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Weather: Sunny, with a high near 69. North wind 6 to 11 mph, with gusts as high as 16 mph. Sunday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 54.
- 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]
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.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at the Bridges United Methodist Fellowship at 205 North Pine Street, Bunnell (through the gate, in room 8), 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.
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.
Storytime: Valeria Luiselli is a discovery worth a caravel. She is a young Mexican-American writer, professor of languages and literature at Bard, born near the end of the first Reagan term, with a book of essays–Tell Me How It Ends, on the migrant crisis–and a couple of novels to her credit, one of them called The Story of My Teeth, “a kind of extended commentary on how possessions acquire value largely through the stories we tell about them,” says Kirkus. In “Predictions and Presentiment,” a story in the Feb. 16 New Yorker that would not have surprised if it’d made into the next annual edition of Best American Short Stories but for the fact that it’s a novel’s excerpt, the narrator tells the stories of three “possessions,” each less possessed than the other: the narrator’s 12-year-old daughter, whose charming emancipation happens before our eyes, a historic mosaic imprinted with a portrait of Proteus that the narrator’s mother stole from an archaeological dig where she was working, and the head of a swordfish the mother buys at a fishstand, even though, as her daughter will discover, the mother was had by the fishmonger. The mother is a writer. Mother and child have just landed in a village in Sicily (Luiselli has been visiting the island every year for a decade) so the mother can rebuild a relationship with her daughter, minus the stepfather who raised her and who, we are never told why, has left: “I have been hoping that it would be here, on this island, this summer, that my daughter and I would finally have a real beginning.” “Now we are mother and daughter, learning how to orbit each other like two new planets. The question is: Now that the gravity of the family nucleus no longer holds us together, how do I do it?” The center of gravity is the child, not the mother, even as the child is not yet aware of her own gravity. That’s what gives her–and the story–an understated boldness, like her “wild leonine curls bouncing up and down with the pace of her steps.” Luiselli is interested in the intersection between fiction and autobiography, invention and reinvention, two terms that leaven the story’s epiphany. She weaves those inquiries through the daughter’s insistent, seemingly random questions that gradually form a pattern of inquiry into a past she, not her mother, is uncovering with the deliberate precision of an archaeological dig. We learn that Nanna, the thieving grandmother, lost her mind to dementia, but left Proteus to her daughter. The 12-year-old wants the theft erased from the family’s history. She wants the mosaic returned. She doesn’t know how to ride a bike (“impossible, she pedalled always backward. I tried not to think about it metaphorically”) but she is the balance to her mother’s unmoored life. She is the one who notices and prosecutes adults’ pat deceptions, like the smug sign at the fishmonger’s stand–aren’t all proverbs smug to some degree, like antiquity’s bumper stickers?– that says “if you’re born a tuna you can’t die a swordfish.” The grandmother’s dementia suggests otherwise. Little revelations like that, on the verge of the precious, breeze through the story as a Levante, that east wind bearing storms, approaches from the east. It is as if the Levante, in echo to Mount Etna’s cavernous gurgles, says, “change is in the air,” while also saying that Levante winds are as old and unchanged as creation. The story is also full of sounds, sounds being as important to Luiselli as words. She incorporates the sounds in her reading of the story on The New Yorker’s site, though I prefer to hear them distilled through her leonine prose. “Predictions and Presentiment” is an excerpt from Beginning Middle End, Luiselli’s third novel, due in July.
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April 2026
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Flagler Beach All Stars Beach Clean-Up
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
2nd Annual Italian Festival
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club, at Flagler Beach Public Library
“My Fair Lady,” at Daytona Playhouse
Celebrating Celine! with Jenene Caramielo, at the Fitz
“Godspell,” at the Limelight Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
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
For the full calendar, go here.
Recording sound and listening attentively have been an integral part of my writing process for a long time now. My book “The Story of My Teeth,” for example, took shape through a series of audio exchanges with a group of workers in a juice factory in Mexico. I’d write weekly installments of a story, and they would record themselves reading it out loud and giving critiques. They’d then send me these clips as well as ideas for how to continue the story. Some years later, I wrote “Tell Me How It Ends,” an essay about the U.S. immigration system, which was born from my work listening to, transcribing, and translating the testimonies of undocumented children in deportation proceedings. And, for the past five years, I’ve been working with my team on “Echoes from the Borderlands,” a sonic essay that works like a twenty-four-hour road trip along the U.S.-Mexico border. We’ve recorded hundreds of hours of material—sounds as subtle as that of the wind blowing through a saguaro forest, and some as strident as Border Patrol interrogations or rocket launches in Starbase, Texas. “Beginning Middle End” is particularly attentive to the sounds of the natural world. The sonic version of the novel layers narrative and soundscapes that were recorded with binaural mikes, hydrophones, and geophones. Over the past year, we’ve collected field recordings from Sicily and the Aeolians: sea sounds, underwater currents, winds, volcanoes, fire, dust storms, rainstorms, church bells, fish markets. They are not meant to illustrate or enhance the narrative. Rather, they constitute a kind of emotional undercurrent. I think that sound is a powerful antidote to the shallow and fleeting nature of our attention and of many of our contemporary experiences. We can’t really consume it the way we consume so many other things. We can’t really scroll through sound the same way we do images. Sound, attentive listening, allows us to be emotionally rooted in time, and that’s an ability that precedes writing. If we are not present in time, paying attention fully, it’s hard to write anything that is truly meaningful.
–From Valeria Luiselli’s interview in The New Yorker, Feb. 8, 2026.
Dennis C Rathsam says
Thank you president TRUMP, for bringing death to the devil, Ayatollah, & 40 top leaders, gone in a whimper. This murderer ruled for 37 yrs, had 30,000 executed. Now once again, the Jackasses are outraged… Let them do what they do best….NOTHING! COMPLAIN! We saw Tuesday night the difference in both parties. One, loves illegals, murderers, thievies, liars & crooks! The other stands for thruth, justice, & the AMERICAN people.
Pogo says
Cartoon of the year.
Thank you.
Mark Webb says
Dennis. Every action has a reaction.
Every American will feel the reaction in gas prices etc.
Thanks Trump for pushing voters to vote for change.
Ed P says
Seems like a small price to pay…how many human lives are worth a short term spike at the pump?
Would it be witnessed as hypocrisy to defend illegals but not willing to vanquish a regime that holds 90 million people hostage for 30 years and the leader who recently authorized the murder 30,000+ protesters?
Confusing position.
Sherry says
For any Fox addicted Maga member who may still care about actual facts. . . take a good read regarding trump’s lies. This from the AP:
https://apnews.com/ap-fact-check
Ray W. says
Thank you, Sherry. I didn’t realize that in 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, the number of homicides rose by 30%, compared to 2019. I was aware that the overall crime rate rose, probably due to various effects arising from the pandemic. I wonder how many of the 30% more homicides were committed by the nearly 8,000 violent felony convicted immigrants, including 308 convicted immigrant murderers, released from detention centers by the first Trump administration so as to make space for immigrants who came to the country seeking asylum?
And, yes, I am aware that crime rates fluctuate year-over-year. Overall for about 30 years now, the nation’s crime rate has been trending down.
Every FlaglerLive reader ought to know by now never to accept at face value anything said by any member of the professional lying class that sits atop one of our two political parties.
Ray W. says
According to People, a 39-year-old Canadian-born father of three, Curtis Wright, who entered the country on a valid visa with his family in 1988, was detained last year when he returned to the U.S. from a work trip to Mexico. He has been held for more than 100 days on allegation of intent to remove based on a 22-year-old misdemeanor cannabis offense.
At the age of 14, he received permanent visa status, i.e., a green card.
In 2004, he completed a judicial sanction for possession of cannabis. On two occasions after completion of that sanction, the government renewed his permanent residency status without incident.
His fiancé’s mother told the reporter:
“Curtis tells us that he is not surrounded by ‘the worst of the worst’. He is surrounded by fathers, workers, and good men, people separated from their families and pressured toward self-deportation out of exhaustion and fear.”
Said his fiancé:
“We understand getting the bad out, but Curtis is not bad. He’s not a bad man.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W. says
1998, not 1988. Typo. Please accept my apologies.
Ray W. says
From multiple sources, Mercedes-Benz affiliated with BYD to develop BYD’s luxury-class Denza line of vehicles. Over time, BYD bought a greater share of the line, with BYD now owning 90% of the company.
BYD recently updated the Denza Z9 GT, a full-sized luxury “sporty” station wagon designed to compete in the Porsche Panamerica, list base price beginning at around $106,300, and Mercedes-Benz S-class, list base price beginning at $119,500, market segment.
The Z9 now comes in two iterations, a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) version with a 2-liter turbocharged gas-powered engine to keep the EV battery charged while driving. This version comes with a 63.82 kWh battery, good for a certified greater than 680-mile combined battery and fuel range. Total available horsepower is 858. Time to 62 mph is 3.6 seconds. List base price begins at $46,000 in Chinese prices converted to dollars at current exchange rates.
The BEV Z9 version comes with a choice of two EV batteries – 102.346 kWh, good for 509 miles of range, and 122.496 kWh, good for 644 miles of range. Total available horsepower is 951. Time to 62 mph is 3.4 seconds. List base price starts at $51,700.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W. says
Last June, a team of Japanese automotive reporters drove a production-model full-size luxury Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+ under Guinness World Records auspices 649 miles on a single charge on public roads, setting a certified world record.
Admittedly, the reporters took every effort to maximize battery range, but that is what one does when trying to set records.
For context, the distance from Palm Coast to Richmond, Virginia is 663 miles.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
The Mercedes is a real production vehicle, not a pre-production prototype. The sedan is not a lightweight subcompact car; it is a full-sized luxury model. President Trump is right to say that EV’s could destroy the American car industry, but he lies every time he claims EV’s to be a “green new scam.”
Step-by-step, EV’s are coming with longer and longer mileage ranges, higher and higher numbers of battery discharge-charge cycles, lower and lower initial sales prices, more and more horsepower, less maintenance, fewer repairs, and longer vehicle lifespans.
Innovation abounds. Ingenuity reigns. Money is being earned. Just not so much in America.
Ray W. says
A news outlet with which I am unfamiliar, Green Matters, makes a very good point about current EV battery chemistries. Right now, nearly all of the some 1,600 working battery chemistries are inorganic, i.e., metals-based. Lithium is a metal, as is iron, sodium, aluminum, copper, cobalt, manganese, gold, nickel, lead and silver, among many more, including the rare earth metals. Energy densities by weight or by volume and costs differ between chemistries. These “traditional” inorganic battery chemistries fade in efficiency over relatively short charging cycles, i.e., they eventually fail to hold a charge, requiring replacement and recycling or repurposing.
But what of “organics?”
Graphene is an organic graphite-based polymer compound that is hundreds of times stronger than steel, while at the same time both superconductive and lightweight. Graphene’s energy density is theoretically higher than just about any other known organic or inorganic battery material, and it theoretically will not quickly lose capacity to hold a charge.
Chinese scientists with Tianjin University and South China University of Technology, according to the Green Matters reporter, recently published a research paper in Science, in which paper they describe the discovery of a new polymer (plastic) compound called polybenzodifuradenione (PBFDO) which, when blended with a comparatively small amount of lithium metal, is malleable enough to be formed into complex shapes that can fit wherever needed, is highly conductive, operates at temperature extremes from minus 70 degrees C to plus 80 degrees C, already yields an industry competitive energy storage capacity of 250 watt-hours per kilogram, and neither smokes nor catches fire when an industry standard test nail is driven through a battery cell.
Yes, the chemistry is in the lab testing stage, but prototype batteries exist. Should the new plastic cost less than the lithium it displaces, economic efficiency awaits.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Innovation abounds. Ingenuity flourishes. Profits await. Only not in America so much anymore. Research grants have been axed in the name of wokeness, whatever that bastardized word means anymore. The gullibly stupid among us celebrate as America falls behind the rest of the world in one of the most lucrative industries known to us, the EV industry. America blindly surrendered its lead in EV battery development two decades ago.