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Weather: Mostly sunny. Highs in the mid 80s. Southeast winds 10 to 15 mph. Friday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the mid 60s.
- 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: Pastor Charles Silano will talk about the Trump-ordered cuts that have drastically reduced the budget of the Grace Community Food Pantry. 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
Uptown Motown at the Fitz, 7 p.m. at the Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center/Flagler Auditorium, 5500 State Road 100, Palm Coast. $54 to $64. Fusing Bruno-Mars-caliber stage presence with top-tier vocals and wall-to-wall choreography, the men of UPTOWN combine the smooth stylings of R&B with the fresh hits of today in a unique and modern show that gets every crowd on their feet! Born in New York City (the epicenter of contemporary pop and soul music), the group exudes unparalleled energy with their blend of contemporary radio hits and classic Motown music. Every single member of UPTOWN is a world-class soloist, with frequent comparisons to the artistry of icons like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye; when they come together as one collective, the resulting remix creates “the most electrifying show you’ll see this decade!” (Agua Caliente, Palm Springs CA).
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.
Campaign diary: I too was caught up in the low-grade fever that radiated from all things Josh Weil once I started paying attention to the race, 24 hours before it ended. Until then I had committed a cardinal sin of journalism. I had taken its outcome for granted, its conduct revolting, since Randy Fine, one of the most distasteful characters in American politics today, was involved (the bigot called Weil “jihad Josh,” then turned around and called anyone critical of him anti-Semite). Then came those Iowa-style polls showing Weil within the margin of error. You remember the famous Des Moines Register poll showing Harris ahead of Trump last October, the poll by the great Ann Selzer, who’d hardly ever been wrong before. Those polls. I was part of the scrum of reporters at the gaggle at Flagler Democratic headquarters the day before the election, and again on Election Day at the library, a poor judgment call since I missed covering live the 10 interviews for that Palm Coast City Council appointment. There was some excitement of course. National press all hirsute with mics in Weil’s face (I was flat-handed with iPhone in Weil’s face), Weil saying all those things every candidate in the history of elections saying, whether from 30 points behind or, as it turned out, 10. An honorable loss, given the CCCP-redness of our district, but still a loss. I included a few qualifiers in the reporting, and by the time I started writing my story a few hours before the polls closed, my headline was set: Randy Fine After All, and so on. It took only returning to my desk and merely glimpsing the turnout numbers to know that a Weil victory was impossible. It would have been nice. But Democrats have a long way to being that good, when they’re having trouble being relevant. I don’t blame them. They haven’t yet conceded that democracy is over, though the thug’s election last November should have been proof enough. All else from here on is idealistic window dressing. At least we had that good win in Wisconsin and Corey Booker to console us (his plagiarism of a line from Grey’s Anatomy aside–”why are so many women dying in childbirth in the post-partum period in America. Shameful”–and seed new illusions.
—P.T.
Now this:
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 2025
Friday, Apr 04
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday, Apr 04
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Friday, Apr 04
Friday Blue Forum
Flagler County Democratic Party HQ
Friday, Apr 04
First Friday in Flagler Beach
Friday, Apr 04
Free Family Art Night at Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens
Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens
Friday, Apr 04
Uptown Motown at the Fitz
Flagler Auditorium/Dennis Fitzgerald Center for the Performing Arts
Saturday, Apr 05
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
315 South 7th Street, Flagler Beach
Saturday, Apr 05
Flagler Beach All Stars Beach Clean-Up
Saturday, Apr 05
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Law Office of Scott Spradley
Saturday, Apr 05
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Flagler School District Bus Depot
Saturday, Apr 05
17th Annual Turtle Fest
Saturday, Apr 05
Sunshine and Sandals Social at Cornerstone
Saturday, Apr 05
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Cinematique of Daytona Beach
No event found!
For the full calendar, go here.
Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.” It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car. It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.
–From M. Gessen’s “Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived,” the New York Times, April 2, 2025.
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
