To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: A 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Mostly sunny, with a high near 85. Breezy. Friday Night: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly cloudy, with a low around 72.
- 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:
The Florida Ethics Commission meets at 8:30 a.m. in the third-floor Courtroom, First District Court of Appeal, 2000 Drayton Drive, Tallahassee. Except for the closed-door session, the meetings are generally live on the Florida Channel.
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Notably:
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.
April 2026
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
The Gallery of Local Art’s Bloom and Sip English Tea Party
“Godspell,” at the Limelight Theatre
“The Sound of Music,” at Athens Theatre
Al-Anon Family Groups
Community Chorus of Palm Coast Free Concerts
East Flagler Mosquito Control District Board Meeting
Flagler County Commission Evening Meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
Flagler Youth Orchestra Spring Concert
For the full calendar, go here.
Colonial society was not what the next century would have called healthy. The hottest colonial intellectual controversy between witchcraft and Whitefield took place over inoculation for smallpox. An epidemic hit Boston upon the arrival of an infected crew from the West Indies in 1721. The Reverend Cotton Mather, who had read in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions about protecting healthy people from smallpox by inoculating them with pus from those already down with the disease, persuaded Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to try this new method. He did so, inoculating some 250 persons of whom all but six recovered, whilst nearly half the uninoculated Bostonians who caught it “in the common way” died. In spite of this obvious success, a terrific hue and cry, led by the newspaper published by Benjamin Franklin’s brother, was raised against Mather and Boylston. Stones and threatening messages were hurled through their windows; they were insulted in the street and threatened with death. Dr. Boylston persisted and in the next epidemic again demonstrated the success of inoculation, which was not replaced by vaccination until about 1790.
–From Samuel Morison’s Oxford History of the American People (1965).
Pogo says
@P.T.
Thanks for the video; I clicked on “Watch on YouTube” and fast forwarded.
Jackpot, have a happy.
Ray W. says
Earlier today the Daily Beast opined in a story that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently “moved the goalpost.”
According to the reporter, in early March Secretary Lutnick predicted that Trump’s leadership would soon show up in economic figures: “You’re worried about someone pre-announcing? What they should announce is in the fourth quarter of 2025, this economy is going to be humming.”
Later in March, Secretary Lutnick said that factory construction and production returning to the U.S. would “start really strong in the third quarter.”
Since those two comments, according to the reporter, inflation and unemployment claims are up.
Now, Secretary Lutnick is saying that America’s construction sector in the first quarter of 2026 is going to be “the best quarter of construction jobs this country’s ever seen. … And that’s going to roll all the way through 2026, so I think you’re going to see GDP next year over 4 percent.”
He also predicted that there will be five million job openings during an unstated time period in the future that require technical training and that Americans who are “sitting on the sidelines because they just don’t want to be in the marketing department of this or that company” will rejoin the workforce to fill those job openings: “These people are going to be the arms and legs of the 5 million construction workers and the 5 million factory workers that are coming to America. … You’re going to see it start in 2026 and it’s going to be full fire in ’27’.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Secretary Lutnick just says things to fit a narrative. When the narrative no longer fits economic reality, his response is just to say something else in order to fit a new narrative.
The best economic minds in America do not yet know what is coming down the pike.
Five million new construction jobs created by President Trump? Five million new factory jobs created by President Trump? Utter fantasy!
Pogo says
@Ray W
Seriously speaking, you’re right on point.
Pogoesque speaking, his real name: Howard “Laughing Gas” Lutnick: archetypal Trump cabinet member, Medal of Freedom for service as Trump Best Boy, and made man in Trump crime family.
Howie learning French, “Après moi, le déluge…”
https://www.google.com/search?q=october+1929
Laurel says
We just came back from Georgia, and I cannot tell you how embarrassing, and depressing, it is to see “Welcome to the free state of Florida” sign as we pass the border. Free from what? Intelligence? Sanity? Democracy? So what, the other 49 states are not “free”? My God, it looks stupid!
I want my state back.