Day: January 3, 2014

Last Saturday, 1.3 million Americans were booted from unemployment benefits. If our vacationing legislators don’t do something quickly, millions more will be kicked off.

The Washington Post’s Brad Plummer had the following to say last Friday:

…there are 4 million people who have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, translating to the highest long-term unemployment rate since World War II. These people — young, old and from all kinds of demographics — have a 12 percent chance of finding a job in any given month, and, contrary to the theories of Rand Paul Republicans, there’s little evidence that they’re more likely to find work after losing benefits. Cutting off their benefits only causes more suffering for them and more damage to the economy.

We have paid more attention to Duck Dynasty than we have to the plight of fellow Americans who don’t have jobs to support their families.  As Americans, we should DEMAND that unemployment benefits be extended for these people who simply cannot find employment in an America whose recession has not hit evenly.

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earthsky.org:

Astronomers say that a very small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere on January 2, 2014, after being discovered only one day before.  They’ve labeled the object 2014 AA, because it’s the first asteroid to have been discovered this year.  The Minor Planet Center announced that the asteroid struck Earth’s atmosphere at around 05:00 UTC on January 2.  That’s around midnight, early morning on January 2 on the U.S. East.  The asteroid – which is believed to have been from about 1 to 5 meters across – is thought to have burned up over the Atlantic Ocean, probably off the coast of western Africa.

This is only the second time ever that astronomers were able to spot an asteroid before it struck Earth’s atmosphere.  The first time was in 2008, when the object known as 2008 TC3 burned up over Sudan in Africa.  Like 2014 AA, that object was discovered just a day before it entered Earth’s atmosphere.

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