Latest news with #Kline
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
After $50,000 birthday bonus at UFC Nashville, Fatima Kline sets sights on MSG
Fatima Kline met the media Saturday after her third-round TKO win over Melissa Martinez at UFC on ESPN 70. Kline (8-1 MMA, 2-1 UFC) was the biggest favorite on the card against Martinez (8-2 MMA, 1-2 UFC) and kept after the finish until she ended things midway through the final round at UFC on ESPN 70 at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tenn., with a massive head kick. Advertisement To top things off, the finish came on the strawweight's 25th birthday – and came with a pretty solid present, too, in the form of her first $50,000 performance bonus. Kline said she wasn't content just riding out a decision win. "I think I heard two and a half minutes (left in the fight) – I knew that the round was coming to a close," Kline told after the win. "I knew I was better than that, to let it go to a decision. I don't want to be a decisioner. I want to be a finisher. "I felt like she was hesitating a lot and she was worried about my jab. … I knew if I faked the jab enough and set up that kick, that it was going to land – and that's exactly what happened." Kline, a 25-year-old former CFFC strawweight champion, said she wants to continue to take on stiff tests to climb into the rankings. Her win over Martinez had her as upwards of a 10-1 betting favorite heading into the fight. Advertisement After a loss to Jasmine Jasudavicius in her promotional debut a year ago to the weekend of her win over Martinez, she knocked out Victoria Dudakova earlier this year. With two wins and two finishes in a row, she's shooting her shot. "I want a top 15 (opponent). That's two dominant finishes in a row, so anybody in the top 15, I'll take," Kline said. "(Madison Square Garden in New York) is in November. That's my home state. I'm a New York native. I've always been there and I'll always stay. So I want MSG, I want top 15, and I want $50 grand for my birthday." Check out Kline's post-fight interview in the video below. This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: UFC Nashville: Fatima Kline wants top 15 strawweight fight at MSG
USA Today
14-07-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
After $50,000 birthday bonus at UFC Nashville, Fatima Kline sets sights on MSG
Kline opened UFC on ESPN 70 with highlight-reel head-kick KO win over Melissa Martinez Fatima Kline met the media Saturday after her third-round TKO win over Melissa Martinez at UFC on ESPN 70. Kline (8-1 MMA, 2-1 UFC) was the biggest favorite on the card against Martinez (8-2 MMA, 1-2 UFC) and kept after the finish until she ended things midway through the final round at UFC on ESPN 70 at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tenn., with a massive head kick. To top things off, the finish came on the strawweight's 25th birthday – and came with a pretty solid present, too, in the form of her first $50,000 performance bonus. Kline said she wasn't content just riding out a decision win. "I think I heard two and a half minutes (left in the fight) – I knew that the round was coming to a close," Kline told after the win. "I knew I was better than that, to let it go to a decision. I don't want to be a decisioner. I want to be a finisher. "I felt like she was hesitating a lot and she was worried about my jab. … I knew if I faked the jab enough and set up that kick, that it was going to land – and that's exactly what happened." Kline, a 25-year-old former CFFC strawweight champion, said she wants to continue to take on stiff tests to climb into the rankings. Her win over Martinez had her as upwards of a 10-1 betting favorite heading into the fight. After a loss to Jasmine Jasudavicius in her promotional debut a year ago to the weekend of her win over Martinez, she knocked out Victoria Dudakova earlier this year. With two wins and two finishes in a row, she's shooting her shot. "I want a top 15 (opponent). That's two dominant finishes in a row, so anybody in the top 15, I'll take," Kline said. "(Madison Square Garden in New York) is in November. That's my home state. I'm a New York native. I've always been there and I'll always stay. So I want MSG, I want top 15, and I want $50 grand for my birthday." Check out Kline's post-fight interview in the video below.
USA Today
12-07-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
UFC on ESPN 70 video: Fatima Kline puts away Melissa Martinez with late head kick
Just when it seemed the opening bout at UFC on ESPN 70 was destined to hit the scorecards, it end in a flash. In the final frame of Saturday's strawweight bout at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tenn., Fatime Kline unleashed a perfect head kick that floored Melissa Martinez and led to the stoppage. Kline (8-1 MMA, 2-1 UFC) landed clean to the chin of Martinez (8-2 MMA, 1-2 UFC) at the 2:36 mark of Round 3, achieving the TKO victory. Check out the replay of the finish below (via X): "I train my butt off to come here," Kline said in her post-fight interview with Daniel Cormier. "My coaches were telling my between rounds that the left kick was there. I have the best coaches on the planet and they put so much into me."
Business Insider
16-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Gen Z is hurtling toward a career cliff
Jacqueline Kline was a proud overachiever in college. She enrolled in a packed class schedule, attended campus networking events, landed an impressive slate of internships, and graduated cum laude from Florida State University. Then, after her 2023 graduation celebrations wound down, Kline found herself back in her childhood bedroom. Over the next year, she applied to hundreds of communications and media jobs between babysitting shifts. The responses were deflating: Some companies sent quick rejections, others turned her away after a couple of interviews, but most simply ghosted her. "I graduated, but I didn't feel successful," the now 24-year-old told me. "I had this degree — and that's a privilege, not everyone has that opportunity — but it didn't matter. My GPA didn't matter. None of it mattered if I didn't have a job." It's a tough time to look for work. For 20-somethings, breaking into the market is particularly daunting. Companies and consumers are bracing for an economic slowdown, and employees are hesitant to leave their current gigs. Federal policy uncertainty is spooking businesses, and white-collar industries are not the safe career bets they used to be. The tried-and-true ways that young people used to climb the economic ladder are disappearing, and AI is threatening to replace entry-level work in enviable fields like tech. President Donald Trump's cost-cutting efforts have wiped out jobs in government agencies, nonprofits, and public health. Law school applications are ballooning beyond what the industry can sustain, and humanitarian routes like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps are among the White House DOGE office's latest targets. It all leaves young people — even those who spent their teen and university years positioning themselves for the future — barreling toward a career cliff. So, what's an ambitious Gen Zer to do? Kline is finishing her second year of graduate school at FSU. She said she gave up looking for full-time work because "the burnout was definitely real" and decided to take out student loans to pursue her master's. Many of her friends are also facing tough decisions: Commit to a tall stack of job applications, go back to get another degree, or settle for a role outside their chosen field. Each option feels risky. set of circumstances. As Richard Mansfield, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, put it, Gen Z has "a whole lot of clouds on the horizon." Based on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's analysis of census data, 41.2% of graduates in their early and mid-20s were underemployed in March, meaning they were working jobs that don't typically require a bachelor's degree. That's up from 38.9% in December. And Ivy alums aren't immune: In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that job placement at more than a dozen top MBA programs was the worst "in recent memory" last year. Notably, Harvard told the Journal that 23% of its job-seeking MBAs who graduated in spring 2024 were still looking for work three months after leaving campus, a figure that was up from 20% in the prior year and more than double what it was in 2022. Higher education may be known for its historical role as a path to prestige and higher pay, but Gen Zers are wondering whether it's worth it anymore. Bella Babbitt, 21, graduated a year early from a private New York liberal arts school with a dual degree in business and sociology in 2024. She hoped her internships and the fact that she completed her bachelor's in just three years would help her to land a role in media strategy and to eventually start her own business. She spent a year applying to hundreds of roles without luck while taking on odd jobs to make money, such as waiting tables and delivering food. More recently, she's worked at a marketing firm owned by a family friend. She "truly believes" the reason she's employed is because of that personal connection. "I was applying and I felt like, 'This is so stupid because I know I'm going to get rejected,'" she said, adding, "My parents have such a different mindset, where they can't comprehend how we've applied to all these jobs and we're not getting anything." Historically reliable prestige jobs are facing challenges, too. In tech, hopeful grads are being boxed out of entry-level positions not only by AI, but also by hiring freezes. In law, US firms' hiring of entry-level summer associates is hitting a historic low. Even "stopgap" roles that were stepping stones to bigger things are evaporating: From the start of 2023 to the start of 2025, internship postings on the college job-search platform Handshake declined by over 15%. When Gen Zers are ready to take the leap into a larger role, they're finding themselves stuck — young people can't fill desks because older generations are delaying plans to quit and retire, leaving new grads on the lower rung of the career ladder for longer. It's leaving Abbey Owens discouraged. She graduated summa cum laude last month from a liberal arts college with a record of marketing internships, good grades, and a slew of unanswered applications. After months on the job hunt, the 21-year-old said she's thinking about bartending and losing hope of finding a role in her field: "I'll accept almost anything," she told me. Babbitt and Owens describe the pain of continuous rejection — a stream of "no's" that drags on for months or years, application after application. Their experience is a symptom of a landscape with a dwindling number of job postings and lower hiring rates. One in five job seekers is considered long-term unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meaning they've been out of work for 27 weeks or longer. Even Gen Zers who are trying to follow their passions into less pressure-packed jobs than finance and tech are facing tough times. Young people dedicated to public service or academia, where there is an implicit exchange of stability in place of bigger salaries, are staring at an uncertain road. A 21-year-old University of Maryland student (who asked not to be named for fear of career retaliation) told me they'd lost two roles because of federal government cuts. This spring, they were interning at the Transportation Security Administration before being let go after DOGE prompted cuts of the agency's remote work contracts. Their summer internship — a coveted role at an intelligence agency — was canceled the following week. "I think it's just important for people to know how shocking all of this is," they said, adding, "There's a whole new wave of talented young individuals who are excited about public service who are being denied opportunities and thrown to the dirt." Now, without a summer job, they're likely to stay in their hometown and scoop ice cream or take shifts at a coffee shop, they said. They have two years left at Maryland, and they're rethinking their dream of working in government. Other public sector options aren't promising, either. As part of DOGE 's work, federal agencies are under a hiring freeze, AmeriCorps is pausing programs, the Peace Corps is cutting staff, and federally funded roles at nonprofits, science labs, and public health centers are vanishing. Amid the rising sense of doom, Mansfield cautions that the Zoomer labor market outlook is complicated — and economists don't yet have a full picture. Hard indicators show the economy is relatively healthy on paper: The US added a higher-than-expected number of jobs in May, inflation is getting under control, and the unemployment rate is low. Mansfield said that "the data hasn't caught up yet" to reflect the loss of entry-level opportunities that many new grads are experiencing. "It's not as if we're running out of useful things for young, educated people to do," he said. "It's just that we're undermining our mechanisms for getting them there." While Gen Z might seem headed toward a careerpocalypse, economists and labor market analysts told me the cruelest part was that this instability wasn't inevitable. Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said Gen Zers were almost set up for success. Gould's analysis of labor market data from May indicates that even after adjusting for inflation, 16- to 24-year-old workers experienced historically strong wage growth of 9.1% from February 2020 to March of this year, a figure that exceeded wage growth for workers 25 and older (5.4%). The cohort was set to have lower average unemployment rates and better job opportunities than every other set of young workers since the 1990s. But the rosy picture has rapidly worsened. Job prospects for 22- to 27-year-olds with a bachelor's degree or higher " deteriorated noticeably" in the first quarter of this year, per the New York Fed, and the recent-grad gap — the difference between the overall unemployment rate and the unemployment rate for people who recently graduated from college — just hit its widest point in at least 40 years. It's worth noting that previous generations have faced tough labor markets: Some baby boomers launched their careers in the middle of the 1970s stagflation, and millennials were looking for jobs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But Gen Zers are seeing the start of a troubling trend. Educated Zoomers, specifically, are now more unemployed than the rest of America, something that didn't happen early in the pandemic, during the Great Recession, or in the midst of the dot-com crash. "When the overall unemployment rate goes up a little bit more, I don't think people always understand that that is what happens: the 'last hired, first fired' phenomenon," Gould said, adding: "What are you going to do at that point? You've gone into debt going to school, you've already decided your major, you've already made all those investments. It's very hard to shift." The economists I spoke with emphasized that there were solutions to the Gen Z career cliff, but things may get worse before they get better. Mansfield said some sectors, like caregiving and healthcare, could see increased labor demand as baby boomers and Gen Xers grow older — even if those opportunities aren't as attractive to people trained to do something else, like law or finance. He added that as AI becomes more integrated into the economy, Gen Zers and later generations will most likely start to find roles in careers that don't exist yet. Kline, the recent Florida State grad, is banking on some sort of turnaround. Even as opportunities for people with advanced degrees dry up, she thinks the master's and some more internships will make her resumé that much more attractive to prospective employers. "I'm reminding myself that it will be worth it, taking all these loans will be worth it, because having this master's degree will get me further and give me a better chance at a job opportunity," Kline said, adding. "Before I came back to school, that was one of the loneliest times of my life." Market conditions are changing how ambitious Gen Zers see themselves and their work. It isn't just about whether they can land a job after graduation. A lot of people my age feel that open doors older generations took for granted — having access to homeownership and retirement, affording kids or healthcare or further education — are being locked alongside our career paths. It's part of why young people are becoming less loyal to the grind, or giving up on traditionally white collar careers altogether. It's also why Isabella Clemmens, 22, is betting on herself. After graduating from Oregon State in May, she's moving to Austin to try out a new city, meet friends, attend concerts, and try living on her own. When Clemmens and I spoke a few weeks ago, she was planning to work in retail until her growing stack of applications landed her a branding or graphic design role. After four years of hard work, she hadn't expected her job hunt to be so challenging. To kick off postgrad life in Texas, though, she would have to make concessions. "My dream job might exist," she told me. "But I'm one of 400 people applying for it."
Business Insider
12-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
An LA couple moved to Mexico to avoid deportation. They racked up $20K in debt, but are feeling more hopeful they can build a life together.
Alfredo Linares moved to Mexico with his wife Raegan Kline due to deportation fears in the U.S. The couple left Los Angeles with $20,000 in debt after closing their Japanese barbecue pop-up restaurant. After several months of instability, the two are finally finding some footing in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco. When Raegan Kline and Alfredo Linares married last summer, their dream felt straightforward and simple: start a Japanese barbecue pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles and live happily ever after. But all of that changed in the fall when President Donald Trump, who had promised mass deportations on the campaign trail, won reelection. Linares, who had worked his way up in fine dining to become a cook in a Michelin Star restaurant, arrived in the US as a teenager at 19 with his family and has lived here illegally ever since. Kline, a US citizen, was stricken with worry that at any moment, her husband could be arrested and deported. "I really didn't feel safe," Kline said. "Every morning I would wake up saying, 'If we don't go and something happens to him, I'll never be able to forgive myself.' " In March, the couple moved from Culver City to Linare's birth country of Mexico in hopes of improving their chances of building a future together. "I lived in the shadows for 20 years," Linares said. "I'm 38 years old, so I don't think I have 10 more years of living in the shadows when I'm trying to build a business and grow as a family, as an entrepreneur." Do you have a story to share about moving or immigration? Reach out to this reporter at jdeng@ Going into debt to move to Mexico The couple received around $10,000 in cash from their parents as a wedding gift. They had originally hoped to use the money to hire a lawyer to help Linares gain citizenship, but they wrestled with the best way to use the money to secure a future together. "Do we really go ahead and gamble and trust this administration with this $10,000 that our parents gave us for our wedding gifts, or do we use that $10,000 to move to Mexico?" Kline said of their dilemma. But even the wedding gift wasn't enough to help them break even and start fresh in Mexico. The pair took on debt to start their Japanese barbecue business last spring. While they tried to get it off the ground, their bills ballooned to over $20,000. They raised over $4,000 online through GoFundMe to help them with their relocation. Since the move, they've attempted to find jobs in hospitality, but because Linares doesn't have an identification card and Kline doesn't have work authorization as a temporary resident, it's been difficult to pay the bills. "We're not earning an income," Kline said. "We have all of that stress and try to keep our credit card in a reasonable place and keep ourselves on a budget." Adjusting to life in a new country The biggest hurdle for them has been navigating the deluge of paperwork and bureaucracy in a new country. "I'm very Americanized," Linares said. "Yes, I'm Mexican, but I haven't been here for 20 years. It's totally different from the Mexico I left." From needing a physical copy of a birth certificate to struggling to establish Linares' permanent residence, it's been hard for him to get an ID card when they were first living in Airbnbs in Mexico City. "I need my ID, but I cannot have an ID because I don't have a home address. And I can't get a home address because I don't have a job, because I don't have an ID," Linares said of the frustrating situation. Now they are renting an apartment in Puerto Vallarta in the state of Jalisco, where they've been finally settling in over the past three weeks. "I feel like myself a little bit more," Kline said of the stability. "I'm realizing that this is where we live, this is our home. We're not on vacation." Kline is now able to see past the trials of the past few months and look toward the future with more hope. They've since brought down their rescue dog Dolly Love from Los Angeles to live with them in Mexico. "I do believe we made the right choice," Kline said. "I do believe that there's opportunity here. I do believe in my husband and his talents and his skills." The move to Mexico has tested their relationship and challenged them in many different ways, but Linares said the core of their bond hasn't been shaken. They keep a routine of checking in with each other over coffee every morning. "She makes things easier, and it's because of the communication that we have," Linares said of his wife.
