Early Tuesday morning, on March 22 at around 1 a.m., I realized two things: Brussels was under attack, and I really need to turn the volume down on my BBC Breaking News phone alerts. Not long after receiving the news about explosions at the Brussels Zaventem Airport did I have another BBC News alert-induced almost-heart attack. This time, it was about explosions at the Maelbeek metro station in the city’s downtown, which is close to the EU’s core offices.

Once I read about the events, there was no doubt in my mind that the city was yet another world victim of Islamic State terrorism. Ever since the Paris attacks last November, a lot of international counterterrorism efforts have been focused in the Western European city of Brussels because suspects of the attacks were said to have retreated to the area.

Just four days prior to the Brussels Airport and metro explosions was Salah Abdelslam captured – the most wanted man in Europe who was the only surviving suspect connected to the attacks in Paris.

According to the New York Times – as of noon on Tuesday – at least 10 people died in the two airport explosions and about 20 people were killed in the subway blast. More than 230 others were wounded. It has also been reported that at least one of the two explosions at the airport’s departure hall was a suicide attack.

There is little information on how the tragedies came to be, except that it was an ISIS concoction, but one key source has been CCTV footage, which captured images of the possible assailants in Zaventem Airport.

These catastrophes that we’ve been seeing so much of as of late are horrible in a number of ways: people dying and getting wounded, the difficulty behind how to find and contain the assailants, the politics in the background that we, the public, don’t see, and then, there are people’s reactions all over media that have grown unbearable for me. There are politicians who point fingers; the news on T.V. is full of noisy commentators and there are citizens on social media who, often but not always, also give unnecessary input on the current events.

I’m not sure what the “right” way would be to respond to tragedy, especially when they are acts of horrible terrorism, so that, I think, is where the root of my frustration lies. Rant over.

Now, on Tuesday morning, the public was also graced with a sleepy and solemn President Obama in a news conference about the Brussels attacks, as well as about concluding his trip to Cuba. The POTUS came at us Straight Outta Havana (and we’re done with that) and began with saying he would do “‘whatever is necessary’ to support Belgium,” according to the Associated Press.

The President’s trip to Cuba has proven to be a successful one on the whole U.S.-Cuba relations front. On March 20, the POTUS, FLOTUS and the two DOTUS’s (?) made their way into Havana for a momentous, yet brief Spring Break. It was the first time in almost 90 years that a U.S. president paid an official visit to our longtime communist neighbor, and boy, was he determined to try to bury the “last remnant” of the Cold War.

By the looks of things, it seems as though President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro made friendly and some progressive conversations took place. Some topics of interest that got the Cuban public thinking included the U.S. embargo on Cuba and how it needs to go, Cuban citizens’ human rights and the word “democracy.”

And it wasn’t Mr. Castro that Obama was really trying to get at: “Many suggested that I come here and ask people of Cuba to tear something down, but I’m appealing to the young people of Cuba who will lift something up, building something new.”

Someone else who seems to want to appeal to young people and other Instagram users, in general, is Pope Francis who joined the picture-sharing social media platform on March 19. The Vatican leader has been socially active all over the Web for a number of years now – with over 25 million Twitter followers – so his joining Instagram was evident.

After just 12 hours of opening his official account, the Pope reached over a million followers, one of them being @neginapepina, which is apparently “the fastest-growing Instagram account ever, according to the company.” Looks like his #follow4follow tags paid off. Get it, @franciscus!

Also, get it, Ducks! Am I right? Oregon’s men’s basketball made it into the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA March Madness tournament, in which they’ll face Duke on March 24 in a game that President Obama thinks our Oregon boys will not survive, according to his bracket.

Bleacher Report did an insightful little bracket comparison between the President’s picks and four college basketball “experts.” Unsurprisingly, Obama is sitting pretty against the other guys with 23 of 32 first-round winners guessed correctly and 10 of 16 second-round winners on point.

I think the powerful baller is doing better than just about the rest of the world, given that there have been more upsets by double-digit seeds in the first round than ever before in history. But, a girl can hope. Maybe the President will be wrong about the Ducks versus Duke matchup.