Dec. 24, 2025
🌟 Good morning! Today we bring you a special edition of good tidings with baby whales, upgraded fire services, and sincere best wishes for your holidays.
Check in with us through the next week as we update the site with news and stories from our reporters and news partners.
Our newsletter schedule will change for the holidays, starting today. We’ll move to Sunday and Wednesday for the following week and return to a full 5-day schedule on Jan. 4.
🎄Enjoy your holiday!
NEWS: ENVIRONMENT
Baby boom
With a population of less than 400, every new recruit to the North Atlantic right whale population is a reason to celebrate. And this calving season has whale researchers passing out the seaweed cigars at a rapid clip. Just three weeks into the four-month period when right whales give birth off the Southeast coast, the calf count is up to nine.
The season began appropriately enough with a mother whale named Champagne sighted off South Carolina with her new baby. It’s continued with two more South Carolina babies and six off Georgia, including Tripelago, shown here in surprisingly blue water off Ossabaw. Mother/calf pairs have also been spotted off Little St. Simons, St. Simons, Doboy Sound, and off the Florida/Georgia border.
For more photos of some of the world’s biggest babies — newborn right whales are about the size and length of Mazda Miata — see this running list of right whale birth announcements from the New England Aquarium.
NEWS: PUBLIC SAFETY
Midway celebrates
It’s taken time, energy and money, but Midway’s citizens now have a useable firehouse, firefighters and equipment. Officials took a moment Saturday to cheer the work and show off the renovated firehouse. Liberty County reporter Robin Kemp reports on the newly constituted fire department and the road to get the system back in place after her earlier stories of a dilapidated firehouse, broken equipment and poor staff morale sparked action.
Midway reopens fire station
By Robin Kemp
News of the state of the firehouse, as well as of poor relationships between the volunteer service and Washington, brought public attention to issues affecting fire protection for Midway’s residents and businesses.
Chatham County gets new elections supervisor
By Craig Nelson
Brook Schreiner has been appointed as the new elections supervisor for Chatham County, pledging to ensure the integrity and accessibility of the election process.
McIntosh to begin second vote on Sapelo zoning referendum
By Mary Landers
McIntosh County residents will vote Jan. 20 to repeal the county commission’s zoning changes on Sapelo Island, which would allow for larger homes and could potentially displace the last Gullah-Geechee community on a Georgia barrier island.
Legal hurdles cleared for Forsyth Park office development
By Margaret Coker
Local developers have won legal rulings allowing them to proceed with excavations for the Forsyth Park underground garage and office building in January.
Facts with receipts: How The Current finds documents and how you can, too
By Maggie Lee
A free, open and democratic society requires open records — a public right to inspect government plans, e-mails, budgets, invoices and other records. “Sunshine” laws guarantee that right and The Current GA’s reporting uses the documents that cities, counties and the state don’t publish, and publishes them.
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