we live and breathe the idea of religious freedom and religious tolerance, whatever the religion, and political freedom and political tolerance, whatever the point of view.

“People have sometimes wondered about why our Supreme Court allows one group or another to march in a parade even though it’s the most provocative thing in the world and they carry signs that are an insult to one group or another.

“The reason is, that’s freedom, freedom of speech. In America you have a right to be stupid — if you want to be. And you have a right to be disconnected to somebody else if you want to be.

“And we tolerate it. We somehow make it through that. Now, I think that’s a virtue. I think that’s something worth fighting for.”

The “stupid” line, by the way, received a round of laughs.

Using some of the dozens, if not hundreds, of videos that captured the once-in-a-century event, the scientists have calculated the Chelyabinsk meteor’s trajectory, tracing it back to a group of Earth-crossing objects known as Apollo asteroids. Unlike objects in the Asteroid Belt, which orbit between Mars and Jupiter, Apollos sideswipe Earth’s orbit, posing a risk of collision. According to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, more than 4,800 Apollo “close approachers” have been identified to date.

The BBC reports that the Colombian researchers used video of the fireball taken from camera phones, car-dashboard cameras and CCTV footage, including traffic cams that contained precise time stamps:

“Using the footage and the location of an impact into Lake Chebarkul, Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin, from the University of Antioquia in Medellin, were able to use simple trigonometry to calculate the height, speed and position of the rock as it fell to Earth.

“To reconstruct the meteor’s original orbit around the sun, they used six different properties of its trajectory through Earth’s atmosphere. Most of these are related to the point at which the meteor becomes bright enough to cast a noticeable shadow in the videos.”

The team then plugged the data into astronomy software developed by the U.S. Naval Observatory.

Early estimates of the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor put it at about 10,000 tons, but NASA later estimated the object at between 7,000 and 10,000 tons. The energy released by the event was estimated at about 500 kilotons, or 30 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.

Here’s his good news story:

Last Friday, as local KCTV reported, Sarah Darling “unzipped her wallet and dumped her change” into Harris’s cup. She’d forgotten, though, that earlier in the day she had taken off her diamond engagement ring and put it in her coin purse.

The next day, she retraced her steps. The Associated Press writes that “she went back to Harris, squatted beside him and told him that she might have given him something valuable. ‘Was it a ring?’ he recalled asking her. ‘And she says, Yeah. And I said Well, I have it.’ ”

“It seemed like a miracle,” Darling said, according to the AP. “I thought for sure there was no way I would get it back.”

Darling says she gave Harris all the cash she had with her in thanks. Then her husband, Bill Krejci, launched a Give Forward page to collect money for Harris. As of mid-morning Tuesday, close to $152,000 had been pledged. Krejci wrote over the weekendthat he had spoken with Harris “about what he’s planning to do with the donations. The details would be better left for later but know that he has a very solid plan and a very solid way of making it happen.”As for why Harris didn’t pawn the ring when he had the chance, he told KCTV that “my grandfather was a reverend. He raised me from the time I was 6 months old and thank the good Lord, it’s a blessing, but I do still have some character.”

Most people says David Lieber, the privacy policy counsel for Google, would think yes. But for the most part, they would be wrong.

Lieber was speaking at a panel discussion about privacy in the Internet age at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice in Washington on Monday.

“As users become more aware of where the law is versus where their expectations are, they’ll become more interested,” Lieber said. And they’ll demand action from their elected officials.

At the heart of the discussion was the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that still controls modern communication and allows for authorities to read electronic communication with only a subpoena.

But Lieber as well as Laura Murphy, of the ACLU, argued that Congress needed to act to make the standards for searching email clearer as well as uniform.

Lieber said Google’s goal is for the “same procedural protections that apply when police want to search your home” to also apply to “searching your electronic records.”

Kenneth Wainstein, a former homeland security advisor to President George W. Bush, took the government’s side. He said in many cases — especially in those where the government is trying to prempt a terrorist strike — “emails would be critical to build a case” but there may not be enough proof for a warrant.

Also, Wainstein said, “speed is of essence” in many of these cases. These kinds of searches, said Wainstein, are the price we pay for for “having an effective intelligence operation.”

“The probable cause argument has served the test of time,” Murphy countered. “Why is it different for your personal communication?”

She said the average American would be outraged if City Hall asked them to print out their search history, for example, and turn it over to authorities.

This debate is, of course, not new. Back in January of 2011, The New York Times ran a story declaring that the 1986 privacy law “is outrun by the web.” That story was in part sparked by a new-at-the-time Google initiative that made public the number and types of government requests for information they received each day.

The number of requests, said Lieber, continues to increase. (Here’s a the data for the U.S., where you’ll see the vast majority of requests came through subpoenas and not a search warrant or a court order.)

Monday afternoon’s discussion was in part prompted by the FBI investigation that led to discovery of an affair between former Gen. David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell. It was also prompted by a bill written by Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, that would require a warrant before reading people’s emails.

As The Hill reported at the time, the bill made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with an overwhelming vote in November.

Google said it was pushing for the bill to become a priority this Congress.

 

NPR’s Leila Fadel reports from Cairo that 19 people may have perished. Al-Jazeera puts the current death toll at 18. According to NBC News, at least 14 people were killed — but another four are said to be missing.

Regardless of the final number, “it was the deadliest hot air balloon accident in the world in at least 20 years,” says CNN. Those killed included tourists from Japan, Britain, Belgium and France, according to news reports.

As for the cause, NBC reports that:

“There were conflicting accounts of what happened.

“[Ahmed Aboud, who runs another balloon company and acts as a spokesman for balloon operators in the area] said that gas tanks caught fire and ignited the balloon at about 1,000 feet.

“But an eyewitness, who did not want to be identified, said the balloon was about 12 feet off the ground when a landing rope was thrown to people on the ground. As they grabbed it, the rope wrapped around a gas container, which broke and a fire then started. The witness estimated the balloon then ‘shot up 500 meters’ (1,640 feet) and the pilot ‘jumped out as it was going up.’ ”

According to The Associated Press, “hot air ballooning, usually at sunrise over the famed Karnak and Luxor temples as well as the Valley of the Kings, is a popular pastime for tourists visiting Luxor. The site of the accident has seen past crashes. In 2009, 16 tourists were injured when their balloon struck a cellphone transmission tower. A year earlier, seven tourists were injured in a similar crash.”