Another sign of the times?

NASA: Flash in East Coast sky likely a meteor

Meteor Over Manhattan: East Coast Fireball Sets Internet Abuzz

This map created by Mike Hankey of the American Meteor Society depicts the sighting reports of the March 22, 2013, fireball that lit up the East Coast night sky.

A bright meteor briefly outshined the lights of New York City Friday evening (March 22), according to reports by witnesses who used Twitter and the Internet to report sightings of the fireball streaking over a broad stretch of the U.S. East Coast.

"Strange Friday night … a meteor passed over my house tonight!" wrote one New Yorker writing as Yanksmom19.

The first fireball sightings came at about 8 p.m. EDT (0000 March 23 GMT) and sparked more than 500 witness reports to theAmerican Meteor Society. Reports of the meteor flooded Twitter from New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.

"The witnesses range from along the Atlantic Coast ranging from Maine to North Carolina," Robert Lunsford, the society's fireball coordinator, wrote in an update. "This object was also seen as far inland as Ohio." [5 Amazing Fireball Videos]

The CBS WUSA 9 television news station obtained several security camera videos of the fireball as it lit up the night sky over Washington and parts of Maryland.

In New York, some observers reported seeing the meteor low in the sky as it streaked from west to east across the night sky.

"It shot over Manhattan and broke up over the East Village," observer Ross E. of New York Citywrote in his fireball report to the meteor society. In fact, the meteor streaked across hundreds of miles and was visible from many states along the Eastern Seaboard.

According to Lunsford, meteors often appear closer than they actually are due to the observer's perspective.

Fireballs occur every day and are typically caused by small space rocks about the size of a basketball disintegrating as they streak through Earth's atmosphere, officials with NASA's Asteroid Watch outreach program wrote in a Twitter post.

On Feb. 15, a bus-size meteor exploded over Russia near the city of Chelyabinsk, shattering windows in hundreds of buildings and injuring nearly 1,500 people. That rare meteor explosion, which scientists have classified as a superbolide, was the most powerful in more than a century, NASA scientists said.

The Earth is bombarded by nearly 100 tons of material from space every day, but most of those objects are tiny dust grains that burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere.

NASA scientists and astronomers around the world regularly monitor the night sky for signs of larger asteroids that could pose an impact threat to Earth. Friday night's meteor came just days after back-to-back hearings in the House and Senate about the dangers posed by near-Earth asteroids. Those meetings were scheduled in the wake of the Feb. 15 Russian meteor explosion.

Editor's note: If you snapped an amazing photo of the East Coast meteor or any other night sky sight and you'd like to share it for a possible story or image gallery, please send images and comments, including location information, to Managing Editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

Police arrest 2 teens in Ga. baby killing

This Friday, March 22, 2013 photo provided by the Glynn County Detention Center shows De'Marquise Elkins, 17, one of two teenagers arrested Friday and accused of fatally shooting a 13-month-old baby in the face and wounding his mother during their morning stroll in Brunswick, Ga. Elkins is charged as an adult with first-degree murder, along with a 14-year-old who was not identified because he is a juvenile, Police Chief Tobe Green said. (AP Photo/Courtesy of the Glynn County Detention Center)

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — In five years, Sherry West has lost two sons to unspeakable violence.

The Georgia mother was grieving from Thursday's shooting death of her 13-month-old son in his stroller during an attempted robbery while they took a morning stroll. In 2008, her 18-year-old son was stabbed in an altercation in New Jersey.

A pair of teenagers was arrested Friday in the most recent shooting. West had just been to the post office a few blocks from her apartment Thursday morning and was pushing her son, Antonio, in his stroller while they walked past gnarled oak trees and blooming azaleas in the coastal city of Brunswick.

West said a tall, skinny teenager, accompanied by a smaller boy, asked her for money.

"He asked me for money and I said I didn't have it," she told The Associated Press Friday from her apartment, which was scattered with her son's toys and movies.

"When you have a baby, you spend all your money on babies. They're expensive. And he kept asking and I just said 'I don't have it.' And he said, 'Do you want me to kill your baby?' And I said, 'No, don't kill my baby!'"

One of the teens fired four shots, grazing West's ear and striking her in the leg, before he walked around to the stroller and shot the baby in the face.

Seventeen-year-old De'Marquis Elkins is charged as an adult with first-degree murder, along with a 14-year-old who was not identified because he is a juvenile, Police Chief Tobe Green said. It wasn't immediately clear whether the boys had attorneys.

Police announced the arrest Friday afternoon after combing school records and canvassing neighborhoods searching for the pair. The chief said the motive of the "horrendous act" was still under investigation and the weapon had not been found.

"I feel glad that justice will be served," West said. "It's not something I'm going to live with very well. I'm just glad they caught him."

West said detectives showed her mugshots of about 24 young men. She pointed to one, saying he looked like the gunman.

"After I picked him, they said they had him in custody," West said. "It looked just like him. So I think we got our man."

West said she thought the other suspect looked much younger: "That little boy did not look 14."

The slaying happened around the corner from West's apartment in the city's Old Town historic district. It's a street lined with grand Victorian homes from the late 1800s. Most have been neatly restored by their owners. Others, with faded and flaking paint, have been divided into rental units like the apartment West shared with her son. The slain boy's father, Luis Santiago, lives in a house across the street.

A neighbor dropped off a fruit basket and then a hot pot of coffee Friday as a friend from the post office dropped by to comfort West.

Santiago came and went. At one point he scooped up an armload of his son's stuffed animals, saying he wanted to take them home with him. He talked about Antonio's first birthday on Feb. 5 and how they had tried different party hats on the boy.

"He's all right," Santiago told the boy's mother, trying to smile. "He's potty training upstairs in heaven."

West said her son was walking well on his own and eight of his teeth had come in. But she also mourned the milestones that will never come, like Antonio's first day at school.

"I'm always going to wonder what his first word would be," West said.

Beverly Anderson, whose husband owns the property where West has lived for several years, said she was stunned by the violence in what's generally known as a safe neighborhood where children walk to school and families are frequently outdoors.

Jonathan Mayes and his wife were out walking their dogs Friday, right past the crime scene, and said they've never felt nervous about being out after dark.

"What is so mind-numbing about this is we don't have this kind of stuff happen here," Mayes said. "You expect that kind of crap in Atlanta."

It's not the mother's first loss of a child to violence. West said her 18-year-old son, Shaun Glassey, was killed in New Jersey in 2008. She still has a newspaper clipping from the time.

Glassey was killed with a steak knife in March 2008 during an attack involving several other teens on a dark street corner in Gloucester County, N.J., according to news reports from the time.

"He and some other boys were going to ambush a kid," Bernie Weisenfeld, a spokesman for the Gloucester County prosecutor's office, told the AP Friday.

Glassey was armed with a knife, but the 17-year-old target of the attack was able to get the knife away from him "and Glassey ended up on the wrong end of the knife," Weisenfeld recalled.

Prosecutors decided the 17-year-old would not be charged because they determined that he acted in self-defense.

Sabrina Elkins, the sister of the older suspect in the Georgia baby's slaying, said Friday evening that she believed her brother was innocent of the charges. She didn't know whether he had a lawyer.

"He couldn't have done that to a little baby," she told AP. "My brother has a good heart."

She said that her brother had been living in Atlanta, and only returned to Brunswick a few months ago. Typically, he would come by her house in the morning and they'd go to breakfast. But Friday morning, police came to her door as her brother was approaching along the sidewalk.

"The police came pointing a Taser at him, telling him to get on the ground," she recalled by phone. "He said, 'What are you getting me for? Can you tell me what I did?'"

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Associated Press Writer Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta and news researcher Monika Mathur in New York contributed to this report.

Syria's Assad vows to cleanse nation of extremists

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — President Bashar Assad vowed Friday to "wipe out" Muslim extremists in Syria, blaming them for a suicide bombing at a mosque that killed dozens of people, including a top cleric who supported the embattled regime in the civil war.

The death toll from Thursday night's bombing — the first suicide attack on a mosque in two years of violence in Syria — rose to 49 after seven of the wounded died overnight, the Health Ministry said.

Sheik Mohammad Said Ramadan al-Buti, a top Sunni preacher, was killed as he was giving a sermon in the mosque in the heart of the capital, Damascus. The blast, which also wounded nearly 80 other people, was one of the most brazen assassinations of the civil war, which has seen a number of suicide bombings blamed on Islamic extremists.

Al-Buti, 84, was the most senior religious figure killed in the civil war, and his slaying was a major blow to the president.

The preacher supported the regime since the early days of Assad's father and predecessor, the late President Hafez Assad, providing a Sunni cover and legitimacy to their rule. Sunnis are the majority sect in Syria while Assad is from the minority Alawite sect — an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Al-Buti's grandson was among the dead.

In a statement on Syria's state-run SANA news agency, Assad said al-Buti represented true Islam in facing "the forces of darkness and extremist" ideology.

"Your blood and your grandson's, as well as that of all the nation's martyrs will not go in vain because we will continue to follow your thinking to wipe out their darkness and clear our country of them," Assad said.

Syria's main opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, condemned the blast and expressed solidarity with the Syrian people, hinting that the bombing was the work of Assad's regime.

The Assad regime doesn't "hesitate to bomb mosques, universities, bakeries and residential areas with Scud missiles," said an English statement by the group. "This regime is not deterred by anything to carry out bombings, killing the Syrian people without guilt."

Syria's crisis started in March 2011 as peaceful protests against Assad's authoritarian rule. The revolt turned into a civil war as some opposition supporters took up arms the fight a harsh government crackdown on dissent. The U.N. says more than 70,000 people have been killed since.

In Geneva, the U.N.'s top human rights body on Friday extended its probe into suspected abuses in Syria. By a vote of 41-1, the 47-nation U.N. Human Rights Council reauthorized the investigation, which is being conducted by a panel of four independent experts, until March 2014, a half-year longer than originally proposed.

Those in favor of the extension included the United States, Germany, Libya, Pakistan, Qatar and United Arab Emirates. Only Venezuela was opposed. Abstaining were Ecuador, India, Kazakhstan, Philippines and Uganda.

Earlier this month, the panel, which began its work in August 2011, said it was collecting evidence on 20 alleged massacres in Syria, a reflection of the civil war's growing brutality.

An official at the ministry of religious affairs said al-Buti's funeral was scheduled for Saturday after the noon prayers. The government declared Saturday as a day of mourning and state-run Syrian TV halted its regular programs on Friday to air readings from the Muslim holy book, the Quran, as well as speeches of the late cleric.

In a speech earlier this month, al-Buti had said it was "a religious duty to protect the values, the land and the nation" of Syria. "There is no difference between the army and the rest of the nation," he said at the time — a clear endorsement of Assad's forces in their effort to crush the rebels.

The mosque bombing also was among the most serious security breaches in Damascus. In July, an attack targeting a high-level government crisis meeting killed four top regime officials, including Assad's brother-in-law and the defense minister.

Last month, a car bomb that struck in the same area, which houses the headquarters of Syria's ruling Baath party, killed at least 53 people and wounded more than 200.

Elsewhere in Syria, activists reported shelling and clashes in the northern province of Aleppo, the suburbs of Damascus and the southern province of Daraa, where the uprising against Assad began.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 15 people, including 11 rebels, were killed in the fighting in the Daraa region that borders Jordan. It added that three paramedics who work with the rebels were killed when their vehicle was hit in the provincial capital of Daraa that carries the same name.

In neighboring Lebanon, pro and anti-Assad gunmen fought in the northern port city of Tripoli leaving six people dead and more than 20 wounded, according to state-run National News Agency. The clashes between the Sunni neighborhood of Bab Tabbaneh, which supports Syria's rebels, and the adjacent Alawite neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen, which supports Assad, have repeatedly occurred in the past months.

Also in Tripoli, the Lebanese army said a soldier was killed and several others wounded when troops conducted a raid and captured several gunmen.

Lebanon is particularly vulnerable to getting sucked into the conflict in Syria. The countries share a complex web of political and sectarian ties and rivalries that are easily enflamed. Lebanon, a country plagued by decades of strife, has been on edge since the uprising in Syria began, and deadly clashes between pro- and anti-Assad Lebanese groups have erupted on several occasions.

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