Things To Do In SW Florida

By PAUL WISEMAN, Associated Press Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. employers slowed hiring last month, but still added a solid 139,000 jobs amid uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s trade wars.

Hiring fell from a revised 147,000 in April, the Department of Labor said Friday. The job gains last month were above the 130,000 that economists had forecast.

Healthcare companies added 62,000 jobs and bars and restaurants 30,000. The federal government shed 22,000 jobs, however, the most since November 2020, as Trump’s job cuts and hiring freeze had an impact. And factories lost 8,000 jobs last month.

Average hourly wages rose 0.4% from April and 3.9% from a year earlier – a bit higher than forecast.

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Epic Universe is populated with monsters, wizards, dragons and little guys named Mario and Luigi. And Universal Orlando is tempting visitors to buy remembrances of them, creating a lineup of merchandise, much of which is exclusive to the new theme park.

Consumer tastes and trends make producing souvenirs a more elaborate task than cranking up T-shirt and keychain factories.

“We really have leaned in on the novelty, the playfulness,” said Cathy Fischer, senior vice president of parks global merchandise for Universal Products & Experiences. “It’s really about that cosplay.”

Epic visitors are decked out as videogame characters, playing into the theme of the park’s Super Nintendo World, or as goth vampire types for photo ops within Dark Universe, the land that celebrates Universal’s classic monsters.

“We want people to come into the park and have fun, and what better way than to just get into whoever their favorite character or monster is, to really feel that when they come into the park?” Fischer said. read more

An Atlanta developer’s plan to transform the once-thriving Seminole Towne Center has lined up its first retailer, with Costco under contract to buy a portion of the property and build a new store there.

Costco Wholesale recently submitted plans to the City of Sanford calling for a 156,454-square-foot membership warehouse store, 847 parking spaces, and a gas station to replace the former Macy’s building and a parking lot south of the mall, according to a report in GrowthSpotter. JP Andrews, Director of Real Estate Development at Costco, confirmed that the company is under contract to purchase the parcel from The Ardent Companies, which bought the shuttered mall property in March.

“We are under contract here, so we’re working on a certain timeline. I need to have a budget together and present it to our CEO in August to be able to move this project forward,” Andrews said during a pre-application meeting on Tuesday with Sanford staff. “We are presenting a pretty conceptual plan here, understanding that there’s going to be some massaging of this based on the city requirements and all of that. What you’re seeing here is pretty much a prototype footprint of one of our buildings.” read more

As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk argued on social media on Thursday, the world’s richest man threatened to decommission a space capsule used to take astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station.

After Trump threatened to cut government contracts given to Musk’s SpaceX rocket company and his Starlink internet satellite services, Musk responded via X that SpaceX “will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.”

It’s unclear how serious Musk’s threat was. But the capsule, developed with the help of government contracts, is an important part of keeping the space station running. NASA also relies heavily on SpaceX for other programs including launching science missions and, later this decade, returning astronauts to the surface of the moon.

The Dragon capsule

SpaceX is the only U.S. company capable right now of transporting crews to and from the space station, using its four-person Dragon capsules.

Boeing’s Starliner capsule has flown astronauts only once; last year’s test flight went so badly that the two NASA astronauts had to hitch a ride back to Earth via SpaceX in March, more than nine months after launching last June. read more

By BERNARD CONDON, Associated Press

Investors bought hundreds of billions of dollars of Tesla stock after Donald Trump was elected on a bet that politics were more important that profits.

In three hours Thursday, they learned yet again how dangerous that gamble could be.

Shares of Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker plunged more than 14% in a stunning wipeout as investors dumped holdings amid a bitter war of words between the president and the world’s richest man. By the end of the trading day, $150 billion of Tesla’s value had been erased, more than what it would take to buy all the shares of Starbucks and hundreds of other big publicly traded U.S. companies.

The disagreement started over the president’s budget bill, then quickly turned nasty. After Musk said that Trump wouldn’t haven’t gotten elected without his help, Trump implied that he may turn the federal government against his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump wrote on his social messaging service Truth Social. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” read more