By Alicia Wallace, CNN

(CNN) — Finding a job continued to be a slog at the end of the year, new data shows: US businesses sought out fewer workers in November and hiring rates wilted even further.

The number of estimated job openings – a closely watched indicator of labor demand – fell to its lowest level in more than a year, slumping to 7.15 million at the end of November from 7.45 million the month before, according to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

With the exception of retail and construction, job openings trended lower across the majority of industries.

Hiring activity trended in a similar direction. There were an estimated 5.12 million new hires in November, a drop-off from 5.37 million the month before.

Job openings are at their lowest level since September 2024, while hires are at their lowest since June of that year.

Very few industries posted net gains during November, and those gains were meek. Information added 12,000 jobs, federal government gained 11,000 and construction got a boost of 11,000 new roles.

The hiring rate (hires as a percentage of total employment) slunk back to 3.2%, matching its lowest rate in more than a decade (excluding the pandemic), BLS data showed.

But Wednesday’s report showed that fewer employees were laid off in November and there was an uptick in workers quitting their jobs, an important indicator of worker confidence.

However, despite the monthly swings, the longstanding trend was clear: It remains a low-hire, low-fire labor market where the all-important turnover activity continues to grind slower and slower.

The November JOLTS report is one of several key pieces of labor market data released this week, culminating with the December jobs report on Friday morning.

Economists are expecting that the US labor market added about 55,000 jobs in December. That would cap off what was a sluggish year of employment gains as high uncertainty (from sweeping policies such as those related to tariffs) and dramatic shifts in the nation’s immigration flows weighed on hiring.

“You’re not seeing a dynamic labor market,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson told reporters earlier Wednesday morning following the payroll company’s monthly release of private-sector hiring data.

A ‘K-shaped’ labor market

ADP on Wednesday reported that hiring activity in the US private sector rebounded in December after jobs were shed the month before.

Private-sector employers added an estimated 41,000 jobs last month, a higher-than-expected gain after posting a net loss of 29,000 jobs in November, according to ADP’s latest National Employment Report.

Health care and education businesses as well as those in the leisure and hospitality sector drove the job gains reported for December, adding an estimated 39,000 jobs and 24,000 jobs, respectively, for the month.

The biggest net job losses were in the professional and business services sector (-29,000) and the information sector (-12,000).

“Health services is an expensive type of service for most consumers; leisure and hospitality is a discretionary service for all consumers,” Richardson said during the call with reporters. “These two sectors are consistent with a K-shaped economy where higher-income consumers are driving spending.”

Businesses of all sizes added jobs last month, which marks a reversal from November, when the smallest firms saw a significant drop-off in employment.

“Small establishments recovered from November job losses with positive end-of-year hiring, even as large employers pulled back,” Richardson said in a

By Lisa Respers France, CNN

(CNN) — Beef looks a little different these days for some former teen actors from the early 2000s.

Along with the return of low rise jeans and trucker hats, the world can also now revel in what appears to be drama between two former Disney channel stars.

It all publicly started when The Cut published a personal essay from actress Ashley Tisdale last week titled “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group.”

The star, known for her work on “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” and the “High School Musical” franchise, wrote about how she and some friends had formed a group chat to talk about being new moms, after all being “pregnant through the early pandemic” and missing out “on the activities where you meet other expectant mothers.”

Through the chat and the playdates it spawned, Tisdale initially believed she had found her “village,” she wrote. At some point, she “began to wonder whether that was really true.”

“I remember being left out of a couple of group hangs, and I knew about them because Instagram made sure it fed me every single photo and Instagram Story,” she wrote. “Another time, at one of the mom’s dinner parties, I realized where I sat with her — which was at the end of the table, far from the rest of the women. I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me.”

She recalled other times being left out and feeling distanced from the group, all of which made her wonder “Why me?”

“The truth is, I don’t know and I probably never will. What I do know is that it took me back to an unpleasant but familiar feeling I thought I’d left behind years ago,” she wrote. “Here I was sitting alone one night after getting my daughter to bed, thinking, Maybe I’m not cool enough? All of a sudden, I was in high school again, feeling totally lost as to what I was doing ‘wrong’ to be left out.”

Quicker than you could say “MomTok” (which has its own drama), internet sleuths quickly deduced by combing social media that said mom group included fellow actresses and child stars Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore as well as some other high profile women living in Los Angeles.

Then Duff’s husband, singer/songwriter Matthew Koma, metaphorically entered the chat.

On Tuesday, Koma took to Instagram stories to post a photo of himself made to look like Tisdale’s photo in her Cut essay using the outlet’s logo and a fake headline reading “When You’re The Most Self Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers.”

He added a subheadline that read “A Mom Group Tell All Through A Father’s Eyes” and included as a caption “Read my new interview with @TheCut.”

Duff, who starred in Disney Channel’s hit series “Lizzie McGuire” as a teen, married Koma, who is in the band Winnetka Bowling League, in 2019 and they are the parents of three young daughters.

She also shares a son with her ex-husband Mike Comrie.

Tisdale’s essay for The Cut is not her first on the subject to go viral.

In December 2025, a post on her blog headlined “You’re Allowed to Leave Your Mom Group” under her married name, Ashley French, stirred conversation on social media.

CNN has reached out to reps for Tisdale, Duff, Koma and Moore for comment.

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By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — When Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah first learned over the weekend that US forces had struck Venezuela and abducted its leader, he wanted answers. Without the approval of Congress, he wondered, what justified this attack inside another country?

Two hours later, he got an answer from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Just got off the phone with @SecRubio,” Lee wrote on X. “He informed me that Nicolás Maduro has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States, and that the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.”

That “kinetic action,” Lee concluded, “likely falls within the president’s inherent authority … to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack.”

“Kinetic” — from the Greek kinētikos, meaning putting in motion — has become a recurring word for government officials talking about US aggression against Venezuela. As the Trump administration has blown up boats from Venezuela and Colombia over the past several months, ostensibly to protect Americans from the scourge of drugs, it has repeatedly called its actions “kinetic strikes.”

You probably know the word “kinetic” from physics lessons about kinetic energy, meaning the energy that an object has when it’s moving, as opposed to the unreleased potential energy it has sitting still. When “kinetic” first entered the military lexicon, it was used in this context, to describe munitions that did damage through sheer speed and mass, rather than with explosive force.

As linguistics researcher Neil Whitman noted in 2011, the 1978 “Code Name Handbook: Aerospace, Defense, Technology” lists the acronym SKEW, meaning shoulder-fired kinetic energy weapon. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative also used the term “kinetic energy weapons,” which it defined as nonexplosive projectiles moving at high speeds to inflict damage.

Over the years, the military use of “kinetic” took on a broader meaning. Per CNN senior military analyst James Stavridis, kinetic now indicates physical impact, like “a bullet, a bomb, a knife,” as opposed to “non-kinetic,” which denotes “cyber, intelligence, things that don’t have physical impact in an operation, but can still be very very important.”

Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London and co-author of the Substack newsletter Comment is Freed, characterizes this usage as a product of the digital age. As military capabilities expanded to include cyber warfare and other, less overt forms o

The post A New California Law Requires A Working Fridge In All Apartments. LA Landlords Fought It appeared first on edhat.

Por Elizabeth McBride, CNN

Cuando los viajeros se dirigen al valle de Pankisi, las advertencias suelen comenzar antes de llegar, por lo general en boca de un taxista preocupado que no está seguro de si debería llevar turistas a este destino remoto.

“‘¿Por qué van allá? ¿Qué están haciendo? No sé, no es seguro para ustedes’, dicen los conductores”, cuenta Khatuna Margoshvili, propietaria de una casa de huéspedes en este valle agreste y hermoso.

Pankisi, en Georgia —el antiguo país soviético más allá del extremo oriental de Europa—, ha cargado durante mucho tiempo con una reputación moldeada más por titulares que por el turismo. A comienzos de la década de 2000, chechenos que huían de la guerra de Moscú en su territorio utilizaron el valle como refugio. Rusia alegó que algunos eran exmilitantes.

Tras los atentados del 11 de septiembre de 2001, Estados Unidos afirmó que operativos de Al Qaeda estaban presentes en Pankisi y especuló que Osama bin Laden se encontraba entre ellos, acusaciones que nunca fueron probadas. El estigma se profundizó en la década de 2010, cuando ISIS reclutó a decenas de residentes del valle.

Hoy la historia es distinta, como están descubriendo quienes se animan a visitarlo. Un informe de 2023 de la Agencia de Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo Internacional (USAID) describió a Pankisi como “pacífico”, y las búsquedas en línea sobre el valle arrojan ofertas de paseos a caballo, talleres de fieltro y clases para preparar khinkali, en lugar de reportes sobre extremismo islámico.

Y aunque el Departamento de Estado de EE.UU. sigue advirtiendo a sus ciudadanos sobre viajar a la región, muchos aun así hacen el recorrido.

“En los últimos dos o tres años, el 80 % de nuestros huéspedes han venido de Estados Unidos”, dice Margoshvili.

El turismo en Pankisi sigue siendo relativamente nuevo y limitado en comparación con otros destinos más consolidados de Georgia. Pero el interés ha crecido a medida que surgieron alojamientos y operadores turísticos comenzaron a incluir el valle en sus itinerarios.

Karolina Zygmanowska, guía de Weekend Travelers Georgia, empezó a organizar recorridos a Pankisi hace dos años.

“La gente pedía el tour, así que empezamos a hacerlo. El interés surgió después de saber que se habían abierto varias casas de huéspedes allí”, explica. “Tienen su propia comunidad, su propia cultura; incluso su comida es un poco diferente a la de otras partes de Georgia”.

La mayoría de las familias que viven en el valle son kists, descendientes de colonos chechenos e ingush que migraron a Georgia en el siglo XIX. Hablan checheno, además de georgiano y, a veces, ruso. Siguen tradiciones musulmanas sufíes y suníes en un país mayoritariamente cristiano ortodoxo.

Cada viernes, mujeres de todo el valle se reúnen en la Mezquita Vieja del pueblo de Duisi para realizar el zikr, un rito arraigado en el misticismo sufí. Las participantes se mueven en círculo, cantando, entonando y aplaudiendo a medida que el ritmo aumenta gradualmente. Pankisi es el único lugar donde las mujeres realizan el zikr, y los visitantes pueden pedir observar la ceremonia.

Pankisi está cerca de Tusheti, una región montañosa ya popular entre excursionistas, pero el turismo en el propio valle apenas empieza a tomar forma. En la última década, iniciativas comunitarias —muchas con apoyo de ayuda extranjera— han ayudado a construir desde cero una pequeña industria turística.

Para algunos residentes, la motivación para abrirse a los turistas fue más allá de los ingresos. Margoshvili es integrante de la Asociación de Turismo y Desarrollo del Valle de Pankisi (PVTDA), fundada en 2018 por un grupo de mujeres que esperaban que el turismo ayudara a cambiar la percepción del valle.

Sus esfuerzos atrajeron atención internacional. En 2020, Lonely Planet incluyó a Pankisi en su guía de Georgia, Armenia y Azerbaiyán. Ese mismo a