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Weather: Mostly sunny, with a high near 70. Light northeast wind becoming east 5 to 10 mph in the morning. Winds could gust as high as 15 mph. Saturday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 57. Southeast wind around 8 mph, with gusts as high as 15 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:
Free Tax Preparation Services in Flagler County: The AARP Foundation’s Tax Aide provides free tax preparation services at six locations in Palm Coast, Flagler Beach and Flagler County through April 15, but you must make an appointment first and fill out paperwork. To do both, go here.
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at its new location on South 2nd Street, right in front of City Hall, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley hosts his weekly informal town hall with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. Today’s special guest: Flagler County Commissioner Greg Hansen.
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, 6400 North Oceanshore Blvd., Palm Coast, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Flowers, bushes and hard to find plants. The event is sponsored by the Friends of Washington Oaks. Regular entrance fee applies: $4 per vehicle with one person aboard, $5 for vehicles with more than one person.
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Monthly Meeting, 11 a.m. at Cypress Knoll Golf Club, 53 Easthampton Blvd, Palm Coast. A monthly speaker is featured. Lunch is available for $20 in cash, $21 by credit card, but must be ordered in advance. The lunch menu is available on our website. Lunch may be ordered by sending an email to: [email protected].
‘Social Security,’ At the Daytona Playhouse, 100 Jessamine Blvd., Daytona Beach. Call 386-255-2431. 7:30 p.m. except on Sunday at 2 p.m. Domestic tranquility for two married art dealers is shattered when a goody-goody sister and her uptight CPA husband arrive to save their college niece from the horrors of free love. Jewish Grandma arrives and wants to make whoopee with the art dealers’ best client! Tickets are $15 to $25. Book here.
Gamble Jam: Join us for the Gamble Jam—a laid-back, toe-tappin’ tribute to the legendary Florida folk singer and storyteller, James Gamble Rogers IV! Musicians of all skill levels are welcome to bring their acoustic instruments and join the jam. Whether you’re strumming, picking, singing, or just soaking in the sounds, come be part of the magic at the Gamble Jam pavilion! The program is free with park admission! Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area at Flagler Beach, 3100 S. Oceanshore Blvd., Flagler Beach, FL. Call the Ranger Station at (386) 517-2086 for more information. The park hosts this acoustic jam session at one of the pavilions along the river to honor the memory of James Gamble Rogers IV, the Florida folk musician who lost his life in 1991 while trying to rescue a swimmer in the rough surf.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 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.
Notably: Remember last October when there was a minor kerfuffle over Flagler County government having to indemnify the contractor who built the south-side Nexus library for up to $1.25 million? It had to do with a federal grant that requires grantees to ensure that contractors follow some pretty strict rules about fair labor practices, not firing people for no reason, that sort of thing. It struck me that while federal contracts impose such strict guideines at home, we have no such guidelines for the billions of dollars we hand out to Israel every year, especially not the billions–actually, $174 billion, as of 2023, not including additional billions in loan guarantees that are usually written off–that end up building roads that Palestinians are forbidden from driving, build homes on land stolen from Palestinians, and where Palestinians not only may not live, but are at risk of losing their lives should the get too close, and paying for prisons where Palestinians are held without charges, tortured, often killed. No indemnification. No questions asked. The day I am writing this (Feb. 9), the Times has just published an article that starts: “Israel’s government has taken unilateral steps to give itself greater control over the occupied West Bank, challenging President Trump’s opposition to Israeli annexation of the territory in a move widely considered a violation of international law. The measures, which make it easier for Jewish settlers to buy land and undercut the Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank that it administers, appear to flout important agreements that Israel signed under the Oslo peace process decades ago. The changes were made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet at a closed-door meeting on Sunday. By enhancing Israel’s control over West Bank territory the Palestinians want for a future state, they effectively advance the cause of annexation by degrees — continuing a strategy that the government has been pursuing for years.” On Feb. 4, the Jerusalem Post reported: “US President Donald Trump signed into law a 2026 defense budget that allocates more than $4 billion in security-related support for Israel, combining long-standing aid commitments with expanded cooperation in emerging defense technologies and new restrictions on funding of certain international organizations.” No questions asked.
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 2026
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Palm Coast Spring Arts Festival
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Caleb Hathaway on Antebellum Flagler: A Palm Coast Historical Society Lecture
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
‘The Curious Savage” at Daytona Playhouse
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
‘The Curious Savage” at Daytona Playhouse
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
By 1985 Israel had taken over 2,150,000 dunams (830 square miles), 39 per cent of the West Bank. Almost all of it was public land as previously defined by the Jordanian authorities. The next step was the takeover of private land to complete total spatial control of the West Bank. The expropriation of private land was something never attempted by the Jordanian authorities, nor before that by the British Mandate. Moreover, even the seizure of public land by the Jordanians was limited to the establishment of a few military bases. The appropriation of private land was carried out through Ariel Sharon’s trickery, devised by the legal apparatus of the military rule of turning private land into mawat, in an absurd interpretation of the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman law.
–From Ilan Pappe’s The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories (2017).
James says
From the “you just can’t make this stuff up… but I just did” department…
What if a certain famous, world trotting, hotel and resort king had instructed his hotel and resort managers around the country ten years ago to each purchase ten thousand dollars worth of “forever” US Postage stamps.
Nothing wrong with this, it’s not illegal… and it could be justified as a means of providing a convenient amenity to guests staying at the various hotels.
But what if that person was then able to effect the value of those stamps?
Just an interesting thought.
James says
And if you think the price of a postage stamp is too high now, just think how much it will be to send a letter to mars.
*Badda-boom-boom*
Pogo says
Confirmed
https://www.google.com/search?q=ocd
Trump’s Legacy Will Be the Countless People Killed by His Policies
Millions across the world could die because of the choices Trump has made in his first 100 days.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-100-days-public-health-deaths/
And those who elected IT…
Laurel says
Ray W says
CDC birth figures show a 1% decline from 2023 to 2024, i.e., 54.5 births per 1,000 females to 53.8 births per 1,000 females.
Actual births rose from 3, 596,017 in 2023 to 3,628,934 in 2024.g
Can it legitimately be argued that the addition of female immigrants to our overall population between 2023 and 2024 explains part of the birth increase?
Make of this what you will.
Sherry says
Reach out
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Feb 14
As a lifelong cynic, I have always hated feel-good pieces like the one I’m about to write. I’ve even had a problem with the phrase I used in the headline, distrusting the usage of those two words nearly every time I read them in stories about people who claimed they had “reached out” to a person or a group for a completely bogus purpose, usually covering their ass.
But this state we’ve got ourselves in as a country is different. You’re probably as tired as I am of reading that our democracy is in crisis because of you-know-who and his MAGA you-know-whats. But it is. This week we’ve been hammered by Trump’s claim that he wants to “nationalize” the elections in 15 states. Not all the states, mind you. Just the 15 that he’s afraid will tip the balance enough that Republicans will lose control of the House and the Senate.
It’s not going to happen. The Constitution is perfectly clear in Article One that the states are granted the power to regulate Congressional elections, with Congress itself given the power to “alter” the regulations of the elections in the states by passing laws. Nowhere does the Constitution say that the president is involved in any way in the election of members of the House and the Senate in the states.
But…agita. What’s he going to do? What kind of scams does he think he can come up with?
We are beset by questions like this practically every day because Donald Trump does not seek to govern as president, he seeks to rule. And so we worry, and we organize, and we worry some more.
It kind of startles me to realize that I’ve been writing this column for five years, having begun in January of 2021, and I have endeavored to write a column nearly every day. What I noticed pretty quickly by reading comments from readers is that many people feel isolated and alone in their struggles to understand what has happened to us as citizens over the last 11 years. Way too many of us are feeling divorced from what is going on around us. Some of it is surely that we don’t recognize the nation we have become, with people given free rein to express racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia that we now realize was there all along, if tucked away in large part beneath the surface of our political life. We have watched the political leaders of one of our political parties exploit prejudice and hatred for personal and political gain.
It has been depressing; there is no other word for it.
Some solutions are emerging. I wrote last night about one – how the citizens of Minneapolis were able to pull together and run ICE out of their city. We’ve had No Kings rallies and marches. We have won special elections even in places like Texas and off-year elections for governor and other state-wide offices in Virginia and New Jersey. Things have been looking up. There are glimmers of hope. A great cloud may not be lifting, but it’s at least shifting.
But the hope that’s in the air isn’t great enough to have affected us personally, where it counts. The modern word for it is that we’re “siloed.” We tend to endure things alone.
There is something we can do, however. We can…here’s that phrase again…reach out. To our families. To our friends. To people we know casually, people we work with, even to people we encounter in our daily lives.
Pick up the phone, write an email, send a text. Get in contact with someone you haven’t talked to or heard from in a while. Ask them how they’re doing. Do something positive. Contribute to a food bank. Attend a meeting of a local Democratic political group. Campaigns for local and Congressional races will be starting up. Make contact. Ask if you can contribute in some way, volunteer for outreach to voters, whatever the campaigns are doing in the early days of running in a primary or for reelection.
It’s still cold here in Pennsylvania and elsewhere around the country, but I promise that spring is coming, both on the calendar and in our politics. There isn’t a pill you can take for the kind of depression we’ve been going through, but there is another kind of medicine. Act. Live your life. This is our country. Be proud of who you are – who we are. We are not alone. We are patriots. We are Americans, each and every one of us, and we love our country enough to care about people other than ourselves.