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Weather: A 20 percent chance of showers after 1pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 76. Sunday Night: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly before 1am. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 62.
- 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:
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students: 9:30 to 10:25 a.m. at Grace Presbyterian Church, 1225 Royal Palms Parkway, Palm Coast. Improve your English skills while studying the Bible. This study is geared toward intermediate and advanced level English Language Learners.
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn, at Athens Theatre, 124 North Florida Avenue, DeLand. 2:30 p.m. 386/736-1500. Tickets, Adult $37 – Senior $33 Student/Child $17. Book here. Celebrate the magic of Christmas with Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn—a heartwarming holiday treat packed with show-stopping dance numbers, dazzling costumes, and a treasure trove of timeless tunes. When Broadway performer Jim leaves the bright lights behind for a quiet Connecticut farmhouse, he ends up transforming his home into a seasonal inn, open only on the holidays. But with love in the air, rivalries heating up, and performances for every festivity, the holidays get a lot more exciting than he ever imagined. Featuring 20 beloved Irving Berlin classics—including “White Christmas,” “Happy Holiday,” “Blue Skies,” and “Cheek to Cheek”—this delightful musical delivers all the laughter, romance, and seasonal sparkle of a Christmas card come to life. Presented through special arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from noon to 3 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
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 57 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.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
Notably: Sailing toward a nine-month trip across the United States in 1893 the writer Paul Bourget wrote that it wasn’t America itself that attracted him but “the anxieties and problems shrouding the future of Europe and France.” He hoped that traveling the new world would give him a better grasp of the old. It’s at least one reason we read futuristic novels: not because they’re a good predictor of the future. They almost never are. But because they are a refraction of the present. Setting a novel in the future is a disclaimer. It frees the writer from having to be too realistic even as it opens the way to a critique that has everything to do with an anxious present. Sinclair Lewis didn’t write It Can’t Happen Here in 1935 because he’d tired of fundamentalists or technocrats as subjects for his novels but because he genuinely feared an undercurrent of fascism in the United States, and thought he’d write the equivalent of a warning shot. Orwell didn’t write 1984 in 1949 because he was imagining British society as it might be 40 years hence but because, in Anthony Burgess’ words, “Nineteen Eighty-Four is no more than a comic transcription of the London of the end of World War Two,” down to Big Brother (cribbed from the “Let me be your big brother” advertising tag line of a correspondence college), Hate Week (a British army method of teaching young recruits to hate the enemy) or even the dreaded Room 101, the torture chamber in the book, which, in Orwell’s working days, was an actual Room 101 in the basement of the BBC, from where he broadcast propaganda to India. Burgess himself wrote the futuristic A Clockwork Orange at least in part to exorcise his mixed feelings about his wife’s rape by GIs on Gibraltar. His earlier sloppier novel on the matter, The Right To An Answer, hadn’t done well, so he beefed up the violence, the sex and the wordplay for Clockwork, which went Kubrick, what we today call viral. Burgess wanted to rail about what John DiLulio would 33 years later imagine with more academic and public policy pretensions as “superpredators,” another prediction that Bill and Hillary Clinton and a slew of lawmakers believed and wasted billions building jails and harshing up laws over, but that never came true. Imagination let loose is not always a pretty thing. So futuristic novels are multi-edged. They don’t come true only because reality is always more abominable than anything a lone novelist can imagine. But they are often true in nuggets, as history of what we do not learn and don’t necessarily repeat, but improve on, in worse.
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
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre
Al-Anon Family Groups
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
These years also saw the birth of a nationwide group of vigilantes that, in size and power, dwarfed the militia groups in bulletproof vests that would flourish a century later. With more than a quarter-million members, that earlier organization became an official auxiliary of the Department of Justice. Men in its ranks would sport badges and military-style titles, cracking heads, roughing up protestors, and carrying out mass arrests. Tens of thousands of Americans would join smaller local groups as well; the masked vigilantes under those black hoods in Tulsa that night in November 1917 belonged to one called the Knights of Liberty.”
–From Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2022).
Jim says
From the New York Times:
“President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. And prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine.”
MAGA, please explain to the rest of us why this is happening? We’re busy off the Venezuela coast shooting up alleged drug running boats and, if we don’t kill everyone with the first shot, we hit them again while they’re floating in the water. And Trump just announced a no fly zone over that country, presumably in support of the US anti-drug operation (or is it a coup?). Yet, Trump is pardoning an ex-president of Honduras for his major role in drug smuggling. I’d like to understand how these two events can take place inside MAGA at the same time.
I look forward to the MAGA explanation!
The dude says
The answer is pretty simple… dementia, corruption, and grift.
As always with dementia don…
Kennan says
Well put DUDE.
Questions or asked of MAGA, but the answers are obvious. They’ve been obvious. Transactional fascism clouding our country in real time. very real and here.
Joe D says
It must have been a TRUMP “auto pen” pardon MISFIRE! That was SARCASM for those of you that didn’t get the Biden accusation reference…
Just UNBELIEVABLE…after all the investigators time, the Justice Department’s legal time and the taxpayers money spent trying and convincing this Drug profiteering MONSTER….all that SWEPT AWAY, in one swipe of a Trump pen. And there is absolutely no APPEAL PROCESS. A Presidential Pardon is “ABSOLUTE.” Once done it can’t be CHALLENGED.
Laurel says
Jim: You won’t get an answer from maga, you know that. They don’t know.
Trump doesn’t give a damn about drug running, that’s clear. He wants to overthrow the Venezuelan government and go for its oil. He just might starve out people and wait for an invitation to *help* them.
He is f**king with the world. Good allies are turning their backs on us. Never thought I’d see anything like this from my country.
Jim says
And, a little more on topic:
From NBC News:
“FDA claims Covid shots killed 10 children and vows new vaccine rules”
“The director of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division told agency staff in a memo that an internal review found that at least 10 children died “after and because of receiving” the Covid vaccine.
The 3,000-word memo, obtained by NBC News, was written by Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. In it, Prasad claims that agency staff determined that “no fewer than 10” of 96 child deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, between 2021 and 2024 were “related” to Covid vaccination. He said the true numbers could be higher, accusing the agency of ignoring the safety concerns for years.
The memo, sent Friday, did not include the children’s ages or medical histories, timelines or documentation for the deaths he references and does not identify the manufacturer of the vaccine. The FDA’s findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.”
As with most/all so-called “exposal announcements” from this administration, no facts, no details, nothing to support the announcement. Now, I can’t speak for MAGA, but when the government suddenly announces that a vaccine has been found to kill anyone, I’d kinda like to see a few facts to support the claim. I have a healthy distrust of the government and when they tell me something that sounds this important, they should provide the facts to support the statement. But they didn’t and the far right press will carry it like it’s God’s gospel and not ask any questions. And MAGA will jump for joy.
So let’s all go down the anti-science rabbit hole. And let’s hope we don’t get another pandemic event during the Trump administration. If we do, it’ll make Covid look mild in comparison. Why MAGA is content with this is beyond me.
Laurel says
Watch the Robert Reich video I posted about. He explains why this is happening.
Ed P says
My comment is not in defense of this strategy but only an observation. I’m not qualified to defend it or criticize it. Just a layman’s guess of a possible explanation of the proposed pardon.
To influence Honduran politics by appearing to support conservatives, countering the left-wing alignment with neighboring Venezuela.
A geopolitical tactic that ignores a drug trafficking charge. The Honduran presidential election is today, Sunday, November 30, 2025.
So basically Honduran election interference to weaken Nicolas Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela.
Not necessarily a great strategy, simply the political explanation.
Maybe it’s just another lie and the pardon won’t event occurs.
Laurel says
He doesn’t pardon the innocent; he pardons those most like himself.
Jim says
Ed P,
I’ll give you credit. You gave it a good try!
I totally disagree with you as to whether you’re qualified to defend/criticize the decision, though. As a thinking American citizen, you have the qualifications to decide whether your elected officials are doing what is right for this country. You have to do that to vote intelligently. If Trump put up any explanation as to why this is being done, I’d be willing to look at it. But he won’t. So you and I must decide if this is the way we want our commander in chief to operate.
There is right and wrong and when the president is on the wrong side of any issue, both of us should be willing to call him out for it. This is another situation with Trump where he is not deserving of any benefit of the doubt. This is clearly wrong on this just like he was wrong to give “clemency to David Gentile, a private equity executive who had been sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in defrauding more than 10,000 victims in a $1.6 billion scheme to defraud” (from Ray W. says below). My point in my first comment was exactly that. I’m just asking if there is any action Trump could take that would get MAGA to say he’s wrong. And as Kennan says and Laurel says (above), there is none.
And that is a good portion of why this country is so divided right now.
Ed P says
Jim,
You need to read the international news about the Honduran presidential race. I did not fabricate the rationale of the pardon, I tried to explain it.
The voting took place yesterday, Sunday, and the tally is not complete. Early returns indicate the Conservative Party is leading by a thin margin.
This election will either stabilize the region or enjoin Honduras with Venezuela.
And no, I am not equipped to judge a major geopolitical decision of this scale because I do not hold enough information/ historical knowledge of the last 25 years in that region. I choose to wait, and listen to the pundits of which I am not.
Deja vu all over again says
… Nicolas Maduro is Trump’s Saddam Hussein
Ray W. says
As foundation for this comment, according to the EIA, in January 1981, Florida oil wells produced on average 116,000 barrels of crude oil per day, roughly the same as wells located in North Dakota. Today, Florida oil wells produce on average 2,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
The Tampa Bay Times recently posted an article titled “Gulf of Mexico under pressure from oil industry’s new deepwater technology”
The waters in the Gulf of Mexico lapping onto American shorelines is divided into three “planning areas” for crude oil and natural gas exploration. The Western Planning Area encompasses waters off the coast of Texas. The Central Planning Area encompasses waters off the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The Eastern Planning Area covers Florida’s western shoreline. Florida’s off-shore area is comparatively unexplored.
In one facet of the story, the author reports that at one time, a long, long time ago, the state of Florida announced a $50,000 bounty to the first company that found crude oil in Florida. Wildcatters searched up and down the west coast of Florida for oil. Many drilling efforts came up dry and the searches tailed off. But some wildcatters found oil.
In 1982, the first federal moratorium on drilling off the coasts of Florida came out of Congress. Over time, more and more state and federal restrictions on off-shore drilling came into existence. As an aside, one of the first executive orders signed by Governor DeSantis in 2019 was a ban on off-shore oil exploration. But that ban covers Gulf waters up to 9 miles off-shore.
According to the reporter, “[w]hile other Gulf states built oil refineries on their shores, Florida erected condominiums and resorts, developing an economy dependent on a pristine coastline.”
On November 20, 2025, the Trump administration announced plans to open parts of the Eastern Gulf to crude oil and natural gas exploration.
In a second facet of the story, the reporter wrote of a 2024 federal administrative approval of crude oil and natural gas exploration equipment rated to 20,000 pounds per square inch (psi), up from the previously approved maximum equipment rating of 15,000 psi.
As an aside, the Biden administration approved use of the new 20,000 (psi) equipment, contrary to the lie launderers who claim that the Biden administration was anti-oil exploration. The Biden administration sought to regulate oil exploration, not ban it. Regulating crude oil exploration is not always stopping crude oil exploration. There is a difference between the two positions that our in-house lie launderers cannot quite grasp. The enormity of the cognitive dissonance that the lie launderers would incur should they grasp the truth would likely be too much for them to handle.
Back to the story.
The reporter wrote:
“As wells in the shallower parts of the Gulf run dry, oil companies have shifted to a new trend: ’20K technology,’ which involves drilling at higher pressures in waters miles deep. While the industry has been drilling in ultra-deepwater for years, 20K allows access to wells previously deemed too risky.”
A third facet of the story focuses on the several pros and cons of deepwater drilling.
No one disputes that deepwater drilling is risky. No one argues that a “large scale” spill could not be ecologically disastrous, particularly to shorelines, such as Florida’s tourist-centered shoreline. Industry executives assert that use of newly-certified 20K equipment in waters as deep as six miles is “safe, cutting edge and secures America’s future as a global energy giant.” Opponents of deepwater drilling argue that all it takes is one disaster to undermine the argument posed by industry executives.
Which brings the story to its fourth facet, which is the main facet of the reporter’s work, a study of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a disaster on a giant economic, ecological, and philosophical scale.
Per the reporter:
“The spill is recognized in the industry as a preventable disaster on several fronts. The well had a faulty design to begin with, and operators either ignored or didn’t recognize early warning signs. Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer, which is supposed to be a failsafe, failed. BP also didn’t have immediate access to a capping stack, a failsafe to the failsafe.”
Before dawn in early March 2010, wrote the reporter, Captain Gary Jarvis and two deckhands manned a 57-foot fishing vessel anchored near the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig while fishing for yellowfin tuna, a “high-dollar” fish. After a successful day, Captain Jarvis headed to shore, thinking of many more good days to come.
Less than a month later, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and then sank. For 87 days, the uncapped well spewed a total of over 200 million gallons of crude oil into Gulf Waters. In time, shore waters of all five Gulf states became fouled with crude oil in various stages of evaporation. It remains the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Not only did the crude oil foul shorelines, it fouled surface waters and it fouled the seafloor and it fouled every depth in between.
Fifteen years later, despite a “multi-billion-dollar” combined settlement, the Gulf and the states bordering it have not fully recovered from the damage. In total, BP has paid out more than $65 billion in damages thus far, with more to come.
Soon after the blowout, federal officials shut down fishing in parts of the Gulf. Captain Jarvis, realizing that he was out of work, quickly applied to be paid out of federal funds to help with the cleanup. Other fisherman were not so fortunate.
The summer deep-sea fishing charter business disappeared before it started, as did much of Florida’s tourism-based hotel and restaurant business. Two months after the blowout, a fellow fisherman who waited too long to seek federal funds to aid in the clean-up killed himself on the bridge of his fishing boat.
Said Captain Jarvis:
“There’s always a level of uncertainty and adversity every single day of your life as a professional fisherman. … But when all of a sudden it’s all taken away, that’s when guys really struggle.”
According to the reporter, “Florida’s economy lost billions of dollars and thousands of jobs as Americans steered away from beach vacations and Gulf seafood.” Estimates have it that between 600,000 and 800,000 seabirds died, alongside as many as 167,000 sea turtles and as many as 1,000 dolphins and whales.
Anticipating damage to existing oyster beds, Florida officials permitted over-harvesting of oysters before the oil hit shore. Only 5% to 10% of “historic oyster habitat” remains. Escambia County oyster beds shrunk by 500 acres; much has never returned.
Said Pensacola and Perdido Bay Estuary Program executive director, Matt Posner:
“Now we’re left with a legacy issue that is going to take many decades and many millions of dollars in order to restore.”
Long-term research reveals that oil impact on the environment reached all the way down to the seafloor. Deep-sea fish, shrimp and corals have yet to fully rebound to pre-blowout figures. As recently as 2020, fish and shrimp still carried oil in their organs. “A latent group of oil-eating microbes” evolved to biodegrade the oil, but microbes can only eat so much oil; they can’t regulate all the oil if overwhelmed by a too-large spill.
BP has two new 20K projects on the books, the first deep-sea projects for BP since the Deepwater Horizon failure. One, the Kaskida project, is 250 miles southwest of New Orleans. The other, called Tiber-Guadalupe, is 300 miles southwest of New Orleans. The company could be producing as much as 80,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the Kaskida project by 2029.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I make no secret of my having internalized the argument that renewable forms of energy generation, such as solar, wind, nuclear, geo-thermal, and hydro power, offer the best path of several paths toward the world’s energy future.
Fossil fuel-powered energy will never completely go away, as we need “coking” coal to make steel out of iron and we need crude oil for greases, lubricants and derivatives from which me make plastics for all kinds of industrial uses.
And, yes, the world is on the way to transitioning away from a fossil-fueled past to a renewable future. Too many people want too many things at the same time to just pivot from a comparatively wasteful past into a more-efficient future.
By now, many FlaglerLive readers know that I start most of my comments with a summary of research or writings done by others. I openly admit that I am not an expert in many fields of study. At best, I am a curious student. I then ask each reader to accept or reject what I have typed. Decide for yourselves. Engage in more study. Add to the conversation. Rebuke me. Then, I offer my own take of what the study, report, or story means.
Ideally, one of more of the more gullibly stupid among us would over time stop listening to the lies spewed by the professional lying class that sits at the top of one of our two political parties.
Ideally, one or more of the several prolific lie-launderers who present to the FlaglerLive community will start engaging in the exercise of intellectual rigor before
putting fingers to keyboard.
Hopefully, some FlaglerLive commenter might emerge as an authentic true Conservative voice, instead of being a shill for a Republican Party that long ago pivoted away from true conservative thought.
Ray W. says
The Daily Galaxy reports that the Thacker Pass lithium-clay deposit located underneath the McDermitt Caldera, with an estimated worth of $1.5 trillion, may be the largest lithium deposit in the world.
According to the reporter, traditional lithium mining involving two recognized processes: “spudomene pegmatites (hard rock in Australia)” and “evaporite brines (salt flats in South America).” The Thacker Pass “volcano-sedimentary lithium system” involves a “blend of magma chemistry, closed-basin lake environments, and long-lived geothermal circulation.”
One advantage to the Thacker Pass project is that the lithium-clay is near the surface in a 100-foot-thick layer that spans more than 1,000 square kilometers. The unusually high grade clay formation “translates to less waste rock per ton of lithium – a critical metric for mine feasibility.” The 100-foot-thick near-surface layer permits open-pit strip mining, a relatively inexpensive mining process.
The lithium-rich clay layer developed as “post-eruption hydrothermal fluids transformed magnesium-rich smectite into illite, a potassium-bearing clay containing significantly higher lithium concentrations – up to 2.4% by weight in some zones. …” Traditional lithium clay is found in concentrations that average less than 1% lithium content. Researchers have begun investigating lake-bed calderas all over the world for similar composition lithium-clay layers.
The Biden administration first approved the Thacker Pass mine in 2021 and then approved a $2.23 billion loan through the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program to fund construction, construction that began in 2023. Of five projected phases, the first phase should yield 40,000 tons of lithium per year. When built out, 160,000 tons of lithium output per year is anticipated. Mine operations are expected to span 85 years, one of the longest projected mine outcomes.
General Motors owns a 38% stake in the project and contracted for a 100% “offtake” from Phase 1 over 20 years, plus a “significant share” of Phase 2 offtake.
Legal challenges posed by a coalition of tribal communities remain unresolved.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W. says
The HuffPost reports that this past Wednesday President Trump granted clemency to David Gentile, a private equity executive who had been sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in defrauding more than 10,000 victims in a $1.6 billion scheme to defraud.
Trump’s “pardon czar”, Alice Marie Johnson, posted to X that she was “deeply grateful” that Mr. Gentile would soon be reunited with his young children.
Make of this what you will.
Ed P says
Ray W,
GPB was found to be a Ponzi scheme. The 1.6-1.8 billion dollars of capital raise/invested will not be entirely lost. Somewhere between 300-500 million had already paid back to investors as dividends. ( yes using some “fresh” investment capital, aka Ponzi )
400 million is currently being redistributed, and about 719 million still
is still to be liquidated. 75 million was used for legal defense. Some investors will recover 100% while others who where “invested” in riskier portions of the portfolio may receive zero.
It’s a complex and interesting case that actually did make investments and did have assets. You would probably find it an interesting investigation from their prospectus to the trial.
I do not agree with the pardon of David Gentile but I also believe the government’s case was not a 100% black and white/open and shut, or a slam dunk.
White collar criminal cases of this magnitude are very complex and while the prosecution has unlimited resources, the defense usually collapses under the financial costs associated with a protracted legal defense. That is the reality.
Ray W. says
Hello Ed P.
You question whether there were problems in the government’s case. I understand that. That’s why it is called proof beyond a reasonable doubt, not proof beyond all doubt. But the law recognizes the sanctity of a verdict, absent evidence of actual innocence. A pardon not based on evidence of actual innocence may undermine that sanctity of a verdict.
There are quite commonly problems, major and minor, with many prosecutions. And not just today’s prosecutions. Prosecutors for a long time hid these problems from defense attorneys.
My father often commented about a particular child sex case filed in the late 60’s against a prominent Orlando criminal defense lawyer known for defending mob figures shortly before Florida’s Supreme Court created its set of discovery rules. Only four states, including Florida, eventually adopted this broad set of discovery rules.
My father asked the trial judge to order the prosecutor to turn over his case file for an in-camera review of its contents by the court. That Saturday, the judge called to tell my father to right away drive over to the judge’s Orlando home. The judge, upon my father’s arrival, displayed an affidavit signed by the alleged child victim in which affidavit she told the elected State Attorney for the 9th Circuit that the lawyer never once had had sex with her.
My father obtained court permission to depose the alleged victim, a West Virginia runaway who had returned to her home after the case broke. During the deposition, he asked her one question. After she had returned home, who among her friends had she told what had happened? My father then found each of the named friends. Each of them said under oath the girl had told them that nothing sexual had happened.
There is a reason why the Earl Warren Supreme Court ruled that the government must produce to the defense any exculpatory evidence in its possession! The Supreme Court ordered it because prosecutors and police officers used to conceal the identity of witnesses who said the defendant did not commit the crime or they manufactured evidence in order to convict the innocent or in so many other ways distorted what had really happened in a case.
One of the most telling of a 1950’s or 1960’s generation of Florida cases occurred when a deputy sheriff placed in evidence a plaster cast of a footwear impression allegedly taken at the scene of a serious crime. The defense attorney persuaded a judge to permit an examination of the soil embedded in the plaster cast. The soil at the scene of the crime was not sandy. The soil around the deputy’s home was sandy.
The examination proved that the sand embedded in the plaster could not have come from the crime scene. When confronted, the deputy admitted that he had taken the suspect’s shoes to his own home, at which location he put on the shoes and walked around his home. He then poured plaster into one of the footwear impressions in order to frame the suspect.
To a judiciary forged in the fires of depression and WWII, now called America’s greatest generation, such tactics smacked too much of a totalitarian state. Many of that generation of judges simply would not stand by in the face of abuses of individual rights, including the individual right to liberty, committed by police officers and prosecutors.
In other words, this rule of mandatory disclosure of exculpatory evidence, among many other remedies created by the Warren Court, came into being during the this long-ago time because these greatest generation judges would not tolerate prosecutors and police officers repeatedly breaking their oath to uphold the Constitution.
As an aside, there was a cynical joke that I heard in 1986 from a senior prosecutor when I was a baby prosecutor in Sarasota. He said that any prosecutor can convict the guilty. It takes a real prosecutor to convict the innocent.
Thank you for your comment.
Ray W. says
Many FlaglerLive readers may be familiar with reverse osmosis, a process that yields fresh water from briny water by pushing briny water through a membrane that separates out the salt and allows only fresh water through the membrane.
What to do with the concentrated briny water that results from the process?
According to The Economist, waste brine, being highly concentrated, can be mixed with treated water from sewage waste to produce electricity by using a water turbine.
That is unusual enough, but according to The Cool Down a French company has constructed a pilot osmotic power plant where the Rhone River flows into the Mediterranean Sea. A scaled power plant is anticipated to generate 500 megawatts of power, enough to power the electricity needs of 1.9 million people.
Instead of passing water through a membrane, this plant’s membranes allow only ions to flow through, thereby creating an “electric potential difference”, which is the description of a battery.
This type of osmotic generator stacks together a series of ion-selective membranes and then flows through the membranes salty water from the Mediterranean and fresh water from the Rhone. Ions generated from the difference in salinity flow through the membranes, making electricity. A proprietary nanotube structure made from wood has brought down the cost of manufacturing the membranes.
Theoretically, according to a paper published by the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, the innovative project can produce electricity at scale at a levelized cost of less than $100 per megawatt hour, a price very much competitive with that of coal-fired power plants. With no shortage of fresh and salt water at the Rhone estuary site, power generation should be steady 24 hours per day.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W. says
The Daily Express recently published a story that starts as follows:
“Vladimir Putin’s loyalists are newly confident that Ukraine can be broken apart to Russia’s advantage. They are now publicly discussing which major Ukrainian cities could soon be seized, convinced the West is falling short in its support and unable to slow Russia’s momentum.”
President Putin claimed that Russia will continue fighting “until the last Ukrainian dies”, adding that when Ukrainian soldiers withdraw from territories they currently occupy, “the fighting will cease.”
President Putin also claimed that fighting is underway for the possession of Komsomolsk, although Komsomolsk is nowhere near the front. The reporter opined that President Putin likely meant Kostiantynivka, a city that is under assault.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
A current FlaglerLive commenter has on more than one occasions argued that President Trump is playing chess when others are playing checkers. Appeasement of Russian interests to the Ukraine’s detriment can never be called chess. At best, and only at best, he is playing checkers with the Ukraine’s future. At worst, President Trump is being played.
Ray W. says
RBC Ukraine reports that over the last day, five Russian tanks, 14 armored combat vehicles, seven artillery systems, two multiple rocket systems and 49 units of motor vehicles were destroyed yesterday.
The reporter wrote of a small Russian unit, comprised of 15 men who attempted to infiltrate Ukrainian lines under cover of darkness, was destroyed, complete with two “quad bikes” and one “buggy.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Early in the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, infantry advances were invariably supported by tanks and armored personnel carriers. In recent months, more and more of the Russian infantry advances have been supported by buggies, quad bikes, motorcycles, electric bicycles, and civilian cars.
Ray W. says
A reporter for The Telegraph, a British-based news outlet, reviewed combat video from the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Russian soldiers are seen attacking without helmets or body armor.
According to a commanding officer of Ukraine’s 2nd Mechanized Battalion, per the reporter, over the previous day, 16 of 20 Russian infantry assaults involved soldiers lacking helmets and body armor.
The reporter added that “numerous reports” involve Russian soldiers being sent into battle either to retrieve rifles or that the lack of body armor is punishment for soldiers failing to follow orders.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W. says
About a week ago, a Reuter’s reporter published a story holding that at about the same time as talks in Geneva, Switzerland, began between the U.S., the Ukraine, France, Germany and Great Britain, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen released a statement from Brussels, Belgium:
“Any credible and sustainable peace plan should first and foremost stop the killing and end the war, while not sowing the seeds for a future conflict.
“We have agreed on the main elements necessary for a just and lasting peace and Ukraine’s sovereignty. Let me highlight three of them. First, borders cannot be changed by force.
“Second, as a sovereign nation there cannot be limitations on Ukraine’s armed forces that would leave the country’s vulnerable to future attack and thereby also undermining European security.
“Third, the centrality of the European Union in securing peace for Ukraine must be fully reflected. Ukraine must have the freedom and sovereign right to choose its own destiny. They have chosen a European destiny.”
Make of this what you will.