The city of New Amsterdam was incorporated on this date in 1653 when the Dutch East India Company had brought settlers.
Henry Hudson, an English sea captain, brought them over. He traveled up a large river, which he called the Mauritius River. Though eventually it became the Hudson River in his honor. And the Dutch opened a trading post on the southern tip of Manna-hata Island.
Where just about eleven year later four English frigates sailed in, 1664, demanded that the Governor, Peter Stuyvesant, turn over the territory. And he did, and its 10'000 residents and it was renamed New York.
(The name Manhattan derives from the Munsee Lenape language term manaháhtaan - where manah- means "gather", -aht- means "bow", and -aan is an abstract element used to form verb stems. The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the (wood to make) bows".)

James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, on February 2, 1882. He had an upper-middle class upbringing.
In 1902, he left Dublin for Paris, where he lived in an extreme state of poverty for about a year, before returning to Dublin while his mother was dying.
In 1904, he again left Dublin, this time bound for Switzerland and accompanied by Ms. Barnacle. He spent much of his time there working as an English tutor in Zurich.
Throughout most of his adult life, Joyce's condition ranged between moderate and extreme poverty, but indications are that he had a happy domestic life with his wife, his son, and his daughter.
In 1915 he settled permanently in Zurich and never returned to Ireland.
During the writing of Ulysses, Joyce's eyesight began to fail. Several of his close friends helped him to compensate for the loss of his eyesight.
Joyce died in Zurich on January 13, 1941. Much of the appreciation has come posthumously. Today there is no doubt of his genius as is reflected by his continued popularity.

James A Michener was born in New York on February 3, 1907 and taken as an orphan to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He was raised by Mabel Michener, a Quaker widow. He started to write a sports column at the age of fifteen for the local newspaper and edited the high school student paper.
From his early youth, Michener listened to opera and to collect reproductions of paintings.
From 1929 to 1931 Michener was a master at the Hill School in Pottstown and from 1934 to 1936 at the George School in Newtown. He was a professor at the University of Northern Colorado, and then visiting professor of history at Harvard's School of Education.
When the United States entered World War II Michener decided to enlist in the Navy. From 1944 to 1946 he served as a naval historian in the South Pacific and traveled widely in the area. His early fiction is based on his experiences in the Pacific.
From 1950 through 1953, he reported on the Korean War. He operated in 1956 behind Russian lines during the Hungarian Revolution. In 1972 he accompanied President Nixon on his visit to Moscow, Iran, Poland, and China.
Michener won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for the collection "Tales of the South Pacific."
During his career as a writer Michener wrote some 40 books, which sold about 75 million copies. Many of his works have also been adapted for film and television.
Michener was married three times.
He died on October 16, 1997.

Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended high school in Maplewood. Instead of attending his high-school graduation, Auster headed for Europe. He visited Italy, Spain, France and naturally James Joyce's Dublin. While he traveled he worked on a novel.
He returned to the United States to start at Columbia University. Auster's years at Columbia coincided with a period of social unrest, but he didn't participate actively in student politics.
In June of 1969 Auster received a B.A. in English and comparative literature. The following year he received his M.A. from Columbia.
In February 1971 Auster left for Paris. He supported himself there with a variety of odd jobs and minor literary tasks.
He returned to the US in 1974. Auster has written poems, essays, novels, screenplays and translations. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York City with his wife and two children.

Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, a prairie village in the heart of Minnesota on February 7, 1885. His mother died of tuberculosis when Lewis was six years old.
Lewis's early life was made miserable by teasing. With his red hair and very bad skin he was strange-looking boy. At the age of 13 he ran away from home to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War, but his father caught up with him at the railroad station, and brought the boy home.
Lewis started to write and keep a diary in his youth; he produced romantic poetry, and stories about knights and fair ladies. Before 1921 he had already published six novels.
After Lewis received his M.A. in 1908, he worked for publishing houses and various magazines.
After publishing two novels, Lewis devoted himself entirely to writing. He gained fame with "Main Street." The book became a best-seller.
In the late 1920s Lewis traveled to London, Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow. He loved beautiful surroundings. He had a handsome old house in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and he stayed at the best hotels in America and Europe.
Lewis spent his final years in Europe, suffering from failing health after a life of heavy drinking. He died from the effects of advanced alcoholism on January 10, 1951, in Rome.

Fresh snowfall in Syria on Wednesday has compounded the already desperate situation faced by millions of people whose lives have been shattered by the earthquake disaster, the UN’s top humanitarian official in the country has said.
El-Mostafa Benlamlih, UN Resident Coordinator in Syria, said that 10.9 million people there had been affected by the catastrophe in the northwestern governorates of Hama, Latakia, Idlib, Aleppo and Tartus.
Mr. Benlamlih warned that the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance – currently 15.3 million – will have to be revised upwards.
“All the achievements we had before, anybody who had that small business now has lost that small business, anybody who could go to school cannot go to school, women who could go to protection centres cannot go to protection centres. So, it’s a terrible situation.”
Some 100,000 people are now believed to be homeless in Aleppo alone after Monday’s double earthquake centred on neighbouring Türkiye, and just 30,000 of that number have found shelter in schools and mosques, the UN official said.

Finally to Geneva, where a top rights panel has applauded Switzerland’s decision to grant asylum and residency to four Kurdish refugee children from Syria.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said on Friday that the children’s mother had also been granted permission to stay by the Swiss authorities.
The family had faced deportation to Bulgaria where they were originally given refugee status, but the Committee explained that the children had been expelled from a Bulgarian refugee camp and forced to beg for food, while they were also at risk from their violent father.
At the request of the Committee, Switzerland suspended the deportation, before reopening the case and finally recognising the four as refugees.
This is the fifth time that Switzerland has granted children residence permits after their cases have been registered with the Committee, it said.

Today is Valentine's Day, a big day for greeting card and for candy sales, which goes back more than 1,500 years to the Feast of St. Valentine established in the fifth century, though nobody is sure exactly which of the many Valentines it is the feast day of.
But the ancient Romans had a fertility festival in mid-February called Lupercalia, when young men ran naked in the streets wearing strips of goat skin, which they gently whipped young women with to improve their fertility. And Lupercalia was still popular long after the Roman Empire was officially Christian. So the Church simply came in and renovated it.
In the 14^th century Chaucer wrote about St. Valentine's Day as a romantification in his long poem "The Parlement of Foules."
In the early 15^th century, the Duke of Orleans, held captive in the Tower of London, wrote a Valentine's Day poem to his wife .
Shakespeare mentions the sending of Valentines in a speech by Ophelia in Hamlet.
(Valentine's Day was established by Pope Gelasius I in AD 496 to be celebrated on February 14 in honor of the Christian martyrs.)

It's the anniversary of the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross, founded in Geneva, Switzerland in 1863.
The man behind it was a Swiss named Henri Dunant, who four year before had witnessed the Battle of Solferino, the last battle of the Italian war for independence. At which nearly 40,000 people were killed or wounded, and Dunant was appalled visiting the battle field, that no one was offering any aid to all of the people there.

Clothing is so yesterday. I mean, really, what can it do? It can’t pick up sound, or beep at us if something’s wrong. Or can it? M.I.T. researchers say they’ve developed a fiber that would allow clothing to eventually do those things. Their study is in the journal Nature Materials.
A big key to the fiber is a plastic commonly used in microphones. Its particular molecular structure involves a lopsided arrangement of fluorine atoms on one side and hydrogen atoms on the other. That asymmetry makes the plastic piezoelectric: it changes shape when it encounters an electric field.
So any electric current will then cause the fibers to vibrate. The fibers could act as a microphone or a speaker, depending on whether the vibrations were being recorded or amplified.
The clothing mic could capture speech, sure. But it could also monitor health by detecting almost imperceptible sounds from the body. Sounds like blood flow, which could make a shirt a 24-hour blood-pressure monitor. So maybe someday, your clothes will say: “I detect a rise in blood pressure. Please sit down.”

Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia on February 19, 1917. Her mother was the granddaughter of a plantation owner and Confederate War hero. Her father was a well-to-do watchmaker and jeweler.
From the age of five she took piano lessons, and at the age of 15 she received a typewriter from her father. Two years later she moved to New York to study piano at Juilliard School of Music, but never attended the school. She worked in menial jobs and devoted herself to writing. She studied creative writing at Columbia and New York universities and published in 1936 an autobiographical piece, 'Wunderkind'.
In 1935 she moved to North Carolina, and in 1937 she married a soldier and struggling writer, Reeves McCullers. But the marriage turned out to be unsuccessful. They both had homosexual relationships and separated in 1940.
Carson McCullers moved to New York and five years later she remarried with Reeves McCullers. In 1943 she attempted suicide under depression. Reeves killed himself in a Paris hotel in 1953 with an overdose of sleeping pills.
Carson McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses - she had contracted rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen and a series of strokes left her a virtual invalid in her early 30's.
Carson McCuller is best know for 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' which was well-received when it was published in 1940.
She died in New York on September 29, 1967

To mark International Mother Language Day on the 21^th of February, a top UN-appointed rights expert has urged all countries to reject the idea that societies should only have one language, to the exclusion of all others.
UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Fernand de Varennes, reiterated criticism of attempts by many countries to reduce and in some cases exclude teaching in non-official languages.
These policies were discriminatory and “thinly disguised efforts to assimilate minorities and indigenous peoples”, said the Special Rapporteur, who reports to the Human Rights Council in an independent capacity.
Mr. de Varennes also called for greater investment in mother tongue communication, as this would help minority and indigenous children gain the literacy and numeracy skills that they need to learn official languages.
“This is the most effective way of guaranteeing equality and non-discrimination,” said Mr de Varennes, who also noted that languages help communities to share knowledge, memories and history.
The rights expert also urged governments “to move away from new forms of nationalist majoritarianism”, that call for only one State language.
It’s “inconsistent with inclusive societies that are respectful of the human rights of linguistic minorities and indigenous peoples”, the Special Rapporteur said.

And it was on this date in 1878 Frank Woolworth opened the first of his “five cent” stores, which later became a "dime store" in Utica, New York. The innovation was that shoppers could look at the merchandise, did not have to ask a clerk to bring it to them.
(By the time Frank Woolworth died in 1919, the “five and dime” F.W. Woolworth Corporation was worth about $65 million and owned more than a thousand stores worldwide. But Woolworth closed its stores in the United States in 1997. By 2001, the company focused exclusively on the sporting goods market, changing its name to the current Foot Locker, Inc. Retail chains using the Woolworth name survived in Austria, Germany, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.)

Sunlight beams find their way through the tall eucalypts. Kookaburras laughter echoes off the red dirt around me.
Sunset walks are my thinking time. More scenic than my other thinking time — a nine-hour work shift, packing cartons of meat. Where I listen to the soundtrack of Heartstopper and put on my favourite podcasts.
I realised I couldn't lie anymore about who I was. I came out to my best friend when lockdown ended. I stopped feeling trapped when I heard her say: "I love you no matter who you are".
I started telling my inner circle. The more people I told, the less control I had over my story. It took five minutes on the second last week of term for everyone to find out I was gay. I felt so lonely — like I'd gone from one lockdown to another.
But: weekly conversations with a counsellor, sunset walks. Podcasts. Time. Life did get better.
Sexuality is an ever-evolving thing. I want to see attitudes in regional Australia evolve as I have.
Going to an all-boys country boarding school as a gay man isn't easy. I'm caught in a cultural lag over the Great Dividing Range. I want more safe spaces for queer young people. I'm doing my best to create those spaces, so I can walk down Peel Street without being afraid.
My Saturday morning routine starts with an iced latte, then smashed avo on a bagel — it's a hot $20 moment. I'm with my best friend; she's an icon and my rock. She's been there as I figured myself out, she made a safe space for me to own my identity as a young gay rural kid. She didn't care how long it took.
Neither did the eucalypts I walked past. Those tall trees took time to grow. They've endured storms. They survived. They showed me how to stand strong, how to be proudly me.

In 1919 on this day, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill to establish Grand Canyon National Park, including more than 1 million acres of land in northwestern Arizona. In that year, 44,000 people visited the new national park. These days, about 5 million every year.
Video: A Brief History of Grand Canyon National Park

It was on this date in 1953, (the English physicist) Francis Crick and (the American biologist) James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. With the help of a woman, (the British chemist and X-ray crystallographer) Rosalind Franklin, whose X-rays they had stolen. She would have received the Nobel Prize along with them, but she had died by the time the prize was awarded.
(The Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher paved the way for the identification of DNA as the carrier of inheritance. But the significance of the discovery, published in 1871, was not at first apparent.)

Leap Year Day - February has 29 days this year instead of 28, because it takes the earth 365 days and 6 hours to orbit the sun. So every 4 years we have to spend the extra time. Or else Christmas would wound up in July.
Julius Caesar's astronomers figured this system out and in his honor the month Quintilis was named July. But by the 16th century the calendar had gotten 10 days off whack. So Pope Gregory reformed the Julian calendar and ours is called the Gregorian calendar.
(Leap Year Day happens only in years that are divisible by four, such as 2024, 2028, 2032 etc.)