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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
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Palm Coast Beautification and Environmental Advisory Committee
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Candidate Forum
Flagler Beach City Commission Meeting
Beats and Eats: Live Concert and Food Trucks at the Stage in Town Center
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
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
The dude says
I have been accusing folks of being wrong about this DC Blox thing… But do a search for “Hyperscale data centers within 5 miles of the coast” and it comes up in the top three results.
I could be wrong.
If it is indeed a HS Data center to be used for AI servers… well they didn’t choose very wisely… what I have been correct about is this area simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to support it.
Ray W. says
The monthly Bureau of Labor Services (BLS) May 2026 “paychecks” estimate came out this morning; it is estimated that 172,000 more people are earning paychecks, compared to the April figure.
The first standard revision of the original April estimate of paychecks earned added 64,000 more new paychecks to the original April estimate of paychecks added, for a total of 179,000 new workers earning paychecks.
And, the second standard revision to the number of new workers earning paychecks for March also came out, with 29,000 new jobs added on top of the first revision to the original March paychecks estimate, for a total of 214,000 paychecks added during that month.
The unemployment rate remained steady at 4.3%.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
As I have commented before, based on the exercise of curious study, every month BLS surveyors contact some 120,000 businesses and government agencies spread all across the country. These companies and agencies operate approximately 620,000 work sites.
BLS surveyors do not ask about the number of employees; they ask about the number of people who earned a paycheck during the survey week. People can be on vacation or be on sick leave during the survey week and thus not be earning a paycheck at the time of the survey, but they can still be on a payroll. ADP counts the number of people who are on payrolls, whether they earn a paycheck or not. Different algorithms, different results.
But, not all businesses and government agencies immediately respond to the BLS surveys. Some businesses or agencies fall way behind in their responses. This is why BLS paychecks earned numbers are called estimates, i.e., they are not yet complete. Each month, as more responses come in, the BLS revises its previously issued paychecks earned estimates.
But that isn’t the end of the process. Over time, on two different dates, the BLS blends actual state tax records into its business and agency survey response estimates. Thus, after the passage of many months, a final statistically reliable assessment of actual paychecks created is established. Conflict over estimates comes from a need for immediately issued paychecks estimates against a need for the most accurate final figures. Businesses need immediate figures to plan as early as possible for the future; they can’t wait for up to a year for the most accurate figures that can only come from the passage of time.
This explains why monthly paychecks added revisions can wildly fluctuate as more and better data comes in. The more gullible among us conflate incomplete monthly initial estimates with the long-delayed yet more complete final figures. Wild swings in the numbers are a part of the process.
No one can say the these three monthly “paychecks added” estimates for March, April and May are negative insights into the state of our economy. These either initial or revised figures bolster an argument that Trump administration policies are working. And they might be working. As always, I caution that theses are not year-over-year figures, which I argue offer a better barometer of the health of the job market, one of the two economic sectors that the Fed is mandated by statute to watch closely.
So I checked the BLS for paychecks added over recent year over year figures.
In 2023, for those 12 months, BLS figures reveal 3.0 million paychecks added to the economy. During the 12 months comprising 2024, 2.2 million paychecks added. In 2025, 181,000 paychecks added. And, from May 2025 to May 2026, subject to further revision, 1.659 million paychecks are estimated to have been added to the national workforce.
Clearly, the addition of 1.659 million paychecks added over the past 12 months reflects, at the very least, a healthy labor market. If this is so, is adding 2.2 million paychecks in 2024 reflective of an even healthier labor market? And, does the addition of 3.0 million paychecks earned in 2023 reflect the healthiest example of a labor market, year over year, by a significant margin, in the past nearly three and a half years?
I post what I post for a number of reasons. There is a lot of dishonesty being introduced on the FlaglerLive forum. Professional liars are lying in hopes that the more gullible among us will at first internalize the lies and then launder the lies.
For some five years now, I have been posting comments derived from reliable sources of information. The goal has been to counter the liars and the lie launderers. Yes, to some, the spreading of lies in the furtherance of political gain is a virtue. But not to all.
My target audience is the curious student, the reader capable of learning and adjusting, the ones willing to engage in the exercise of intellectual rigor, the true conservatives.
Ray W. says
More on the status of negotiations between the United States and Iran.
A CNN reporter quotes from Mohsen Rezaei, a former head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (1981 to 1999), who is described in the story as a senior advisor to Iran’s new Ayatollah:
“The negotiations are at a deadlock and (President Donald) Trump must break the deadlock.”
The reporter then describes Mr. Rezaei as saying that the deadlock arises from Iran’s demand that the U.S. return $24 billion that has been frozen on American authority from regional banks. $12 billion is to be returned as proof of trust upon the signing of an “interim agreement”, and the return of the other $12 billion is to be negotiated later.
The reporter then writes that the Trump administration cannot agree to anything that might make the negotiations appear to be less successful than former President Obama’s 2015 negotiations that included the release of $1.7 billion [including interest] in Iranian funds that had been seized by the Carter administration during the Iranian Revolution.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
If the reporting accurately reflects Iran’s position, the Strait of Hormuz will likely remain largely closed for the indefinite future. Some ships may get through. Most will not. Simple as that. It’s already been 97 days of Strait blockage. Rockets and drones are still flying. Some strike their targets. Many miss.
The Trump administration, having politically locked itself into the position of not returning any seized money to Iran for fear of looking to its supporters like Obama, or worse, really doesn’t appear to have a fallback plan other than the resumption of hostilities. Maybe I am wrong.
Pogo says
September 11, 2001 — with the other ending.
Laurel says
Private equity firms are buying public utilities, as data centers require much power. These investment firms will set your rates for their profit.
https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/private-equity-pursues-profits-in-power-utilities-as-data-centers-use-more-energy-and-electric-bills-rise/
Sherry says
@ Laurel. . . It’s a “Brave New World”. . . yet another dystopian nightmare!
Tony Mack says
Seems as if the Chinese have figured out how to have massive data facilities for AI processing with disrupting land masses while helping the environment as well…they just put the facility under water…BINGO…several problems solved…
China is advancing its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities by developing undersea data centers. These facilities are designed to utilize the ocean’s resources for cooling and renewable energy, marking a significant shift in data center technology.
Key Features of Undersea Data Centers
Cooling and Energy Efficiency
Seawater Cooling: Undersea data centers use seawater to cool servers, significantly reducing the need for traditional cooling systems.
Renewable Energy: These facilities are often connected to offshore wind farms, providing a sustainable energy source.
Operational Advantages
Reduced Energy Consumption: The design allows for lower energy usage compared to conventional land-based data centers. For instance, one facility achieves a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) below 1.15, which is much more efficient than the industry average of 1.5.
Enhanced Server Longevity: The sealed environment reduces corrosion and damage to servers, leading to fewer operational failures.
Strategic Importance
Geopolitical Context
Location: Some undersea data centers are strategically placed in regions like the South China Sea, which is significant for military and economic reasons.
Technological Self-Sufficiency: These projects align with China’s goals to enhance its technological capabilities amid global competition, particularly in AI and digital infrastructure.
Future Developments
Expansion Plans: China is expected to continue investing in undersea data centers as part of its broader strategy to boost AI computing capacity and integrate renewable energy solutions into its digital infrastructure.
These undersea data centers represent a forward-thinking approach to managing the growing demands of AI while addressing environmental concerns.
Sherry says
Thank you Tony Mack!
Meanwhile, trump is pushing “coal” energy. . . and, taking us back to the 1950’s. That “complete nonsense” will help the US “WIN” the AI race. . . maybe to oblivion. . . right Maga?