National: The Dow Jones is up again this morning after closing yesterday at an all-time high. The market is being fed by an improving economy and interest rate support from the Federal Reserve. Some analysts believe this is the beginning of a great bull market.

• Heavy snow is falling today in Washington DC and the Mid-Atlantic. Hundreds of flights are being cancelled.
• A pilot for the Italian airline Alitalia reported spotting what he described as a drone aircraft 4-5 miles from Kennedy airport in New York. The unidentified small aircraft was said to have flown within 200 feet of the jetliner. The FBI and Federal Aviation Administration are investigating.
• The TSA says it will once again allow passengers to carry small pocketknives on airliners. The blade must be no more than 2.36 inches and less than half an inch wide. Also allowed, pool cues, hockey and lacrosse sticks. The guy with the oversized carry-on will still have to check it.

World: Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez has died of cancer at age 58. Chavez had been fighting cancer for two years, having only recently returned from surgery in Cuba. Chavez was a hero to the poor at home and a colorful antagonist to the US. For a while he provided free heating oil to needy Americans. In 2006, speaking at the United Nations a day after President George W. Bush, he said, “The devil came right here… And it still smells of sulfur today.”

• Russian authorities say a Bolshoi dancer and two accomplices have confessed to the January acid attack on the Bolshoi ballet’s director. The dancer, Pavel Dmitrichenko, has a romance with a female dancer who blames her stalled career on director Sergei Filin. Authorities say that Dmitrichenko paid the two attackers to throw acid in Filin’s face, nearly blinding him.  The Bolshoi is apparently notorious for its internal intrigue.

Armed and Patriotic: The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists, says there’s an all time high number of anti-government “patriot groups”. They counted 1,360 patriot groups in 2012. The number of groups hit a high of 858 in 1996 before slipping to 131 in 2007. The SPLC correlates the rise in patriot groups to rising fears about gun control.

No Joke: Comedian Jon Stewart will take three months off from The Daily Show this summer to direct his first movie. British comic John Oliver, a regular on The Daily show, will sit in for eight weeks. The movie will not be a comedy. Stewart wrote the screenplay about a journalist who spent 118 days in an Iranian prison.

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