Item: “There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm,” Bryan Walsh wrote in a February 10 Time magazine online article, commenting on the twin blizzards that buried Washington, D.C., within a few days of each other. He went on: “As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.”

Item: Following the State of the Union address, Bloomberg News reported on January 28 that President Obama “urged the U.S. Senate to join the House in overhauling the federal student-loan system, saying such a move would end ‘unwarranted taxpayer subsidies’ to banks…. Obama said the cost of the higher-education initiatives would be offset by money saved from his plan to provide all new federal loans directly to students, instead of through private lenders.”