Good Monday morning, CivMixers, and welcome to February – the shortest month of the year.

Where the heck did January go? Not that I’m sorry to see the back end of it, mind you. It started out…let’s just say not terribly well, despite a lot of hope and promise about the end of 2020 and turning over a new leaf and all that.

Maybe we could consider February the new January?

There’s a whole backstory regarding why February got the short end of the calendar stick, which basically boils down to the fact that the first ever calendar was only 10 months long, but fell out of sync with the 12-month lunar cycle, confusing all the Romans. It’s a little convoluted. Read more here.

Today is National Freedom Day, which commemorates the signing in 1865 by President Abraham Lincoln of a joint House and Senate resolution that later became the 13th Amendment, which ratified outlawing slavery.

The states, however, did not ratify this until much later. (27 of the 36 existing states at the time were required for ratification, which occurred in December of that same year).

A former slave named Major Richard Robert Wright, Sr., who went on to become a successful businessman and community leader in Philadelphia after receiving his freedom from bondage, created National Freedom Day. On June 30, 1948, President Harry Truman signed a bill proclaiming Feb. 1 as the first official National Freedom Day in the U.S.

Truman signed the bill to “promote good feelings, harmony, and equal opportunity among all citizens and to remember that the United States is a nation dedicated to the ideal of freedom,” according to the Library of Congress.

National Freedom Day is also the kickoff for Black History Month, designated as such by every U.S. president (starting with Gerald Ford) since 1976. The month-long observance originally started as just one week – the second week in February, chosen to coincide with the birthdays of Lincoln and escaped slave-turned-activist, public speaker and author Frederick Douglass.

It’s the 18th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Following its return to Earth after a 16-day space mission, the shuttle broke apart on its journey back into the Earth’s atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003. All seven crew members were killed. 

There are 47 days left until spring. However, there are a few, ahem, things we’ve got to get through first – like a major snowstorm, for example. New Jersey and New York City have declared emergencies in advance of a powerful storm that walloped the midwest and now has its sights set on the Northeast.

Blizzard conditions with up to 2 feet of snow are possible for some areas, accompanied by very high winds. Almost 80 million people were under winter storm warnings, watches and advisories as of yesterday.

All nonessential travel has been restricted in NYC starting at 6 a.m. today, with in-person instruction at schools called off and scheduled COVID-19 vaccinations postponed. Tomorrow’s appointments are still up in the air, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

“Another storm system is set to impact New York with potentially heavy snow, strong winds and possibly coastal flooding downstate,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned.  “I am urging all New Yorkers to…begin preparing their households for this latest round of winter weather.”

In the Capital Region, there’s a winter storm warning in effect from 7 a.m. today to 7 a.m. tomorrow, and we’re expected to get between 6 and 10 inches of snow. It looks like the real accumulation won’t start piling up until the afternoon. Gas up those snowblowers, stock up on milk, bread and eggs if you haven’t already. It’s going to be a doozy.

In the headlines…

President Joe Biden has agreed to hear out a group of Republicans senators who made a last-ditch effort yesterday to engage him on the next coronavirus relief package. They will meet today.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threw cold water on the Republican offer to give Biden less than a third of what he wants in a COVID relief package.

Haunted by what they see as their miscalculations in 2009, the last time they controlled the government and faced an economic crisis, the White House and top Democrats are determined to move quickly this time on their stimulus plan, and reluctant to pare it back.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said he thinks there are enough Democratic votes to pass a massive Covid-19 relief package through a process known as reconciliation as the country grapples with the economic fallout of the pandemic.

Sanders is mounting an aggressive campaign ahead of what will be one of his first tests as chairman: securing the support needed to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 in a pandemic relief package.

With a new Senate majority, Democrats are again pushing to repeal a cap placed on state and local tax deductions — this time as part of pandemic relief efforts, which will primarily benefit residents of high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Former President Donald Trump’s office announced that David Schoen and Bruce L. Castor, Jr. will now head the legal team for his second impeachment trial, a day after five members of his defense left and his team effectively collapsed.

Trump’s new political committee took in more than $30 million in the final weeks of 2020 as he made relentless and baseless claims of voter fraud, new filings show.

Hours after the United States voted, the now former president declared the election a fraud — a lie that unleashed a movement that would shatter democratic norms and upend the peaceful transfer of power.

The picture that emerges in the new FEC reports is of Trump mounting a furious public relations effort to spread the lie and keep generating money from it, rather than making a sustained legal push to try to support his conspiracy theories.

Facebook is clamping down on Groups after its own research found that American Facebook Groups became a vector for the rabid partisanship and even calls for violence that inflamed the country after the election.

Oregon’s Measure 110, a first-in-the-nation law that decriminalizes possession of all illegal drugs, takes effect today.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said yesterday evening that the city had not reached an agreement with the Chicago Teachers Union on how and when to reopen schools in the nation’s third-largest district.

The coronavirus in January has claimed the most American lives of any month since the outbreak of the pandemic – and five daily death tolls remain to be counted.

The United States reported 110,470 new Covid-19 cases and 1,789 virus-related deaths yesterday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The number of new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations across the nation continued to go down last week — although the death toll remains high, according to reports.

A year into the pandemic, researchers still aren’t sure when some COVID-19 survivors may get their senses of taste and smell back – if ever – and many are struggling with the long-term safety, hygiene and psychiatric implications of the loss.

A new study suggests that protective antibodies can be transferred through the placenta, and the baby may receive more of them if a mother is infected with Covid earlier in her pregnancy.

Travelers on airplanes and public transportation like buses and subways will be required to wear face masks starting next week to curb the spread of COVID-19.

The Department of Homeland Security said TSA workers now have the authority to enforce Biden’s transportation mask mandate “at TSA screening checkpoints and throughout the commercial and public transportation system.”

A top epidemiologist and adviser to Biden’s transition team said Sunday that the U.S. needs to prioritize giving a single dose to as many people as possible before focusing on second doses of the two-shot vaccines.

Many states are trying to speed up a delayed and often chaotic rollout of coronavirus vaccines by adding people 65 and older to near the front of the line. But that approach is pushing others back in the queue.

The discovery of highly transmissible coronavirus variants in the United States has public health experts urging Americans to upgrade the simple cloth masks that have become a staple shield during the pandemic.

Amid a sometimes chaotic rollout of vaccines across the United States, health experts say a glimmer of good news has emerged: Recent reports of coronavirus cases in nursing homes have declined for the past four weeks, according to federal data.

Efforts to disseminate Covid-19 vaccines as widely as possible are hitting an unexpected obstacle: health-care workers who decline the shots.

The storm will temporarily derail a vaccine rollout in New York City that has been plagued with inadequate supply, buggy sign-up systems and confusion over the state’s strict eligibility guidelines.

The rollout of vaccines in New York City — once the epicenter of the pandemic — has been plagued by stark racial disparities, with Black and Latino residents receiving far fewer doses than white residents, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have received shots since December, with whites accounting for 48%. Blacks received 11% of the doses, while 15% went to Asians and another 15% to Latinos in the city.

Facing a limited supply of Covid-19 vaccine doses and what they say is a disjointed system for securing appointments, some New York residents are planning to travel hundreds of miles across the state to get a shot.

New York City public schools that lost students after families moved or pulled out because of the Covid-19 pandemic now must prepare to return to the city some funding due to enrollment drops.

New York City’s Department of Education has taken its first steps toward reopening middle schools and high schools, all of which have been closed for in-person instruction since November as the result of rising coronavirus infection rates across the city.

Laboratories in New York are trying to ramp up capacity to do more genomic sequencing, to look at both the whole genome of the coronavirus and specifically at the most important surface protein that indicates whether it is variant.

The state Senate is planning to pass a package of bills today designed to address gaps between the health care outcomes for white people and for Black people in New York.

State Attorney General Letitia James’s report on how the coronavirus hit nursing homes in the state struck a sore spot for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has faced criticism from state lawmakers over that aspect of his management of the pandemic.

Another conclusion in the report that sparked outrage: staffing levels at nursing homes directly correlated with COVID-19 deaths, and that the long-held industry practice of insufficient staffing had “simply snapped” under the stress of the pandemic.

New York’s nursing homes and hospitals would be required to maintain adequate minimum staffing levels under a proposed state law gaining steam in the wake of a damning report linking understaffed facilities to high levels of coronavirus deaths.

Cuomo and his health commissioner on Friday offered some different perspectives on an investigation that said the state underreported the deaths of nursing home residents connected to the coronavirus by as much as 50 percent.

Even as the pandemic continues to rage and New York struggles to vaccinate a large and anxious population, Cuomo has all but declared war on his own public health bureaucracy, and at least nine senior DOH officials have resigned as a result.

Cuomo floated the possibility of the NYPD coming under the control of a court-appointed monitor, and demanded that mayoral candidates detail their police reform agendas.

Cuomo’s proposed financial plan, which supplants state education aid with federal COVID-19 relief dollars, steers school districts towards a fiscal cliff — one potentially steeper than the fallout of the 2007 financial recession, education and school finance officials warned.

Housing advocates and Senate Deputy Majority Leader Mike Gianaris have a $2.2 billion plan to help struggling tenants and small landlords.

In January, some 100,000 employees at major corporations across New York City got a message from their bosses: If they wanted a say in who runs the city after de Blasio leaves office, they had best hop to it and get registered.

New York City restaurants can seat customers inside starting on Feb. 14, over a month after Cuomo shut down service as virus cases climbed.

Questions about the Yang campaign’s treatment of women and Citigroup’s role in the mortgage crisis created moments of friction among the New York City contenders during the first advertised (online) debate of the race.

The candidates’ ideas for bringing the city back after the pandemic range from giving $2,000 to low-income residents and “tax-free Tuesdays,” to traditional approaches such as big investment in infrastructure projects.

More than 30 city elected officials are calling on the prestigious Hunter College High School to suspend its entrance exam this year amid the pandemic — and permanently revamp the admissions system to increase diversity at the Upper East Side school.

Rochester police released two bodycam videos that showed officers restraining a distraught 9-year-old girl who was handcuffed and later sprayed with a chemical “irritant” when she disobeyed commands.

During the incident, which occurred Friday afternoon, officers restrained the girl, pushing her into the snow in order to handcuff her, while she screamed repeatedly for her father, the footage showed.

Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said the girl reminded her of her own 10-year-old daughter. “I can tell you that this video, as a mother, is not anything that you want to see,” Warren said, her voice rising with emotion.

With county officials announcing yesterday that three more residents died after contracting COVID-19, the final number of deaths in January hit 89 – by far the most in a month since the pandemic began being tracked in March.

Rensselaer County officials said in a COVID-19 update Saturday night that three-day-old twins were confirmed as having the virus – the youngest county residents to be confirmed with COVID-19.

Some UAlbany students will be heading back to their classrooms today.

There has been no progress on redeveloping Albany’s iconic Nipper building while a legal battle over its fate plays out, but there have been some building code violations.

A 32-year-old woman died in a shooting on Central Avenue late Saturday night, as she and four other people were shot during a large gathering.