Imf: Mideast Growth To Slide In 2009

President Biden has issued an executive order to honor former President Carter, who died at the age of 100. Here’s what that means for businesses and employees. U. S. stock markets, federal offices, and the post office will remain closed next Thursday, January 9 to honor former President Jimmy Carter, the country’s 39th president, who died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia at the age of 100.

After years of delay, the post-9/11 law that requires a new standard of identification for air travel will finally kick in. Here’s what flyers need to know. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is finally getting real about Real ID enforcement.

It’s easy to coin generational nicknames, but it’s much harder to get them to stick. Welcome to the world, “Generation Beta.” Newborn babies in 2025 are members of a brand new generation, but already, some are calling for a new name.

We spoke with dozens of experts about what to expect in the year ahead. Here’s what they said.  Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here.

Expect to see the rise of AI agents and multimodal models, along with an end to “AI theater.” The so-called AI boom has been going on for more than two years now, and 2024 saw a real acceleration in both the development and the application of the technology. Expectations are high that AI will move beyond just generating text and images and morph into agents that can complete complex tasks on behalf of users.

The weekly jobless claims numbers are a proxy for layoffs, and those have remained below pre-pandemic levels. The unemployment rate is at a modest 4.2%, though that is up from a half-century low of 3.4% reached in 2023. The number of Americans applying for unemployment checks dropped last week to the lowest level since March, suggesting that most U.