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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the upper 80s. Southwest winds around 5 mph. Wednesday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the mid 60s. Southwest winds around 5 mph.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Airline Room at the Daytona Beach International Airport. The TPO’s planning oversight includes all of Volusia County and the developed areas of eastern Flagler County including Beverly Beach and Flagler Beach as well as portions of the cities of Palm Coast and Bunnell, with board member representation from each of those jurisdictions. The committee is responsible for reviewing plans, policies, and procedures and rank priority projects as they relate to bicycle and pedestrian issues within the TPO planning area. See the full agendas here. To join the meeting electronically, go here.
David Jolly Town Hall, 5:30 p.m. at Palm Coast United Methodist Church, 6500 Belle Terre Parkway. David Jolly, a centrist Republican U.S. Representative for Florida’s the 13th Congressional District in Pinellas County from 2014 to 2017–he defeated Alex Sink–switched to the Democratic Party in April and is considering a run for governor, a decision he intends to make around Memorial Day. He is the Executive Vice President and Principal of Shumaker Advisors Florida. “Jolly has been attending Democratic town-hall meetings since he announced that he was considering a run for governor a month ago,” the Florida Phoenix reported, “and he says those meetings have encouraged him to step back into the political arena. The intensity displayed in these events in reaction to the first months of the second iteration of a Trump presidency shows that Democrats have a chance to win back voters disaffected by the party in recent years, he said.” Jolly has been an analyst for MSNBC and has been featured in numerous national media.
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 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 atlanticcoastau@gmail.com or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
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 childrens@flaglercounty.gov
Mother’s Day in Gaza is just another day for Israel to kill Palestinian mothers and their children. pic.twitter.com/9aoMyBXW9j
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) May 11, 2025
Notably: I realize that Gaza made an appearance on this page and in this space just a few days ago, and that it’s really overkill to note mention twice in five or six days that 52,000 people have now been massacred there, but four days ago The Economist updated its own death tally, with mind-boggling drone images of Gaza that, without exaggertion, make Dresden after the allied bombing look salvageable in comparison. (Incidentally, the death tally in Gaza is now twice that of Dresden.) The Economist: “The precise daily counts from Gaza are unusual. No such tally emerges from Ukraine. But during this war, as in past ones, Gaza’s authorities, run by Hamas, have issued details of how many Palestinians have been killed. Doubts about such figures are reasonable. Hamas, presumably, has an incentive to inflate civilian losses. When previous conflicts ended, however, estimates from Israel and the UN of the numbers killed have roughly matched those released during the fighting. This war has been far more extensive and lasted longer than any in the past. Many of the institutions that count deaths, such as hospitals, have been destroyed. As of May 5th, the health ministry said that 52,615 people had died in the war. As in previous wars, its tally does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. In January, Israel estimated that about 20,000 of those killed were militants.” Yet the Lancet, the medical journal, considers the figures low. “The researchers found that the overlap was so small that the true number of deaths was probably 46-107% higher than the official ministry total. If you assume that the ratio has stayed the same since last June (and not fallen, as systems caught up during the ceasefire, say) and apply them to the current tally, it would suggest that between 77,000 and 109,000 Gazans have been killed, 4-5% of the territory’s pre-war population (see chart).” The 109,000 figure should strike home. It is the population of Palm Coast. It is every home, every school, every hospital, every business: leveled. erased. Somewhere in that rubble, a young Palestinian Vonnegut is writing his own Children’s Crusade, though we can only wish he could say, and so it goes.
—P.T.
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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.
May 2025
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
David Jolly Town Hall
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Democratic Club Recap Meeting
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
My husband, Jamal Hamad, 39, and I have six children: Nagham, 15, Shatha, 13, Jawad, 11, ‘Abd al-Wahab, 10, Sila, 4, and ‘Alaa, 1, who was born during the war. The past year and a half, we’ve been living in a hell of war and destruction: bombings, killing, starvation, and being displaced again and again. At the beginning of the brutal war on Gaza, we and my husband’s family left our homes in eastern Jabalya Refugee Camp and moved to the home of relatives in western Gaza City. We stayed with them for 45 days of fear and panic, surrounded by fire and bombings. Everywhere we went, leaflets were dropped from the air ordering us to evacuate. There was no safe place. Later, we were displaced again with my husband’s family to an apartment in al-Maghazi Refugee Camp in the central Gaza Strip. There were 35 of us in an 80-square-meter apartment. The situation there was catastrophic, no less than in the north. After we were displaced, hunger spread throughout the Gaza Strip. We lived without meat, vegetables, or fruit — products that almost completely disappeared from the markets. A 25-kilogram sack of flour sold for nearly 300 shekels, compared to 30 shekels before the war. We are a big family, and all we ate was canned food and grains. We usually had one meal a day, at most two. I remember that on the day I gave birth to my daughter ‘Alaa, I ate falafel, and for lunch I ate some halva in the hope it would help me breastfeed her. I was constantly hungry. I didn’t eat any vegetables, fruit or meat, and was afraid I wouldn’t make enough milk. It was especially hard because infant formula was almost impossible to obtain. ‘Alaa cried all the time. Jamal, my husband, would go out looking for formula for her, but only managed to get a single tin from time to time, which was enough for only a week. After the invasion of Rafah, we were displaced again, this time to a tent in Khan Yunis. The constant displacement made our suffering much worse. My husband, my kids and I lived in that tent for eight months. We suffered from the lack of food, the daily struggle to find some, and the misery of living in a tent that offered no protection at all. The tent was full of insects, flies and mosquitoes. I found them on my kids’ bodies day and night. We also suffered from stray dogs that roamed near our tent and in the surrounding streets. But the hunger overshadowed everything. We ate only canned food, fava beans, lentils and noodles. I feel like our stomachs have shrunk and atrophied because we haven’t been eating healthily, only canned goods and grains.
–From the testimony of Anwar Hamad, a Gaza resident, to B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, April 20, 2025.
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