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February is Black History Month, and schools, libraries and organizations around the nation often take time to celebrate Black history and to recognize the United States' violent and unjust treatment of Black people; the federal government's monthly allocation of COVID-19 vaccine to Alaska will nearly double in March, rising to a hundred thousand first doses from sixty thousand last month; and more than 20 percent of Alaskans have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, but some racial groups lag far behind that rate. 

Unalaska officials have reduced the number of days travelers to the island must quarantine upon arrival; the first case of a highly transmissible variant of the COVID-19 virus has been detected in Alaska; and some Alaska communities have made it through the whole pandemic so far without a single confirmed case of COVID-19.

Some Unalaska high school students are working part-time jobs rather than returning to in-person classes; President Biden's pick for Interior secretary appeared before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this morning, and Alaska Native leaders strongly support her; and Governor Mike Dunleavy has quietly appointed an unknown real estate executive to an agency tasked with regulating commercial fishing permits.

Trident Seafoods' huge processing plant on the remote Aleutian island of Akutan reopened Friday after a nearly month-long COVID-19 closure; a two-week federal inquiry into the fatal sinking of the F/V  Scandies Rose — lost on New Year's Eve 2019 near Kodiak Island — opened Monday in Seattle; and the U.S. Coast Guard's sole heavy icebreaker, Polar Star, recently broke the nation's 40-year winter absence from the Arctic Circle's icy waters while on a 12-week deployment to the Bering Strait region.  

The Unalaska City School District will have to fill a total of 10 vacancies for the upcoming school year; the temperature at the Unalaska Airport hasn't gone below freezing yet this month, and it's the second warmest start to February on record in Cold Bay; and local linguists are incorporating storytelling into their language revitalization efforts, giving elders a chance to create and tell stories in their native languages and imparting that knowledge onto language learners.