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Weather: Patchy frost in the morning. Sunny. Highs in the lower 60s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Wednesday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the upper 30s. North winds around 5 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
In Court: Circuit Judge Terence Perkins sentences Alfonso Joseph, a former pastor, following Joseph’s plea to a second degree felony molestation of a 15-year-old victim. It’s an open plea, meaning that it will be up to Perkins to set the sentence, likely within the sentencing guidelines. 1:30 p.m. in Courtroom 401.
The Cold-Weather Shelter will open: The shelter, run by the Sheltering Tree, a non-profit, opens at Church on the Rock in Bunnell only when the overnight temperature is expected to fall to 40 or below. It will open from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m.
Separation Chat, Open Discussion: The Atlantic Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State hosts an open, freewheeling discussion on the topic here in our community, around Florida and throughout the United States, noon to 1 p.m. at its new location, Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. All are welcome! Everyone’s voice is important. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
Internet Safety Class: Online Frauds and Scams, 4:30 p.m., a one-hour class at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. you’ll learn how to recognize and avoid the most common types of scams: phishing, malware and social engineering. No need to sign-up for the class, just bring your “scam stories” and questions with you.
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library: Do you enjoy Chess, trying out new moves, or even like some friendly competition? Come visit the Flagler County Public Library at the Teen Spot every Wednesday from 4 to 5 p.m. for Chess Club. Everyone is welcome, for beginners who want to learn how to play all the way to advanced players. For more information contact the Youth Service department 386-446-6763 ext. 3714 or email us at [email protected]
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
In Coming Days:
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Notably: Jacob Dreyer writing in The New York Times: “Walking toward the shrinking remnants of what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was like entering hell. All around was a desert devoid of life, aside from scrubby saxaul trees. […] over the decades, Soviet authorities diverted rivers that flowed into the sea to irrigate cotton and other crops. The world’s fourth largest inland body of water — which covered an area about 15 percent larger than Lake Michigan — gradually shrank, triggering a domino effect of ecological, economic and community collapse, the kind of catastrophe that could befall other environmentally fragile parts of the world unless we change our ways. […] Worse, the Soviet authorities knew what was happening, but priorities like economic growth seemed more important. By the 1980s, authorities even considered compounding the folly by diverting water from Lake Baikal in Siberia, more than 2,000 miles away, to the Aral region. The Soviet Union collapsed before that scheme could be carried out. […] In the United States, Lake Mead and the Great Salt Lake are shrinking, and cities like Los Angeles are racing to balance their water needs with a changing climate. Agriculture, fracking, lawn maintenance and other activities are rapidly depleting groundwater aquifers across America. Can we live with the possibility that other places are headed for a fate similar to the Aral Sea? The human race is using up its water and other resources like there’s no tomorrow, but as the residents of Muynak found out, there was a tomorrow, just not the one they were hoping for.”
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
December 2025
Santa in Bunnell
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn
‘Greetings,’ A Christmas Comedy
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
For the full calendar, go here.
The Soviet Union was a country whose experts maintained that radiation sickness was basically a mental problem, and called the Aral Sea “nature’s error” and hoped it would “die in a beautiful manner.” Whose medical personnel were sometimes instructed to wash bandages for a second use. Whose doctors, 66 percent of whom were women, took home 80 percent of the average male factory worker’s salary. Whose minister of health in 1989 advised, “To live longer, you must breathe less.” The Soviet Union was a country where, in 1990, remembering Nikita Khrushchev’s boastful promise to overtake and surpass American standards of living, angry, abused, and exhausted protesters marched past the Kremlin carrying placards that read: “Let us catch up with and surpass Africa.” Some Americans might regard these facts as proof of American capitalism’s superiority to Soviet Communism in every imaginable way. Such citizens hexed Al Gore as a “radical environmentalist” on the basis of his sensitive and ideologically tame book Earth in the Balance. Their organizations have names like The Abundant Wildlife Society of North America. They have wiped from their minds a history in which Ohio’s Cuyahoga River periodically burst into flames. They possess crusaderly faith in Le Chatelier’s principle, which posits the tendency of the environment to restore itself in the face of destabilizing forces. But the ecocidal histories of the United States and former Soviet Union are startlingly similar. In the years following World War II, Americans cut down vast forests, built thousands of factories, assembled millions of atmospherically toxic automobiles, and filthied the water throughout North America. In 1970 the United States passed the Clean Air Act twenty-one years after the Soviets had decreed their own version. Our Clean Air Act was actually more lenient toward polluters than the Soviet Union’s in fixing carbon-monoxide limits (not that the Soviet Union, whose environmental pledges were filled with high-minded ideals, actually bothered to obey its own laws). The Pittsburgh of the 1940s and 1950s, to name one locale of acute American environmental Shame, bore a ghastly resemblance to the manufacturing leviathans of the Soviet Union.
–From Tom Bissell’s “Eternal Winter: Lessons of the Aral Sea disaster,” Harper’s, April 2002.
DAve says
Not far from the truth, AI, well it’s here. a CBS News Report. ‘Artificial intelligence contributed to nearly 4,000 job losses last month, according to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, as interest in the rapidly evolving technology’s ability to perform advanced organizational tasks and lighten workloads has intensified.’ The report released Thursday by the outplacement firm shows that layoff announcements from U.S.-based employers reached more than 80,000 in May — a 20% jump from the prior month and nearly four times the level for the same month last year. Of those cuts, AI was responsible for 3,900, or roughly 5% of all jobs lost, making it the seventh-highest contributor to employment losses in May cited by employers.
Whathehck? says
I think I would prefer AI to take over the 3 stooges on the school board, it couldn’t be worst.