By ALBERT STUMM, Associated Press

Melanin Bee curves her spine like a stretching cat as she lets out a maniacal, forced laugh.

The quick-fire pattern of manufactured giggles —“oh, hoo hoo hoo, eeh, ha ha ha”— soon ripples into genuine laughter, and she giddily kicks her feet.

She’s practicing what she calls Laughasté, a hilarious yoga routine she created that is a descendant of “laughter clubs” that emerged in India in the 1990s. It feels awkward at first, but you fake it till you make it, she said.

“It’s about allowing yourself to be OK with being awkward,” said Bee, a Los Angeles comedian and speaker. “Then you’re going to find some form of silliness within that is going to allow you to laugh involuntarily.”

The laughter clubs were based on the common-sense notion that laughter relieves stress. But a good laugh is also good for your heart, immune system and many other health benefits, said Dr. Michael Miller, a cardiologist and medical professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Like we say, exercise at least three to five days a week,” Miller said. “Belly laugh at least two to five days a week.”

FILE – A woman wearing star-shaped glasses smiles during a campaign rally for former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Oct. 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix, File)

The study of laughter

Although luminaries from the ancient Greeks to Freud have opined on the roots and implications of laughter, the modern study of laughter — gelotology — began emerging in the 1960s.

Stanford University psychologist William F. Fry, one of gelotology’s founders, drew blood samples from himself while watching Laurel and Hardy. He discovered that laughter increased the number of immune-boosting blood cells.

In 1995, Dr. Madan Kataria, a physician in Mumbai, got wind of the emerging research as editor of a health magazine while researching an article on stress management. To combat his own stress, he started the first daily laughter club in a park. It ballooned from a handful of participants to more than 150 within a month, he said.

After the group quickly ran out of jokes, Kataria created exercises that activated the diaphragm, and he incorporated yogic breathing exercises, light stretches and deliberately silly sounds and movements.

“We were faking in the beginning and within seconds, everybody was in stitches,” Kataria said.

FILE – Members of laughter clubs participate in a laughter competition for the elderly to celebrate World Laughter Day in Mumbai, India, May 6, 2007. (AP Photo/Gautam Singh, File)

Why is laughter good for you?

Miller began studying laughter in the 1990s. Showing funny movies to study participants, he found that laughter produces endorphins in the brain that promote beneficial chemicals in the blood vessels. Nitric oxide, for example, causes blood vessels to dilate, which lowers blood pressure, inflammation and cholesterol.

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The combination reduces the risk for a heart attack, he said, and the endorphins are natural pain killers.

“When you’ve had a really good laugh, you feel very relaxed and light,” said Miller, who is also chief of medicine at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration, where he is implementing a laughter therapy program. “It’s like you’ve taken pain medication.”

Forced laughter — or simulated mirth, in academia — may even be more beneficial than spontaneous laughter, said Jenny Rosendhal, a senior researcher of medical psychology at Jena University in Germany.

Rosendhal completed a meta-analysis of 45 laughter studies, among other research, and found that laughter-inducing therapies decreased glucose levels, the stress hormone cortisol and chronic pain. They also improved mobility and overall mood, especially in older populations.

Because humor is subjective, it is hard to measure. That’s why much of the more recent research has focused on laughter yoga and similar programs that provoke sustained bouts of laughter during 30- to 45-minute sessions, Rosendhal said.

Laughter yoga is particularly effective for people who might not feel like laughing, such as those struggling with depression or cancer patients, she said. With simulated laughter, the physiological mechanisms are the same, such as additional inhaling, exhaling and muscle activity that also improves mood.

“The well-being comes through the back door,” she said. “You start with an exercise, and then the spontaneous laughter comes later because it’s funny to see people laughing.”

FILE – Class members participate in a laughter yoga class on Main Beach in Laguna Beach, Calif., Nov. 29, 2006. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File)

How to laugh more

During a recent video call, Kataria said the trick is to learn to laugh for no reason. He and others in laughing yoga classes around the world have created hundreds of exercises that help.

The simplest: Get together with another person, look in each other’s eyes and repeat the sound “ha” for a full minute. Or try the “breathe in and laugh.” Bring your hands to your chest on a deep inhale, hold your breath for three seconds, and burst out laughing on the exhale while extending your hands forward.

In laughing yoga classes, people may pretend to greet each other like aliens, crawl around like their favorite animals, or tap their temple as if a light bulb went off, exclaiming, “Aha! ha ha ha!”

Kataria suggested bringing laughter into your daily life, even at things that might not seem funny. Demonstrating “credit card bill laughter,” he held out his hand as if looking at a statement, and burst into a roiling, infectious laughter. For inspiration, you could log into one of the three dozen free online American laughter clubs recognized by Laughter Yoga International.

“Really, it’s not about forcing yourself to laugh,” he said. “It’s like activating your laughter muscles, getting rid of your mental inhibitions and shyness. Then the real laughing is childlike laughing, unconditional laughing.”

Albert Stumm writes about wellness, food and travel. Find his work at https://www.albertstumm.com

An executive at a Forest Lake charter school was fired last month for allegedly falsifying documents.

North Lakes Academy Executive Director Cecelia Dodge was fired following a closed session of the school board, allegedly “due to the falsifications of applications for federal funds due to forging signatures of employees and insufficient enrollment,” school board officials said at the November meeting.

The charter school received a complaint about Dodge on Oct. 30, conducted an investigation of the allegations and, on Nov. 17, “the board voted unanimously to terminate her employment,” said Board Chair Morgan Borck in an email.

No details were given regarding which documents were allegedly falsified. Dodge stepped into the executive director role in October 2023.

Founded in 1999, North Lakes Academy is a K-12 charter school with two Forest Lake campuses. In partnership with its authorizer, Osprey Wilds, the academy emphasizes environmental learning, according to its website.

Financial challenges

Dodge’s dismissal comes as the public school is facing financial challenges.

“I have become increasingly concerned with the long-term viability of North Lakes Academy,” wrote Andrew Clark, managing director and research analyst for Nuveen Asset Management, which owns a majority of the charter’s outstanding bonds.

“The current budgeted loss of over $600,000 for FY26 (fiscal year 2026) is particularly concerning considering that level of deficit spending could leave the school insolvent by the end of the year,” Clark said in the October letter addressed to Dodge and Borck.

“Re-growing enrollment is imperative to the school’s long-term success,” Clark wrote.

The charter school, which opened its K-6 campus in 2019, tallied its highest enrollment of 607 students in the 2022-23 school year “and it’s been dropping each year since,” the school board said in its response to Clark.

As of last month, North Lakes Academy had just over 400 students enrolled. The charter expects its enrollment to grow to 430 students by fiscal year 2027, according to school board documents.

Merging of schools

In addition to enrollment efforts, the charter is considering merging its two campuses.

The potential merging of the two schools, a proposal called “Huskies United Under One Roof,” suggests vacating the charter’s 7-12 campus at 308 15th St. SW. before the 2026-27 school year.

Should the two campuses merge into the current K-6 building at 4576 232nd St. N., elementary-aged students would remain on the main floor with the secondary students on the second floor.

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With 12 classrooms and about 300 students on the main floor, class sizes would average about 25 pupils. On the second floor, there are 16 classrooms for roughly 500 students, which would mean average class sizes of 32 students, according to school board documents.

“A bold move like this gives us our best chance, and a very good chance to regroup from our financial challenges to become solvent and viable,” the school said in its proposal.

If the charter were to merge its upper and lower schools, it could save roughly $350,000 across staff, administration and operational costs, not including the lease price of a second building, according to the school board.

“If a change is not made, I fear that the school could close, and our investors would have to look to selling the real estate to recover as much of our investment as possible,” Clark wrote in October.

By Jarrell Dillard, Bloomberg News

This year was a difficult one for Americans looking for work. Forecasters don’t see much improvement in their prospects coming in 2026.

The unemployment rate is set to remain elevated through almost all of next year despite solid economic growth, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg. That unusual combination owes to the growing role of investments in artificial intelligence in powering the expansion without boosting hiring, some say.

A stagnant labor market likely means another year of limited job opportunities and cooling wage increases, exacerbating affordability concerns for American families heading into the midterm elections. It also spells an even greater reliance on the health-care sector, which accounted for nearly all job growth in 2025.

“A lot of the GDP growth we’re getting is from AI infrastructure investments, which don’t generate very many jobs, and there’s some displacement from AI,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG. “We don’t know how much that is yet. It looks like it’s only the beginning phases of it.”

While economists say the U.S. isn’t in a recession, the second half of 2025 probably felt like it for many job-seekers. In the five months from June to November, the unemployment rate rose half a percentage point, to 4.6% — a rare development outside of business-cycle downturns.

Those with four-year college degrees were hit particularly hard, reflecting an ongoing hiring freeze across so-called white-collar occupations. While their unemployment rate remains somewhat below that for lesser-educated workers, young college graduates have seen their historical advantage in the job search disappear this year.

Hiring rates, meanwhile, looked even worse — low enough that, in decades past, they would have been consistent with even higher levels of unemployment. And layoff announcements have picked up in recent months, adding to Americans’ malaise about the job market.

Workers outside of health care, in particular, have had a difficult go of it: Excluding that sector, nonfarm payroll employment actually fell in the first 11 months of 2025.

There are some positives for the outlook. The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates this year and is expected to continue doing so in 2026, and tax cuts alongside some potential easing in the Trump administration’s trade policies — a major source of uncertainty for small businesses this year — should also help, said Michael Pugliese, a senior economist at Wells Fargo & Co.

But first, there is “probably still a little more labor-market weakening to go, whether that’s another tick or two higher in the unemployment rate,” Pugliese said.

All of that has already added up to slower wage growth as the balance of power in the labor market has continued to shift from workers to employers. It’s a sharp turnaround from 2022 and 2023, when workers had the upper hand and employers were forced to offer higher pay to attract talent.

A Harris Poll conducted for Bloomberg News in October showed 55% of employed Americans were concerned about losing their jobs, and nearly half said they thought it would take at least four months to find a new job of similar quality if they lost their current position.

Various measures of wage growth show pay is now rising at the slowest rate in four years, and low-earners are seeing pay rise by less than top earners — worsening the so-called “K-shaped economy” trend of widening inequality this year.

That’s a risk for Republicans, who were elected to majorities last year in part due to widespread anger over rising prices that exacerbated cost-of-living concerns, as they head into the 2026 campaign season.

“Overall wage growth will likely come close to the pace of inflation, and likely maybe even go a little above overall inflation,” KPMG’s Swonk said. “But the problem is the distribution of wages.”

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Black unemployment

Inequality is also increasingly noticeable in who is being hired in the first place. Black Americans have seen their unemployment rate shoot higher over the last several months — to 8.3% in November, from 6% in May — and the ratio of Black to white unemployment now matches the highest level since 2019.

While some of that increase reflects more Black Americans joining the labor force, Black workers historically have been disproportionately impacted whenever the U.S. job market loses steam. The Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce, where Black workers are overrepresented, has only added to the difficulties they’ve faced in an already-challenging employment landscape this year.

Michelle Holder, an economist who studies labor-market outcomes for Black Americans, said there is a risk Black unemployment continues to trend higher in 2026.

“Even if the overall unemployment rate continues to revolve around the same 4.6% level, trends are pointing that the fallout of a stagnant economy is increasingly falling more and more heavily on the shoulders of Black workers,” Holder said.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg said they expect gross domestic product to grow 2% in 2026, powered by solid consumer spending and strong business investment. Yet hiring is set to remain muted as in 2025, and the unemployment rate will be higher on average next year than this year, according to the median estimate.

While respondents said they anticipate the unemployment rate could fall slightly by the end of 2026, Veronica Clark, an economist at Citigroup Inc., warned the risks are “skewed toward worse outcomes” if hiring fails to pick up.

“This has been a very prolonged period of such low hiring that until that changes, you would be worried that the next step would be larger layoffs,” Clark said.

(With assistance from Dana Morgan.)

©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Alarmed by “staggering” increases in cryptocurrency scams, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office has released an online survey asking users to weigh in on how and why they access cryptocurrency ATMs. The machines, which can be found with increasing frequency in supermarkets and convenience stores, allow users to make cash deposits into accounts and have their dollars converted to Bitcoin.

The attorney general’s Consumer Protection Division is conducting an investigation into cryptocurrency ATMs, and St. Paul and Stillwater banned the machines outright this year in light of growing concerns. The Attorney General for the District of Columbia recently filed a lawsuit against Athena Bitcoin, a major crypto ATM operator, alleging that 93% of deposits to the company’s crypto ATMs were scam-related.

Ellison’s office said it has also received dozens of reports over the years from scam victims who sent money to fraudulent accounts after being misled. Scammers tend to prey on vulnerable seniors by claiming they owe back taxes and must pay them off immediately using the machines or face immediate consequences from law enforcement, such as a visit from the FBI.

Federal Trade Commission data show losses at cryptocurrency ATMs nationwide growing from a reported $12 million in 2020 to $250 million in the first half of this year alone, according to Ellison’s office. The median reported loss was $10,000. The transactions, according to authorities, are difficult if not impossible to trace.

The attorney general’s survey is at ag.state.mn.us/Survey/Bitcoin-ATM. It asks crypto ATM users which company’s machines they’ve accessed, whether someone told them to use a crypto ATM, whether they lost money, and more. A survey was also emailed directly to some consumers of a leading ATM brand.

Ellison is encouraging victims to contact their local law enforcement and the Minnesota Department of Commerce, as well as his office.