To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Sunny, with a high near 74. East wind 5 to 8 mph. Tuesday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 54. Light and variable wind.
- 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:
Schools are off all week.
Click here for holiday schedules of government services, courts, garbage pick-up, library hours, etc.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
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.
Notably: Sunday’s News-Journal ran an item that read, in part: “Waving posters of his mugshot and chanting ‘You’re a scumbag,’ Seabreeze High School students and parents ‘welcomed’ a travel agent accused of scamming them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars on his arrival in handcuffs at Daytona Beach International Airport. Volusia Sheriff Mike Chitwood invited anyone who lost money to meet travel agent Robert Safford Goodwin, as deputies brought him back to face charges in Volusia County.”
A friend reacted: “While I have little sympathy for this toad, if he’s guilty, this use of performance justice seems more intended to score social media likes for Mike Chitwood than advance society’s real interest in deterring those who prey upon it. When our sheriff seems to slide in that direction, it gives me a queasy feeling I’ve slipped into a Scarlet Letter time warp, where self-righteous citizens are invited to stone the adulteress (never the adulterer) in the public square.”
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 United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club, at Flagler Beach Public Library
NAACP Flagler Branch General Membership Meeting
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
To the extent that language provides cues for behavior, the orders that American governors, mayors, police chiefs and block association presidents have been giving cops on the beat in big cities over the past few years are unambiguous. Tension on the street: Police hunt for clues to an officer’s shooting in 1997 in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. As James Alan Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, notes, these officers have been told that they form the front line in a “war” on crime and a “war” on drugs, that they have been enlisted in special “operations” and drafted for bold new “offensives.” “We use all these paramilitary terms,” Fox said, “and we have promoted somewhat of a siege mentality among police: The enemy is out there, and there are more of them than we thought.” Fox paused, sighed and added, “When you have this sort of mentality, excessive brutality and improper actions are more likely to occur.” Fox’s comments root out what is indisputably a dirty little secret embedded in the public angst over police brutality: many Americans have come not only to tolerate a degree of it from their police officers but also, in ways subtle and unsubtle, to encourage it.
–From “Behind Police Brutality: Public Assent,” by Frank Bruni, The New York Times, Feb. 21, 1999.
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