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Woman placed on ‘Do Not Rent’ list at Enterprise seeks answers

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

A South Florida woman found herself headed for trouble after renting a car. Her search for answers hit a dead end, until she reached out to 7News for help. Kevin Ozebek investigates.Angela Palermo is worried about her car.Angela Palermo: “I am just riding around in this car with a hope and a prayer.”It broke down back in March, and she had to rent a car while hers was being repaired.That did not go well.Angela Palermo: “I go over to Enterprise, and they’re like, ‘You’re on a Do Not Rent list.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I was so embarrassed.”Angela says this isn’t the first time she was told she could not rent from EnterpriseIn 2019, she had to rent a car after an accident, so she went to Enterprise in Lauderhill.Angela Palermo: “He goes, ‘You are on a Do Not Rent list,’ and I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ They said I had $8,000 owed.”Angela says the worker claimed she had crashed on...

Why the hell would you work for an MP?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

Listen on Spotify Apple Music Google Play EN_Google_Podcasts_Badge Created with Sketch. Stitcher .st0{fill:#EB8A23;} .st1{fill:#FAC617;} .st2{fill:#612368;} .st3{fill:#3792C4;} .st4{fill:#C33727;} Acast In a special episode, host Aggie Chambre gathers a group of 20-something politicos who spent years working as aides and researchers for some of Britain’s best-known politicians — and hears what workin...

The world’s richest are leaving the poorest to deal with the global debt crisis alone

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

Mark Malloch-Brown is president of the Open Society Foundations, the world’s largest private human rights foundation, and the former U.N. Deputy Secretary-General.If the richest countries in the world can’t find the will to face the global debt crisis, what are the chances they’ll tackle the climate crisis?This is the question looming over this week’s G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan.And as the leaders of the world’s richest countries meet, it is Malawi’s Finance Minister Sosten Gwengwe who should be at the forefront of their minds — though he probably won’t be.Malawi, an African nation of almost 20 million people, has the unfortunate distinction of being the poorest democratic nation on the planet. And at this year’s spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, Gwengwe delivered a grim, personal account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of an accelerating global debt crisis — as well as the impact being wrought on his country by...

No skeletons, please: The UK Conservative Party cleans house

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

LONDON — If Rishi Sunak’s mission is to make politics boring again, he needs to start with his own MPs. After a seemingly endless string of scandals involving Tory politicians — from parliamentary porn-viewing, to bullying and outright sexual assault — party chiefs are intent on cleaning up their image at the next general election.Sick of lurid headlines, officials in Tory HQ are beefing up the vetting procedure for would-be-MPs ahead of the next national poll, widely expected to take place in 2024.The aim is to replace a number of departing Tory MPs who — for a variety of reasons — found themselves embroiled in scandal with a slick new generation of scrupulously-vetted politicians.Anne Jenkin, a Tory peer who has led the drive to elect more female Conservatives, said the process of getting on the candidates’ list will be “far more stringent” and that “it would be harder to get through if you have a history of bad behavior.”“The powers that be are far more aware and far less to...

Russia strains to put off a Ukrainian counteroffensive

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.Unveiling the hypersonic Kinzhal missile in 2018, Russian President Vladmir Putin had bragged it was almost impossible to intercept. But overnight Monday, Ukrainian commanders claimed to have shot down all half a dozen of the missiles tracking toward Kyiv. They also said Ukraine’s air defenses downed a dozen other missiles, as well as Iranian-made drones.So, not that hard to detect after all.Predictably, Moscow insisted all their missiles struck their intended targets — facilities storing ammunition, weapons and military equipment supplied by the West. But there’s no ground evidence to support this claim — although they did manage to hit a Patriot air-defense missile battery, with U.S. officials saying an assessment is now underway to see if the damage can be patched up quickly in situ.Even if a Patriot system was mangled, however, at first glance the overall impact of all the missiles expended by Russia on Monday — as well as the s...

A civil war in Poland’s top court upends efforts to reconcile with Brussels

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

WARSAW — Poland’s government is desperate to unlock €36 billion in grants and loans from the EU’s pandemic recovery fund, but to get the cash it needs to finalize a law rolling back legal reforms that Brussels said undermined judicial independence.The problem?President Andrzej Duda in February sent the bill to be examined by the Constitutional Tribunal but the court has been unable to gather a quorum of 11 out of 15 judges because it’s locked in a civil war. That’s delaying both the money and the effort by Warsaw to improve its poisonous relations with Brussels ahead of this fall’s parliamentary election.At least six judges say the six-year term of the tribunal’s President Julia Przyłębska has expired and that she’s no longer in charge. When Przyłębska — a rumored close friend and lunch companion of Law and Justice (PiS) party boss and Poland’s de facto ruler Jarosław Kaczyński — tries to summon them for hearings on the legislation, they don’...

Build that wall, Greek leader says ahead of election

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

ATHENS — Greek voters will decide Sunday whether to harden the country’s line on migration by extending a border wall with Turkey, or elect the left-wing opposition Syriza party which has adopted a softer stance on the issue.Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has pledged to lengthen the fence to cover almost the entire length of Greece’s 192 kilometer border with Turkey by 2026. He also wants the EU to provide the funding, arguing that Greece alone should not bear the cost of protecting the bloc’s most problematic border.And if the pledge to build a wall and make someone else pay for it sounds familiar, Mitsotakis rejects the comparison with Donald Trump, who won the U.S. presidency in 2016 with a slogan to do something very similar with Mexico.“I don’t have thick blond hair, so I think the comparison is not particularly relevant,” Mitsotakis said in an interview last month with German newspaper Bild, published in English on the prime minister’s website.He sa...

Take that, Russian raccoon! The battle of Kyiv Zoo heats up

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.Unleash the dogs of war — and lions and monkeys and polar bears!Russia’s latest missile barrage against Kyiv was foiled by Ukraine’s supercharged air defense system but there was still plenty of damage, including to Kyiv Zoo.Kyiv’s hardman Mayor Vitali Klitschko said some missile debris fell into the zoo but “fortunately, none of the animals or workers were injured.” He added that “anti-stress measures are now being conducted with the animals.”The plight of zoo animals has been a small but fascinating part of the war. The most bizarre story came late last year from Kherson where Russian soldiers took a number of animals — including raccoons, wolves, peacocks, a llama and a donkey — from the local zoo. “While retreating from Kherson Russians stole animals from the local zoo,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister of internal affairs, wrote on Twitter.A man seen grabbing a rac...

UK plays catch-up in chips war with £1B semiconductor strategy

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

LONDON — The U.K. will invest £1 billion over the next decade to secure semiconductor supplies and boost its chip design sector, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced in the early hours of Friday morning.As POLITICO reported last month, the strategy will focus on the U.K.’s strengths in design and compound semiconductors, where it already has clusters in Cambridgeshire and South Wales — rather than competing with U.S. and EU manufacturing subsidies worth nearly $100 billion.Semiconductors are needed in everything from iPhones to missiles, but the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the global economy’s reliance on Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers. The threat of war in Taiwan, home to TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor company, has triggered a race among the largest economies to shore up their chip supplies.Around £200 million of the U.K. funding will come between now and 2025, the government said, which will support setting up a National Semiconductor Infrastructure Initiative to...

Italy prepares to quit Xi’s global building megaplan

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:00 GMT

HIROSHIMA, Japan — It took four years for Italy to consider breaking off its special relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In 2019, Italy became the first G7 country to join China’s global infrastructure program, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to the surprise of allies in the West. Now, Italy’s right-wing leader Giorgia Meloni is ready to tell her G7 counterparts she is prepared to sever ties with Xi’s landmark foreign policy project, according to one senior diplomat familiar with her government’s deliberations. Meloni has not yet taken a final decision, but the discussion in Rome is focused on how to exit Belt and Road, rather than whether to do so, said the diplomat, who was speaking anonymously because the matter is sensitive. If it comes, such a move would represent a dramatic turnaround in relations between Italy and China, planting Meloni firmly in the camp of Sino-skeptic countries led by U.S. President Joe Biden. It would also mark a blow t...