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Slim down your budget by doing a subscription cleanse
CBSN
When Sarah Pekkanen let her son sign up for a free trial of an online educational subscription, she figured she would cancel the subscription before charges began and in the meantime, her son, now 12, would learn math. But she forgot to cancel, and soon the charges started piling up.
"I paid for something that we never used," says Pekkanen, a novelist in Chevy Chase, Maryland. When she finally noticed the charges and tried to cancel, it ended up taking a couple of hours over several days. With the rising popularity of subscriptions for streaming services, monthly product boxes and more, Pekkanen's experience is increasingly common. UBS Group, a financial services company, predicts the subscription economy targeting consumers and businesses will have an 18% growth rate and be one of the world's fastest-growing industries by 2025. Many subscriptions auto-renew, which means consumers can waste hundreds of dollars a year on products or services they are barely using.![](/newspic/picid-6252001-20250214202746.jpg)
Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a high-stakes meeting at this year's Munich Security conference to discuss the Trump administration's efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Vance said the U.S. seeks a "durable" peace, while Zelenskyy expressed the desire for extensive discussions to prepare for any end to the conflict.
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Washington — The Trump administration on Thursday intensified its sweeping efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce, the nation's largest employer, by ordering agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees who hadn't yet gained civil service protection - potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.
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It was Labor Day weekend 2003 when Matt Scribner, a local horse farrier and trainer who also competes in long-distance horse races, was on his usual ride in a remote part of the Sierra Nevada foothills — just a few miles northeast of Auburn, California —when he noticed a freshly dug hole along the trail that piqued his curiosity.