Things To Do In SW Florida

Orlando-based Darden Restaurants closed 15 Bahama Breeze restaurants in the eastern United States last week — including five in Florida — but spared Orlando-area restaurants.

“We continually evaluate the performance of all our restaurants,” Darden told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “Closing a restaurant is a difficult choice because it impacts our team members and guests.

“However, we believe this is the right decision because it will allow Bahama Breeze to focus on its highest performing restaurants and strengthen the brand’s overall performance.”

There are nine Bahama Breeze locations in the Orlando metro area: five in Orange County, two in Osceola and two in Seminole. Darden did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday about how those locations are performing.

The Bahama Breeze restaurants shuttered in Florida were in Daytona Beach, Gainesville, Naples, Oakland Park and Sunrise. Four restaurants were closed in New Jersey as well as one each in Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New York and Tennessee. The closures reduce the number of active locations from 44 to 29. read more

By JOSH FUNK, Associated Press

Passengers on Southwest Airlines flights will soon be required to keep their portable chargers in plain sight while using them because of concerns about the growing number of lithium-ion battery fires in a new policy that other airlines may adopt.

Southwest announced the new policy that will go into effect May 28 and said passengers may have already seen notifications about the rule when using the airline’s app. While Southwest is the first U.S. airline to restrict the use of portable chargers like this, several Asian airlines have taken action earlier this year after a devastating fire aboard an Air Busan plane waiting to take off from an airport in South Korea in January.

There is growing concern about lithium-ion battery fires on planes because the number of incidents continues to grow yearly, and devices powered by those batteries are ubiquitous. There have already been 19 incidents involving these batteries this year, following last year’s record high of 89, according to Federal Aviation Administration statistics. read more

By YURI KAGEYAMA

TOKYO (AP) — Honda said Tuesday electric vehicle sales were slowing in the U.S., prompting the Japanese automaker to scrap its previous goal for EVs to be 30% of its global vehicle sales by 2030.

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Instead of the initial plan to invest 10 trillion yen ($69 billion) in an electrification strategy through the fiscal year ending in 2031, Honda is reducing that investment by 3 trillion yen ($21 billion) to 7 trillion yen ($48 billion).

Honda Motor Co. Chief Executive Toshihiro Mibe called the decisions “a switch in the planned course,” while stressing the long-term shift toward electrification remained unchanged, just pushed back in time. read more

By MICHELLE CHAPMAN

Home Depot doesn’t expect to raise prices because of tariffs, saying it has spent years diversifying the sources for the goods on its shelves.

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Billy Bastek, executive vice president of merchandising, said during a conference call on Tuesday that Home Depot’s suppliers have shifted sourcing across several countries and that the company doesn’t expect any single country outside of the U.S. will represent more than 10% of its purchases 12 months from now.

“We don’t see broad based price increases for our customers at all going forward,” he said. read more

By JON GAMBRELL and BERNARD CONDON, Associated Press

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Elon Musk said that he expects hundreds of thousands of self-driving Teslas will be on the road requiring no human intervention by the end of next year and that he is committed to staying as CEO of the company for at least another five years.

The billionaire also said in a pair of interviews on Tuesday that he has no regrets about leading the job-slashing Department of Government Efficiency under the Trump administration. He downplayed any damage to the Tesla brand from that role, saying demand for Teslas has experienced a “major rebound.” That’s potentially a big development given that the latest public sales figures from Europe and U.S. show steep declines in sales for several months running.

“We’ll probably have hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, Teslas doing self-driving in the U.S.,” Musk said in an CNBC interview Tuesday, adding that passengers won’t need to pay attention to the road. “Like you’re asleep and you wake up at your destination.” read more