From the article "Forensic experts found that a fire in the fireplace of the sitting room where the badly burnt body was found, had not been the cause of the blaze that killed Mr Faherty.". Yet we the investigator has no clue how the body could have caught fire. Geez.

"If the rocks are small enough, they burn up in the atmosphere. And even if the rocks remaining don't completely disintegrate in the sky, their impact on the ground, while causing loss of life in particular, will be so limited as to not cause loss of life in general."

Unfortuantely no. The issue is energy. The kinetic energy of the impactor has to go somewhere, and since it's hitting the Earth, all the energy is transfered to the Earth. With large impactors this will cause enough heating to bring about the conflagration of the biomass of the planet, or a large percentage thereof.

The other issue is that these damn things are so huge, our nuclear arsenels don't have enough umph to break up the solid ones, not to mention that the numerious "rubble pile" astreriods and comets are fantastically resistent (read completely immune) to this sort of effect.

Nukes are not the answer to cosmic impactors, not because tree hugging nuts don't like them, but because they won't work. Taking ones science from Hollywood is a mistake.