• A man who killed two and injured four in a series of explosions in Austin, Texas this month killed himself with one of his explosives as police closed in on him early Wednesday morning.  The domestic terrorist’s motives are as yet unknown, and police have warned that he may have planted additional package bombs before his death.  [Washington Post]
    • For The Sidebar staff’s take on Muffle‘s use of the term “terrorist” with respect to domestic assailants with unknown objectives, see our earlier piece on the subject, When is Terror Terrorism?
  • Much of the Northeast was pummeled by snow, sleet and freezing rain on Wednesday and Thursday; as a result, many school children and government workers alike ushered in the official start of Spring with a snow day.  [CNN]
  • Former Vice President and grown-man-who-reflects-fondly-on-schoolyard-fisticuffs Joe Biden has once again informed the world that he would really like to beat up the sitting President of the United States of America.  In a show of great maturity and restraint, the President has responded in kind.  [Business Insider]
  • The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday and signaled that at least two more increases would occur in 2018.  The move signals that the Fed believes that the economy is strong and growing, and makes Muffle feel pretty good about refinancing her student loans to a fixed rate last week. [Reuters; personal research]
  • A whistleblower revealed this week that a big data firm called Cambridge Analytica harvested data from 50 million Facebook profiles without user consent in 2014.  Though the social networking platform learned of Cambridge Analytica’s actions in late 2015, it failed to alert users that their data had been compromised or take more than limited actions to secure the information taken. [The Guardian]

FACT OF THE WEEK: A “clerihew” is a humorous, four-line poem with an AA/BB rhyme scheme.  A clerihew must be about a famous person, and begin with the person’s name.  They are named for Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who invented them in the late 1800s.  [Verse.org.uk]