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Weather: Mostly sunny, with a high near 70. Northeast wind 5 to 8 mph. Tuesday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 53.
- 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 three-member East Flagler Mosquito Control District Board meets at 5:30 p.m. at District Headquarters, 210 Airport Executive Drive, Palm Coast. Agendas are available here. District staff, commissioners and email addresses are here. The meetings are open to the public.
The Palm Coast City Council meets at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 10-18, 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 Tuesday from 4:30 to 6 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 [email protected]
The Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry: Flagler Beach United Methodist Church‘s food pantry is open today from 9:30 a.m. to noon at 1500 S. Daytona Ave, Flagler Beach. The church’s mission is to provide nourishment and support in a welcoming, respectful environment. To find us, please turn at the corner of 15 Street and S. Daytona Ave, pull into the grass parking area and enter the green door.
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.
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.
Notably: Last week’s jobs report was encouraging: an unexpected 130,000 jobs added. This is not. From Statista: After several years of job openings vastly outnumbering the number of unemployed people in the U.S., creating a job market in which workers could dictate terms, the balance of power has shifted back to employers. In December 2025, the number of jobseekers in the United States outnumbered job openings by almost one million – the largest gap since March 2021. According to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), the number of job openings dropped to 6.54 million in December 2025, which is the lowest number of unfilled positions since September 2020, when the U.S. economy was in turmoil due to the devastating impact of Covid-19. Meanwhile, there were 7.50 million unemployed people in the U.S. at the end of last year, which is back to levels last seen in late 2016 when not taking the pandemic years into account. This means there are now 0.87 unfilled positions for every job seeker, indicating that the excess labor demand, identified by the Fed as one of the factors that drove inflation in 2022 and 2023, has disappeared and we’re moving towards excess supply again. Before the pandemic hit in March 2020, there had been 1.2 job openings per unemployed person in an already tight labor market. That indicator then crashed to 0.2 by April 2020 amid mass layoffs in sectors affected by Covid restrictions before climbing as high as 2.02 job openings per unemployed person in March 2022, at the height of the “Great Resignation”.
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
“My Fair Lady,” at Daytona Playhouse
Al-Anon Family Groups
“Godspell,” at the Limelight Theatre
Free Tax Preparation Services in Flagler County
Flagler County Commission Morning Meeting
Beverly Beach Town Commission meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
For the full calendar, go here.
There is also a recognition that while America is the avant-garde of reaction, taking a form as garish as the gold fixtures in the new Lincoln bathroom, it has plenty of company. Washington is not unique in its malevolence, even if its power to do harm is unequalled. In his liner notes to Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, Amiri Baraka wrote that ‘one of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here.’ I used to think this was a perceptive observation; today it strikes me as an example of American provincialism. People outside the US aren’t baffled by this contradiction, which is true of most societies, and are as likely to associate America with Coltrane, Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé as with Trump, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller. Like Beauvoir and James, they know that another country exists in America, one that’s immediately evident when you walk into a bookshop in Paris, Berlin or Madrid stocked with translations of Baldwin, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, David Graeber and other messengers from an alternative American future. We are very far from that future.
–From Adam Shatz’s “Another Country,” London Review of Books, Feb. 5, 2026.
Endless dark money says
I’d say complexity. Issues like climate change are complex, hence why republicans defund education and crank out misinformation as they are paid well by oil companies to deny science. it’s who they represent. Everything is corrupt and the pedophiles run the nation. So for class the 3 branches of government are corporations, pedophiles, and Israel.
Ray W. says
All my adult life, in story after story, educators and authors have argued that free market capitalism relies in part on the invisible workings of “creative destruction.”
For example, at one time horses and buggies directly competed with early versions of gas-powered cars. Eventually, only the most nostalgic of buggy lovers held to the dying technology.
Same for messaging. At the time of our Revolution, overland mail traveled by horse or horse-drawn cart or wagon. At its zenith, the Pony Express for a short time dominated long-distance mail delivery. But telegraphy came to dominate long-distance communication. In time, 1876, telephony entered the scene. Telegraphy (mainly Western Union) and telephony competed side-by-side for some 75 years until telegraphy eventually faded.
Right now, in electricity generation, fossil fuels compete side-by-side with renewables. One technology is fading, the other accelerating. Creative destruction is at work. Yes, nostalgia is a measurable economic factor. But so too is a lower price for producing the same commodity.
A pair of Oil Price US reporters asked in a recent article whether a superior, lower-cost technology producing an identical commodity would achieve market dominance? In other words, do electricity consumers of all types of power generation simply want affordable and reliable power at a lower cost? Do they really care all that much how electricity is made?
The authors then listed a number of reasons why renewables eventually will become the dominant power source.
First, lifetime costs for renewables are lower, because fossil fuel prices are likely to rise, in part due to increasing price volatility. While upfront costs for renewables are higher than for fossil fuels, sunlight and wind are free and long-term maintenance costs for renewables are slight compared to fossil fuels.
Second, build times for renewables are two years. In a scenario where time is money, the five to six years for fossil fuel buildout is an economic hindrance. Nuclear buildout times are at least a decade.
Third, improving battery backup capacity more and more economically fills gaps in renewable power production.
Fourth, improving AI technologies now allow power purchasers to instantly spot any oversupply of power and purchase it at the lowest possible prices.
The authors wrote:
“In the electricity business, fossil-fired power generation, to remain dominant, needs superior technology and the ability to undercut competitors on price. Our fossil fuel industry today possess neither. Its costs will rise more or less at the rate of inflation, not counting the increasing volatility of natural gas markets. Renewables, … are a technology where costs are declining with new scientific advances in things like battery materials and solar power efficiency. To us, this type of economic competition is like a war in which only one party emerges victorious. The fossil fuel industry may have already lost.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W. says
I know that Dennis C. Rathsam is going to be all over this.
The most recent core inflation data under normal BLS data collection methods has inflation at a 5-year low. But economists knew that no economic data had been collected during the 43-day shutdown.
New York Fed economists, using different accepted economic algorithms, searched for more complete actual inflation data available at or near the end of 2025. They found that inflation was at 2.83% in December 2025, far above the Fed’s target rate of 2%.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W. says
Numerous news outlets report that when Starlink learned that Russian forces had hacked into Starlink’s network, Elon Musk ordered the links severed. Prior the cuts, Russian forces had been slowly capturing Ukrainian soil.
From last Wednesday to Sunday, counterattacking Ukrainian forces, according to the non-profit Institute for the Study of War, recaptured slightly more than 200 square kilometers of land, just less that what Russian troops took in all of December 2025.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
About a week ago, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb told a reporter that in his estimation Russia has suffered a complete strategic failure in the Ukraine; he opined that the Ukraine was now winning the war.
In December 2025, he said, in exchange for a small area of Ukrainian land, 34,000 Russian soldiers had been killed, a rate of death greater than Russia can now replace.
Of the three Russian strategic goals in February 2022, Russia wanted to absorb all of Ukraine into a greater Russia; the Ukraine is now more European. Russia planned to prevent the enlargement of NATO; now NATO is bigger than ever, with Sweden and Finland joining NATO. Russia planned to to keep EU defense spending low by quickly capturing the Ukraine; now EU defense spending up to nearly 5% of GDP across the board.
To President Stubb, Russia has failed on every pre-war strategic point.
Ray W. says
I concede from the outset that I didn’t see this story coming.
A news outlet named Mediaite reports that last year 55-year-old Joe Ceballos was re-elected mayor of Coldwater, Kansas by a vote of 101-20. One town member described the Trump-supporting Republican as a “pillar” of the town.
Today, Mayor Ceballos stands charged with three counts of election perjury and three counts of voting without being qualified; he faces up to 20 years imprisonment, plus fines.
Long a permanent resident, Mayor Ceballos has lived in America for 51 years.
He told a reporter:
“Nobody ever told me that I couldn’t vote or register to vote. … And so, as a young man, yeah, I did it, I registered.”
He later stated:
“I still strongly believe in Trump’s immigration laws about, ‘Let’s get the bad guys out of here. You know, they’re murderers, they killed people, they molested people, let’s get them out of here.’ … But, I don’t feel like I fit that category, …”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I suppose this puts an end to the Trump lie that Democrats want immigrants to enter the country to vote Democratic. Let’s face it. No one knows how any immigrant will decide to vote in the future after they become eligible to vote. And, according to a long-term Heritage Foundation study, non-citizen immigrants almost never attempt to register to vote.
Democrats want immigrants to want to come here to build a better life for themselves and their families. That they add to the wealth of the country in an amount greater, on average, than do the native-born, according to a recent Cato Institute study, is a bonus.