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He said the meteor that exploded above Russia and the massive asteroid that whizzed past Earth at 2:25 p.m. ET., are a “stark reminder of the need to invest in space science.”

His statement continues:

“Fifty years ago, we would have had no way of seeing an asteroid like this coming. Now, thanks to the discoveries NASA has made in its short history, we have known about 2012 DA14 for about a year. As the world leader in space exploration, America has made great progress for mankind. But our work is not done. We should continue to study, research, and explore space to better understand our universe and better protect our planet.”

Unfortunately, Wired has pretty grim news on that front. Their headline today: “There Is No Way to Stop Space Rocks From Hurtling to Earth and Killing You.”

The magazine explains:

“‘The reason, simply put, is physics,’ explains Brian Weeden of the Secure Earth Foundation, a former captain and missile expert in the U.S. Air Force Space Command. Asteroids orbit the sun like Earth does, and occasionally our orbits intersect, causing the rocks to enter the atmosphere as flaming meteors screaming toward impact. They are not flying like airplanes and missiles that air defenses target. Shooting them will not change their speed or trajectory — at best, a missile impact might change its direction somewhat or shatter it into more pieces.”

Smith said his committee will hold a hearing “in the coming weeks.”

Pakistani news outlet, Dawn, cites Quetta senior police official Wazir Khan Nasir, who says the bomb appeared to target Shiite Muslims because of the neighborhood the attackers picked. Most of the victims are women and children who were shopping for vegetables.

After the blast, enraged residents formed a huge crowd, and police and rescue workers couldn’t initially get through to victims. The bomb was stashed on a motorcycle and parked next to a building; the building partially collapsed after the explosion, and there are reports that some people were trapped inside.

According to The Associated Press, there have been several attacks against Shiite Pakistanis in Baluchistan province, of which Quetta is the capital, over the past several months. There are militant groups active in the region.

On Jan. 10, attackers targeting the Shiite community in Quetta carried out two separate bombings, killing at least 119 people and wounding 121, according to the BBC. Relatives of the victims were so angry they would not bury their dead until they got promises of better security from provincial officials.

Inslee released a statement, saying a single shell tank at Hanford Nuclear Reservation is slowly losing between 150 and 300 gallons of radioactive waste each year. All of the liquid was removed from the tank in February 1995; what’s left is toxic sludge. Inslee said “Fortunately, there is no immediate public health risk. The newly discovered leak may not hit the groundwater for many years, and we have a groundwater treatment system in place that provides a last defense for the river. However, the fact that this tank is one of the farthest from the river is not an excuse for delay. It is a call to act now.”

Northwest News Network reporter Anna King, who’s tracking the Hanford site, found activists who say there’s a worse problem than the leak: Now that the tank is breached, where will officials put the toxic waste?

“Tom Carpenter heads the Seattle-based watchdog group Hanford Challenge. He says Friday’s news highlights the fact that there’s little space to move highly radioactive waste to. So Carpenter asks, ‘If you have another leak, what do you do? You don’t have any strategy for that.’ And the Hanford Advisory Board and the state of Washington and Hanford Challenge and others have been calling upon the Department of Energy to build new tanks. That call has been met with silence.”

Hanford has been in existence since the 1940s, when the site was used to prepare plutonium for bombs. As NPR’s Martin Kaste tells our Newscast Desk, federal officials have spent many years and billions of dollars cleaning up the reservation, including efforts to protect the nearby Columbia River. There are 177 tanks holding nuclear waste at the Hanford site; Gov. Inslee says 149 are single shelled, like the leaking one. Worse, they’ve outlived their 20-year life expectancy.

The waste mitigation work now faces a predicament with the impending sequester, the automatic across-the-board federal spending cuts that are set to take effect March 1 unless Congress reaches a different arrangement on a spending plan. Inslee says this will mean layoffs at Hanford and could even stop work there. He termed the combination of the leak and the budget cuts the “perfect radioactive storm,” according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

An upcoming PBS Frontline documentary seeks a more nuanced view of Nancy Lanza, and by extension, her son Adam. The documentary, Raising Adam Lanza, provides details about Nancy Lanza and her son, the young man who has often been described as smart, aloof, and painfully awkward.

“He was resistant to any type of touching. He had been diagnosed very early with something called Sensory Integration Disorder,” The Hartford Courant’s Alaine Griffin tells NPR’s Linda Wertheimer in a Morning Edition interview. “And what that essentially did is… he wasn’t able to guide touch and smell and sight. He wasn’t able to, sort of, process things to do with his senses. And we learn that Nancy was very sad at the fact that he couldn’t love her back.”

Griffin and other reporters from The Courant collaborated with Frontline on the documentary. The newspaper will offer its own feature coverage, as well.

“Through the reporting we did,” Griffin says, “we definitely learned more about Nancy and the efforts she went through to give Adam as normal a life as possible as he went from boy to man.”

Two months after the shooting, Griffin says, the question of whether Nancy Lanza should be seen as a victim as blameless as any other remains complicated.

“I think the viewers of the Frontline documentary and the readers of The Courant story are going to have to sort of make that judgment on their own,” she says.

Raising Adam Lanza will air on Frontline Tuesday, part of a week of PBS programming about the Newtown tragedy.

USA Today adds that the sheriff said the remains were positively identified using dental records.

Dorner, who was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department in 2009, had threatened many current police officers in an online manifesto. He’s suspected of killing four people — two of them police officers — during a crime spree that led to a massive multi-state manhunt.