Things To Do In SW Florida

The mostly vacant Seminole Towne Center — once billed as a premier mall for well-heeled shoppers in Seminole County — will shutter most of its property by the end of the month, after years of struggling with closed stores and acres of empty parking lots.

Mall owners told the few remaining tenants last month they had until Jan. 31 to vacate the property.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Asad “Eddie” Hussain, owner of Venetian Jewelers, as he spent most of this week packing merchandise in boxes in preparation to move out to his other store at the Florida Mall. “A lot of my customers have tears in their eyes. We did everything we could to stay in this mall.”

But Hussain, who began working at his family’s store as a teenager in 2005, said he knew the end was near.

“This year, they never brought in Santa Claus. There was no Christmas tree. There was no Christmas music,” he said.

Representatives for Seminole Mall Realty Holdings, which owns most of the roughly 60-acre mall property and 500,000-square-foot building, could not be reached for comment Thursday. read more

By CORA LEWIS

NEW YORK (AP) — Lenders will no longer be able to consider unpaid medical bills as a credit history factor when they evaluate potential borrowers in the U.S. for mortgages, car loans or business loans, according to a rule the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized Tuesday.

Removing medical debts from consumer credit reports is expected to increase the credit scores of millions of families by an average of 20 points, the bureau said. The CFPB says its research showed that outstanding health care claims are a poor predictor of someone’s ability to repay a loan yet often are used to deny mortgage applications.

The three national credit reporting agencies — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion — said last year that they were removing medical collections under $500 from U.S. consumer credit reports. The government agency’s new rule goes further by banning all outstanding medical bills from appearing on credit reports and prohibiting lenders from using the information. read more

By DAMIAN J. TROISE

NEW YORK (AP) — Electric vehicle demand is expected to keep rising this year, but uncertainty over policy changes and tariffs is clouding the forecast.

By JOSH FUNK

What is going on with aviation security?

By SARAH PARVINI, Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) — So much of the technology showcased at CES includes gadgets made to improve consumers’ lives — whether by leveraging AI to make devices that help people become more efficient, by creating companions to cure loneliness or by providing tools that help people with mental and physical health.

But not all innovation is good, according to a panel of self-described dystopia experts that has judged some products as “Worst in Show.” The award that no company wants to win calls out the “least repairable, least private, and least sustainable products on display.”

“We’re seeing more and more of these things that have basically surveillance technology built into them, and it enables some cool things,” Liz Chamberlain, director of sustainability at the e-commerce site iFixit told The Associated Press. “But it also means that now we’ve got microphones and cameras in our washing machines, refrigerators and that really is an industry-wide problem.” read more