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Weather:
A chance of showers, then showers and thunderstorms likely after 11am. Mostly sunny, with a high near 89. Chance of precipitation is 70%.
Thursday Night:
Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly before 8pm. Partly cloudy, with a low around 76. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
Today at a Glance
:
Drug Court
convenes before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols at 10 a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse, Kim C. Hammond Justice Center 1769 E Moody Blvd, Bldg 1, Bunnell. Drug Court is open to the public. See the Drug Court handbook
here
and the participation agreement
here
.
The Palm Coast Beautification
and Environmental Advisory Committee meets at 5 p.m. at City Hall, 160 Lake Avenue, Palm Coast.
‘Let’s Talk Palm Coast’ Town Halls with Council Member Ty Miller:
The City of Palm Coast is hosting a series of town halls, offering residents the chance to meet face-to-face with their City Council Members, ask questions, and learn more about the inner workings of their local government. At 5 p.m. today, Council Member Ty Miller, at the Southern Recreation Center’s second floor.
The Flagler Beach City Commission
meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 105 South 2nd Street in Flagler Beach. Watch the meeting
at the city’s YouTube channel here
. Access meeting agenda and materials
here
. See a list of commission members and their email addresses
here
.
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Central Park
, from noon to 2 p.m. in Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave. Join Bill Wells, Bob Rupp and other members of the Palm Coast Model Yacht Club, watch them race or join the races with your own model yacht. No dues to join the club, which meets at the pond in Central Park every Thursday.
Notably:
Bret Stephens, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal (where he won a Pulitzer), and now one of the New York Times’s conservative (albeit anti-Trump) columnists, with whom I happen to share a birthday, is part of Israel’s amen corner in the United States, an apologist’s apologist. Trump’s infamous line about standing on Fifth Avenue, killing somebody and not losing any votes applies to Stephen’s view of Israel: Israel could nuke a country (or a non-entity like Gaza or the West Bank, since Israel doesn’t recognize Palestinians’ right to exist, let alone their territories or potential countries) and not lose Stephens’s support. It could commit genocide and not lose his support. To the contrary. Stephens
in his latest column
offers a shocking apology for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza by simply defining genocide as
not what’s going on in Gaza
. Israel is not killing enough people to call it genocide. I thought I was reading a Jonathan Swift satire. But no. Stephens is dead serious: “If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans — why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, has cited so far in nearly two years of war?”
Why not
. Israel warns its victims first. We should be thankful. Israel could do so much worse. We should be thankful. He then throws this strange line in there: “As for the threat of economic boycotts, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has been the
world’s best-performing major stock index since Oct. 7. 2023
.” In a column on the non-genocide-but-60,000-deaths in Gaza. 60,000 out of 2 million, the equivalent of 10.5 million Americans based on today’s population estimates (illegals not included), but it’s not genocide. Because it is not matching the UN definition of genocide: Israel, in his view, is not displaying the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The razing of Gaza is not that kind of destruction. The denial of a people’s right to eat is not that kind of destruction. The ultimate goal–expulsion of 2 million Gazans out of Gaza–is not that kind of destruction. “Genocide does not mean simply ‘too many civilian deaths,’” he writes, and “too many civilian deaths” isn’t that notable anyway. It’s “a heartbreaking fact of nearly every war, including the one in Gaza.” I like this comment I read, one of 1,400 for that column: “Actual human suffering, on both sides, is being swept under the rug while we all argue on semantics.”
—
P.T.
Now this:
FlaglerLive News Service, Palm Coast
(@
flaglerlive
) • Instagram photos and videos
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My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. […] The crime of genocide
was defined
in 1948 by the United Nations as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel’s case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. […] In fact, the
systematic
destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely. […] Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That’s how Mr. Netanyahu’s own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November
described
on Israel’s Democrat TV and in subsequent
articles
and
interviews
the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population.
–From “
I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It
,” by Omer Bartov, The New York Times, July 15, 2025.
.
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive
.
