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Weather: A 20 percent chance of showers before 2pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 84. East wind 6 to 14 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph. Friday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 70.
- 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 For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Today’s guests include Mike Hahaj, Raydient’s director of commercial development and operations (Raydient is the developer of the so-called western expansion, west of U.S. 1), and Byron Donalds, the gubernatorial candidate. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, 6400 North Oceanshore Blvd., Palm Coast, 10 a.m. Join a Ranger the First Friday of every month for a garden walk. Learn about the history of Washington Oaks while exploring the formal gardens. The walk is approximately one hour. No registration required. Walk included with park entry fee. Participants meet in the Garden parking lot. The event is free with paid admission fee to the state park: $5 per vehicle. (Limit 2-8 people per vehicle) $4 per single-occupant vehicle. Call (386) 446-6783 for more information or by email: [email protected].
First Friday in Flagler Beach, the monthly festival of music, food and leisure, is scheduled for this evening at Downtown’s Veterans Park, 105 South 2nd Street, from 5 to 9 p.m. The event is overseen by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and run by Laverne M. Shank Jr. and Surf 97.3
Free Family Art Night: Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens, 5:30 to 7 p.m. 78 East Granada Boulevard, Ormond Beach. All art supplies are provided. No art experience is needed, and all ages are welcome. Free Family Art Night is a popular, monthly program typically scheduled on the first Friday of each month to coordinate with the free, family-friendly movie shown outdoors at Rockefeller Gardens. The two programs offer a stimulating evening for families, at no charge, in the heart of downtown Ormond Beach. Our art program takes place in the OMAM Classroom, rain or shine, but the City’s outdoor movies are weather dependent. Movie information can be found here or call The Casements at 386-676-3216.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
The Battle of Shallowford, a play at Limelight Theatre, 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine. 7:30 p.m. except on Sunday, 2 p.m. Buy tickets here (generally $37.60 for adults). The play centers around the dramatic events that unfold when the residents tune into Orson Welles’ famous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. The locals, who rely on the radio for news and entertainment, are thrown into a frenzy when they believe an actual Martian invasion is taking place in their own town.
| The Latest Jail Bookings |
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| Source: Flagler County Sheriff's Office. Note: the Sheriff's Office redacts or censors the names of migrants arrested under authority of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The federal agency requires the redactions, according to the Sheriff's Office. |
Juxtapositions: Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses opens on a scene of “Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens.” Gibreel is the actor-protagonist of the novel. His Air India plane has just exploded over the English Channel, victim of a Sikh terrorist bomb. Gibreel tumbles, “cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity.” He survives. That’s all on the first page of the 547-page novel. The Satanic Verses was published on Sept. 26, 1988. So it had already been printed and bound by July 3, the day the USS Vincennes in its “Sea of Lies,” as the Newsweek investigation revealed, shot Iran Air Flight 655 out of the sky, killing 290 people on their way to Dubai, including a family of 20 that was heading to a wedding, and was dressed for the occasion. Robert Fisk in The Great War for Civilisation described how the crew of another American Navy vessel spotted people falling out of the sky. “Yes, the passengers would all fall out of the sky like that, over a wide area, together, in clumps. in bits, from 10,000 feet it seemed. I could imagine the impact with the sea, the spouts of water, some of the passengers no doubt still fully conscious all the way down. Three days later, in the emergency Bandar Abbas mortuary. I would look at Fatima Faidazaida and realise with horror that she must have been alive as she fell from the heavens, clutching her baby as she tumbled and spilled out of the sky in the bright summer sun, her fellow passengers and chunks of the Airbus and burning fuel oil cascading around her. And she held on to her baby, knowing could she have known?-that she must die.” A final irony: soon after the publication of The Satanic Verses, Ayatollah Khomeini put a bounty on Rushdie’s head. The fatwa was not, as Khomeini claimed, over Rushdie’s portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad reciting verses to a pagan goddess, but because Rushdie had made fun of him.
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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.
June 2026
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Friday Blue Forum
First Friday in Flagler Beach
Free Family Art Night at Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens
‘The Battle of Shallowford,’ at Limelight Theatre
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
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club, at Flagler Beach Public Library
‘The Battle of Shallowford,’ at Limelight Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
“There was a portrait of an imam like him in The Satanic Verses, an imam grown monstrous, his gigantic mouth eating his own revolution. The real imam had taken his country into a useless war with its neighbor, and a generation of young people had died, hundreds of thousands of his country’s young, before the old man called a halt. He said that accepting peace with Iraq was like eating poison, but he had eaten it. After that the dead cried out against the imam and his revolution became unpopular. He needed a way to rally the faithful and he found it in the form of a book and its author. The book was the devil’s work and the author was the devil and that gave him the enemy he needed. This author in this basement flat in Islington huddling with the wife from whom he was half estranged. This was the necessary devil of the dying imam.
–From Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton (2012).
Laurel says
And there you are. Data centers for more data slop. We need this for “national security”? Really, really, really, we need this locally, why?
Pogo says
The story continues
2020: Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752
https://www.google.com/search?q=Ukraine+International+Airlines+Flight+752
Since 2022… over 57,000 served
https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+shahed+drone+russian+war+on+ukraine+to+date
Irony? “Shahed” (شاهد, transliterations: Persian: Šâhed, Arabic: Šāhid) literally means “witness” in both Persian and Arabic languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahed_drones
Ibid (aka Lawnmower — more irony?)
https://www.google.com/search?q=shahed+witness+drone
“The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.”
— David Foster Wallace
EC: File