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Weather: A 50 percent chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 73. Northeast wind 8 to 14 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph. Wednesday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 60.
- 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:
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) meets at 9 a.m. at the Airline Room at the Daytona Beach International Airport. The TPO’s planning oversight includes all of Flagler and Volusia counties, with board representation from each of those jurisdictions. See the full agendas here. To join the meeting electronically, go here.
Conversations in Democracy: An open, freewheeling discussion on topics here in our community, around Florida and throughout the United States, today taking on migrant detention at the Flagler County jail, noon to 1 p.m. at Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. All are welcome! Everyone’s voice is important. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
The Circle of Light Course in Miracles study group meets at a private residence in Palm Coast every Wednesday at 1:20 PM. There is a $2 love donation that goes to the store for the use of their room. If you have your own book, please bring it. All students of the Course are welcome. There is also an introductory group at 1:00 PM. The group is facilitated by Aynne McAvoy, who can be reached at [email protected] for location and information.
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: The image above, from Turkish Archeological News, is of “The King’s Gate” in Hattusa, in central Turkey, once the capital of the very powerful Hittite civilization and empire in the second millennium BCE. It is today a UNESCO Heritage Site. “A monumental enclosure wall of more than 8 km in length surrounds the whole city,” the page on the UNESCO site states. “There are remains of older walls around the lower city and section walls dividing the large city area in separate districts. The ruins of the upper city’s fortification form a double wall with more than a hundred towers and, as far as is known today, five gateways: two in the west, the Lion’s Gate in the south-west, the King’s Gate in the south-east and a procession gate, the Sphinx Gate in the south of the city. The latter is located on top of a high artificial bastion with stone-plastered slopes, with two staircases leading to the gateway at the top and an arched stone tunnel running underneath. The impressive ruins of fortifications, placed on rocky peaks in the centre of the Upper City, bear witness to the complexity of Hittite rock masonry, and the longest known Hittite hieroglyphic inscription from the Hittite Empire can be found in the Upper City at Nişantepe.” The “King’s Gate” received its name from a relief carved at the base of the archway. My Pleiade edition of the history of that era describes the sculpture above: “This sculpture is one of the most famous examples of Hittite art from the New Kingdom. In high relief, the silhouette of a male figure stands out on the block, wearing a pointed helmet with cheek guards. His face is youthful and beardless. The man advances to the right with a determined air. Dressed in a short loincloth, his torso is bare, and the sculptor has meticulously depicted the abundance of body hair. In his right hand, the figure holds a finger-handled axe (a valuable dating marker), while a curved sword is tucked into his belt. His left hand is closed in a deliberate gesture. His legs and feet are bare. The figure’s identity remains uncertain: god or king? The small horn affixed to the side of the helmet is a clue cited by those who favor the former hypothesis. The weaponry, however, is more suited to a monarch than a deity; the placement of the relief also makes it quite understandable that it depicts the king entering his city, perhaps returning from a victorious campaign and at the head of his army. Indeed, his face emanates the contentment that success brings, as well as confidence in the future.” The raised fist looks a bit too familiar. But for the nobility and art of the king represented in the statue, I could’ve sworn it had a maga air about it. I am surprised Ubu Roi has not had the stele stolen and brought stateside, maybe placed in front of the Donald Trump Center for the Performing Arts.
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
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Flagler County Cultural Council (FC3) Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
Community Chorus of Palm Coast Free Concerts
“Godspell,” at the Limelight Theatre
“The Sound of Music,” at Athens Theatre
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Flagler Schools Jon Fair for Teachers
Chess Meet-Up At the Flagler Beach Public Library
“The Sound of Music,” at Athens Theatre
“Godspell,” at the Limelight Theatre
“The Sound of Music,” at Athens Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
Compared to the great literary monuments of the Hebrews, India or Greece, Hittite literature ranks as minor literature. The aristocracy which dictated or inspired these tablets had no taste for abstract speculations. She seems to have ignored or disdained the mathematics flourishing in Babylon; she confined her conception of the world and of life within the ready-made frameworks of foreign mythologies. The Hittites, superstitious people, asked the oracle and magic for the answer to the problems which, elsewhere, gave birth to the scientific spirit. But these positive lords excelled in the expression of the concrete, in effective disciplines: history, law, administration, practical morality, their literary legacy is that of soldier-peasants. All of their writings roughly prefigure what was, before the discovery of Hellenic thought, the Latin heritage, of which the epitaphs, decrees, laws, votive inscriptions, ritual or magical form constitute the essential.
–From Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, History of Literatures 1: Ancient, Oriental, and Oral Literatures, ed. Raymond Queneau (1955, 1977).
Ray W. says
Car buzz reports that this past Sunday evening, at a time contemporaneous with a local thunderstorm, the roof of the world’s largest auto window glass factory caught fire; it is thought possible that a lightning strike ignited the fire.
The Ohio-based Chinese-owned Fuyao Glass America facility manufactures 30% of the national auto sector’s glass needs. 2,000 employees may be impacted.
No word on how long production will be impaired.
Make of this what you will.
HMMM says
These ridiculous illustrations are doing nothing but adding fuel to unstable people. I’m wondering what your agenda is by publishing an illustration of ICE dressed as Nazis, insinuating that they are shooting people dead at airports. Cant you just stick to the local news instead of trying to rally up Trump and ICE haters?
Pierre Tristam says
I expect the unstable people you are referring to are ICE and their mobs. We do not have to be a Nazi regime to adopt Nazi tactics. ICE tactics, encouraged by Trump and his junta, straight out of the totalitarian playbook. They are not gunning people down at airports, no, though you’re doing an effective job of gunning down satire, and they are gunning down civilians elsewhere, among other aberrant, police state—and yes, Nazi—behavior, masks, proud boyhoods and illegal roundups included. If you don’t think that concerns us all, making every such act anywhere in the country as “local” as it gets, you are conveniently not paying attention. If only the cartoons were ridiculous. May the days they were return, though for now and the next three years that’s a vain hope, thanks in no small part to heads-in-the-sand anonymous commenters like you.
Skibum says
HMMM??? It is easy to hate something that hasn’t gone well. The hate build-up against ICE has been growing across all segments of society for many months as a direct result of THEIR actions, THEIR brutality, THEIR Naziesque stormtrooper tactics and hidden identities, and yes, THEIR unnecessary and unjustifiable killings of two American citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.
Had this federal law enforcement agency been fulfilling their responsibilities in an ethical, professional manner like they had previously been directed to do under past presidents, all of the attention they have attracted, which is certainly warranted as well as concerning, would not have occurred. Anyone who is now trying to move the blame to others for THEIR contemptuous behavior is a moron! Anyone who is appalled by a political cartoonist’s depiction ICE… but NOT by their grotesque and thuggish actions that have played out again and again for all to see… is also a moron!
People have in fact died because of THEIR lack of training, their lack of proper de-escalation that is common in other law enforcement agencies precisely to avoid the type of circumstances that led to the two killings their masked agents unjustly committed. If you are so dense that you cannot comprehend these facts, I have only one thing left to say to you.
HMMM… you must be a maga mush brain, as well as a MORON!
Ray W. says
The WSJ constructed an article around the idea that the American EV sector may be “doomed” to lag behind the Chinese EV sector unless CATL, China’s leading EV battery maker, is soon allowed to enter the American manufacturing community, because CATL’s current technology is so much less expensive than anything American carmakers can make. At the very least, American EV sales may struggle for a few years. In the reporter’s recounting, without CATL’s influences, American EV costs will be higher than they need to be.
Right now, according to Robin Zheng, founder of CATL, for political reasons his company cannot even directly buy land in certain states on which to construct a battery factory. Other political hurdles block his company’s direct entry into the American EV battery market. But he predicts that the political resistance will be short-lived: “Maybe by 2028, it will change, because business relationships are always stronger and longer lasting than politicians.” He thinks a resurgence in American EV car sales has to occur, saying “it will have to be booming, because it’s the trend. It is the future.”
As an EV battery maker, CATL, per the reporter, was formed 15 years ago. Over passage of those few years, admittedly with generous government support, CATL’s net earnings broke $10 billion in 2025 on revenues of more than $60 billion. The company now employs 21,000 engineers.
While other battery companies plowed their development money into building liquid-state lithium-ion battery factories, CATL put much of its development money into proving the viability of lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) EV batteries, a battery chemistry developed in the United States, but then abandoned.
So now, writes the reporter, to get around legal and political barriers, CATL is indirectly partnering with both Ford and GM to meet their EV battery needs by supplying to them CATL’s LFP batteries. Ford will pay CATL for its battery-related intellectual property and then build LFP batteries in a Ford-owned American factory, a workaround of those legal and political limits placed on CATL to stop it from building its own batteries in American factories. GM will import CATL batteries from China. Ford even abandoned a liquid-state lithium-ion battery factory venture with South Korea’s SK Group to partner with CATL. Ford’s decision was prompted by CATL’s current ability to construct a 500-mile LFP battery. CATL’s new and inexpensive sodium-ion batteries offer the next step in EV battery chemistry design. Tesla is building stationary LFP battery backup systems in Nevada using CATL technology.
While the reporter referred to both Ford and GM working on their own battery chemistries without naming the chemistry involved, prior reporting holds that both companies are working on lithium manganese-rich (LMR) battery chemistries.
As an aside, in what was described as a lament, a Ford battery executive told the reporter: “We just didn’t commercialize that [LFP] technology.”
Make of this what you will.
Skibum says
This morning, Republican senator John Kennedy from Louisiana had no more patience with his fellow republican senators, and especially the senate majority leadership who have consistently been directed by the orange menace in the WH for days on end to NOT negotiate with democrats on the government shutdown, no matter what! So for those who believe the lies that it is the democrats who are prolonging the government shutdown and responsible for TSA employees at our nation’s airports, Coast Guard and FEMA employees from not getting paid, here is a reality check for you, straight from republican senator Kennedy.
Kennedy has told his fellow senators that he would be putting forth a bill asking for unanimous consent from the other senators to immediately fund TSA workers, who are walking off the job in droves after missing their 2nd regular monthly paychecks, thus creating chaos at the airports, including hours long bottlenecks and infuriating travelers. While the senate held the voting period open for yet the latest vote on reopening the government, Kennedy had to wait for his ability to offer up his proposal. Senate republican leadership stepped in the way, preventing him from offering his proposal by keeping the vote open for more than 4 hours even after every senator had already voted, specifically to prevent his proposal to be considered!
Republican leadership was not allowing a proposal that would almost certainly pass, simply because the idiot in the WH did not want Americans to see bipartisan support in Congress after he instructed republican leadership to defy an attempt by a fellow republican congressman to solve one of our most critical problems today! Then the convicted felon prez went on social media saying HE would issue an executive order to DHS, ordering them to start paying TSA employees so it would look like he resolved the problem that he created in the first place by demanding republicans not negotiate with democrats on funding DHS because of all of the overreach and brutality that ICE agents have been causing for many months.
Just another example of the convicted felon prez causing a huge mess, then trying to be seen as fixing the mess that HE caused in the first place. And it is especially offensive that this shutdown has gone on as long as it has because HE has been telling both senate and house republican leadership not to engage in any negotiations with democrats! That is literally their jobs!!!
This republican shutdown, and that is exactly what it is and has been, could have ended days or weeks ago except for the insistence by the WH to do nothing and keep it going. Gas prices are still rising. Cost of groceries and other goods are rising. Airline tickets are rising. The DOW and NASDAQ keeps going down, down, down and is now is “correction” territory with Americans who own stock losing more than 10% of their previous worth… so far. The strategic oil reserves here in the U.S. are already severely diminished and at their lowest level in decades. Oil tankers are still blocked from transiting the Strait of Hormuz, except for very limited movement that Iran permits after friendly nations pay “ransom” money to Iran to keep their tankers from being blown up.
The convicted felon prez’ support from even republicans is at the lowest level, and his disapproval polling results, from his favorite fauxinfotainment nuze even, shows historic high disapproval in every category because Americans are so pissed of at his administration and the republican congress. Even republicans know and expect a total trouncing by democrats for the coming midterm elections in a few short months.
Nothing the republicans are doing or managing are going well. Just like most of the orange menace’s personal businesses and schemes I guess that went bankrupt or were ordered disolved due to fraud. I hope we are soon going to vote out the complicit and spineless republ-con members of congress who have abdicated their authority, forgotten or ignored their oaths of office and their duty to push back on authoritarian power grabs by a corrupt, criminal president!
We can NEVER allow this type of unconstitutional governmental malpractice to continue, and in November, voters will step up and do what congress has refused to do… to hold this corrupt man in the WH accountable and STOP him in his tracks from doing even more harm to this nation and it’s citizens!