Things To Do In SW Florida

WEST PALM BEACH — Transportation Security Administration employees on Wednesday described in detail their financial hardships — bracing for not getting their much-needed paychecks by the end of this workweek.

They shared their stories as congressional leaders in Palm Beach County called for the end of the federal government shutdown.

U.S. Reps. Lois Frankel and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, South Florida Democrats, joined members of the American Federation of Government Employees — a federal employee union — on Wednesday for a news conference aimed at urging federal lawmakers, particularly Republicans, to negotiate an end to the shutdown.

The shutdown began on Oct. 1 after Republican and Democrat lawmakers failed to agree on a short-term budget, with one of the primary contentions being whether tax subsidies should remain for those who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Frankel and Cherfilus-McCormick are among the Democrats who want to preserve the subsidies, fearing skyrocketing premiums if the subsidies were to vanish. “Democrats have taken the position that we will not vote for a budget that cuts millions of people out of health care,” Frankel said at the news conference outside of Palm Beach International Airport. read more

By MATT O’BRIEN, Associated Press

Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an “industrial-scale, unlawful” economy to “scrape” the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain.

Reddit’s lawsuit in a New York federal court takes aim at San Francisco-based Perplexity, maker of an AI chatbot and “answer engine” that competes with Google, ChatGPT and others in online search.

Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a “former Russian botnet,” and Texas-based startup SerpApi.

It’s the second such lawsuit from Reddit since it sued another major AI company, Anthropic, in June.

But the lawsuit filed Wednesday is different in the way that it confronts not just an AI company but the lesser-known services the AI industry relies on to acquire online writings needed to train AI chatbots. read more

Wendy Lee and Caroline Petrow-Cohen, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Inside a historic aircraft hangar in Playa Vista, crowds of people gathered on Thursday to browse the latest fashions from handbags to clothing and shoes as they prepared for the holiday shopping season.

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These weren’t shoppers or retailer buyers searching for the latest products. Instead, they were YouTube video creators who were being courted by brands from Lowe’s to Shark Beauty to encourage online audiences to buy their products. read more

Progressive, one of the nation’s top auto insurance companies, plans to return nearly $1 billion to Florida policyholders, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Wednesday.

Policyholders will receive an average of $300, DeSantis said. “It might be a check,” he said, “It might be a credit on your bill.”

A Progressive spokesman said later Wednesday that policyholders will receive “a credit” in 2026.

DeSantis credited insurance reforms enacted by Florida’s Legislature in 2022 and 2023 with reducing auto insurers’ losses and making it possible for the state’s top five companies to request a combined 6.5% rate reduction in 2025, down from +4.3% in 2024 and +32.7% in 2023.

The reforms, he said, reduced insurance litigation by making it more difficult for plaintiffs attorneys to recover steep legal fees. The reforms followed years of rate increases resulting from claims disputes that saw legal fees far exceeding what was recovered for policyholders, he said.

“The dispute would be over, like, $50,000, and then the lawyer ends up getting like $350,000. Well, why would we want a system that encourages that?” he said. read more

By WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Less than a day after gold soared to another record high, prices for the precious metal plunged — marking the biggest sell-off in years.

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Gold futures in New York closed at a record $4,374 per troy ounce on Monday, before falling more than $250 (or 5.74%) Tuesday. That’s the largest, single-day percentage drop seen since September 2011, according to data in FactSet. And despite some brief rebounds, losses continued to pile up Wednesday — with gold futures trading at about $4,036 as of 11 a.m. ET. read more