Good Monday morning, CivMixers.
Today, we are celebrating something all of us could use a little more of in our lives: Tolerance.
Yes, there’s a day for that….an International Day, even. It was founded in 1996 by the UN, because the concept of fostering mutual understanding among cultures and peoples is really its central mission – it’s raison d’etre, so to speak.
And tolerance, as the UN puts it, is “more important than ever in this era of rising and violent extremism and widening conflicts that are characterized by a fundamental disregard for human life.”
Amen. Sign me up. Because really, if we were all able to just be a wee bit more open minded, think of all the problems we would be able to avoid.
And you know what’s incredibly ironic? This International Day for Tolerance also happens to be my seventh wedding anniversary.
If there’s anything one needs to survive a marriage and make it successful, it’s the ability to tolerate another human being for the long term and learn to not only accept their many quirks and foibles, but actually come to appreciate them.
We’re not doing gifts this year – and maybe not for the holidays, either – because the more time I spend cooped up in my house, the more I am starting to feel tyrannized by all the STUFF we have accumulated.
Where the heck does it come from, all this flotsam and jetsam that is taking up space in our closets and drawers and on our counters? I have thrown out so MUCH of it, and yet it seems to be multiplying in my sleep – like some species of deranged rabbit.
Anyway, if we WERE to be purchasing presents, apparently the seventh anniversary is the year for buying items made out of copper and/or wool. Who comes up with this?
Oh, and here’s another encouraging thing to look forward to: The seventh year of marriage is reportedly the hardest.
Where are all my happily long-married readers? Hit me up with your words of advice, folks, because I’m fairly certain the couples responding to the aforementioned poll weren’t living through a pandemic, which seems to magnify every small disagreement one hundred times over. We could be in for a very difficult 12 months indeed.
In keeping with the tolerance theme, it’s National Transgender Awareness Week, which we’ll be discussing more as the days progress.
On a much lighter note – today is National Fast Food Day. If that sort of thing floats your boat, there are many deals on offer at various franchises across the state and nation.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. has the world’s largest fast food industry, with American restaurants located in over 100 countries.
First popularized in this country in the 1950s, along with the rise of the automobile, fast food is considered any meal with low preparation time and served to a customer in a packaged form.
Fun fact: The first ever McDonald’s Happy Meal was served in June of 1979.
After some crazy rain last night, we’re in for a nicer day, with a mix of clouds and sun this morning and mostly cloudy skies in the afternoon. Temperatures will be in the high 40s.
In the headlines…
The U.S. passed 11 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 yesterday as the country saw a surge of roughly a million new cases in the past week, according to figures tabulated by Johns Hopkins University.
With a third surge of the Covid-19 pandemic hitting the U.S., many public-health authorities are warning the coronavirus is now so widespread that it will take pervasive new measures to contain it.
Medical experts with the Trump administration and President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team both warned against public complacency with the first vaccine on the way in the coming weeks and said Americans themselves must work to slow the virus.
Ten months into this unprecedented public health crisis, it’s still largely unknown where most people are contracting COVID-19.
Despite painstaking efforts to keep election sites safe, some poll workers who came in contact with voters on Election Day have tested positive for the coronavirus, including more than two dozen in Missouri and cases in New York, Iowa, Indiana and Virginia.
Thousands of medical practices have closed during the pandemic, according to a July survey of 3,500 doctors by the Physicians Foundation, a nonprofit group.
A member of Biden’s COVID-19 advisory team rejected claims that the president-elect would force the country into another round of strict lockdowns as daily coronavirus cases reach new highs.
President Donald Trump flat-out claimed in an all-caps tweet late last night that he won the election, capping a day during which he worked to take back an apparent acknowledgement that Biden had won the White House.
Trump’s refusal to concede the election has entered a more dangerous phase as he stokes resistance and unrest among his supporters and spreads falsehoods aimed at undermining the integrity of the American voting system.
Trump’s campaign has dramatically scaled back its federal lawsuit challenging the election results in Pennsylvania, dropping legal claims stemming from observers who assert they were blocked from viewing vote-counting in counties dominated by Democrats.
Trump is facing a barrage of calls to permit potentially life-saving transition talks between his health officials and Biden’s aides on a fast-worsening pandemic he is continuing to ignore in his obsessive effort to discredit an election that he clearly lost.
Biden will join the lineup of influential Democrats involved in Georgia’s ongoing senatorial campaigns.
As Georgia continues to audit 5 million ballots by hand, Biden’s lawyers have said that the recounting isn’t making any substantial difference in the final vote count.
Republicans are showing little appetite for aggressively pursuing GOP investigations into Biden and his son, Hunter, if they keep their U.S. Senate majority in 2021.
Trump attorney and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani insisted the presidential election would be “overturned” based on “proof I can’t disclose yet.”
When Trump leaves the White House in January, he will face some of the deepest financial and legal challenges in his family business empire in decades.
Former President Barack Obama said he’s committed to seeing his ex-vice president, Biden, succeed in the White House, but won’t be joining his cabinet because former First Lady Michelle Obama would not be happy about that.
Obama warned that global rivals of the United States are closely watching the rocky presidential transition and Trump’s refusal to concede, which has “seen us weakened.”
A federal judge in New York ruled that Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf assumed his position unlawfully, a determination that invalidated Wolf’s suspension of DACA, which shields young people from deportation.
The fate of a COVID-19 relief bill to deliver aid for millions of Americans left desperate by the pandemic rests in the hands of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, according to New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Elected officials and political operatives in New York have a new parlor game since Biden’s victory: speculating who might leave state offices to take jobs in a new administration, and the domino effects of their departures. High on the list: Gillibrand and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
House leaders are discouraging fellow Democrats from taking jobs with the incoming Biden administration — out of concern that Republicans could nab any vacated seats.
The pandemic’s disruptions have transformed how American consumers behave by accelerating their embrace of digital commerce, and the changes are likely to prove permanent, according to businesses studying and adapting to the changes.
The Small Business Administration won a temporary stay of a federal judge’s ruling that required the agency to release detailed information on Paycheck Protection Program borrowers, including names and specific loan amounts.
A creator of one of the many coronavirus vaccines in development said life for most people would return to normal by next winter after the impact of the vaccine, if successful, starts kicking in next summer.
Cuomo fired the latest salvo in his and Trump’s ongoing COVID-19 vaccine war — threatening to sue the Republican administration if it moves ahead with its immunization distribution plan.
“Any plan that intentionally burdens communities of color to hinder access to the vaccine deprives those communities of equal protection under the law,” the governor said.
“If the Trump administration does not change this plan and does not provide an equitable vaccine process, we will enforce our legal rights,” Cuomo said. “We will bring legal action to protect New Yorkers. I’m not going to allow New Yorkers to be bullied or abused.”
Speaking at Riverside Church yesterday, Cuomo pledged New York will mobilize an army to make sure everyone is vaccinated, but also said he will need federal resources to do it.
The federal government has sent billions to drug companies to develop a coronavirus shot but a tiny fraction of that has gone to localities for training, record-keeping and other costs for vaccinating citizens.
More than 300,000 New Yorkers have left the Big Apple in the last eight months. City residents filed 295,103 change of address requests from March 1 through Oct. 31, according to data from the U.S. Postal Service.
Cuomo said he would sit down with five other governors of northeast states this weekend for an emergency powwow over how best to fight the second wave of coronavirus infections sweeping across much of the region — and the nation.
But the governors of most of New England’s states appeared to have been absent from what New York’s governor billed as an emergency summit on COVID-19 among his counterparts in the northeast this weekend.
Hours after Trump first acknowledged that he lost the election, dozens of his supporters reaffirmed their allegiance with marches past the homes of two of his Westchester County political rivals: Cuomo and Hillary Clinton. (Though Cuomo doesn’t live there anymore).
State government workers are being called back to the workplace more frequently in recent weeks, even as New York is experiencing a surge in some areas in the rate of people testing positive for COVID-19.
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation’s October health tracking poll, two-thirds of the public are worried they or their family will get sick from the coronavirus, up 13 percentage points since April.
Expressing concern that Cuomo’s Thanksgiving executive order is overreach and is “scaring the hell out of people,” Fulton County Sheriff Richard Giardino said his deputies will not be enforcing the 10-person limit on holiday meals.
Cuomo said he believes the state’s COVID-19 infection rate will continue to rise through the holidays, even as he offered a suggestion that he said might prevent the closure of NYC schools.
New York City’s coronavirus test results have not reached the level that would trigger a shutdown of public schools, so they will remain open for now, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced.
De Blasio had warned parents Friday to prepare for schools to shut down classes and revert to remote learning. But the daily positivity rate announced yesterday fell sharply to 0.3 percent.
Catholic schools in Brooklyn and Queens will stay open even if New York City’s public schools go all online again amid rising local COVID-19 infections, officials said.
The Archdiocese of New York is demanding that the city pay for and administer COVID-19 testing for students in Catholic schools in the Big Apple’s coronavirus yellow zones.
The NYC Sheriff’s Office put an end to another weekend of defiant New Yorkers secretly partying despite increased COVID infections across the five boroughs.
Manhattan Councilman and comptroller hopeful Brad Lander says the city would be better off if police no longer handled traffic enforcement.
The Democratic Socialists of America this weekend endorsed six candidates for NYC Council seats in a bid to “take over” the city.
Rep.-elect Nicole Malliotakis, soon to be the New York City delegation’s lone Republican member, is taking direct aim at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with an “anti-socialist squad” of fellow freshmen whose families, like hers, fled communist regimes.
New York City’s ailing taxicab industry may get a boost if a proposed bill to establish a “universal e-hail app” gets a green light from the City Council.
Left to fend for themselves as the coronavirus spread and New Yorkers lost their jobs en masse, undocumented immigrants turned to one of the few options left: selling food on the street.
A new bipartisan commission, charged with the once-a-decade reconfiguring of New York’s legislative and congressional districts, named its co-executive directors at a meeting last week.
Young climate change activists are calling for New York state’s $120.5 billion NYS Teachers Retirement System to divest the fossil fuel stocks that it owns.
Falling glass cascaded onto the ground last night under the same Midtown skyscraper where a spinning crane sent debris plummeting to the pavement last month, officials said.
The College of Saint Rose is taking its classes fully remote tomorrow.
In addition to the 13 Albany County restaurants that closed temporarily last week because employees tested positive for COVID-19, more restaurants around the area are taking similar measures.
Amid signs that parts of Albany County soon could be entering the state’s precautionary COVID-19 “yellow zone” designation, school superintendents met with county health officials Friday to discuss large-scale coronavirus testing and the possibility of shifting all classes online.
A Saratoga Springs city employee who tested positive for coronavirus had led city officials to close City Hall until further notice.
Albany County reported 64 new coronavirus cases yesterday – at least a one-day reprieve from the massive three-digit case it saw the day before.
A former Albany police officer who was off duty when he fatally shot a Syracuse man who tried to rob him while he was allegedly patronizing a Utica prostitute is suing his former department for reporting to the state that he had resigned under a disciplinary cloud.
More than 82,000 people have come forward with sex-abuse claims against the Boy Scouts of America, describing a decades-long accumulation of assaults at the hands of scout leaders across the nation who had been trusted as role models.
A SpaceX rocket carrying three U.S. astronauts and a Japanese astronaut launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., yesterday bound for the International Space Station (ISS).
