Like a younger brother babysitting his niece or nephew for the first time, yesterday’s jobs report exceeded expectations. US employers added 115,000 jobs in April, roughly doubling analysts’ projections and suggesting that the geopolitical factors eroding consumer confidence haven’t yet hurt the job market.

According to the Labor Department:

• Job gains were once again driven by the healthcare industry, reflective of an aging US population. Transportation, warehousing, and retail sectors also added the most jobs since 2024.
• Federal government payrolls declined again, and job cuts also occurred in manufacturing and “information employment,” which roughly accounts for tech fields. (The latter category has shed 11% of jobs since peaking in November 2022, when ChatGPT was released.)
• The unemployment rate held at 4.3%, as expected.

Combined with even stronger hiring from March, April’s numbers mark the biggest two-month payroll increase since 2024, coming right after the US lost 156,000 jobs in February, reflecting ongoing volatility. While yesterday’s labor dispatch delighted the stock market…

…some warning signs also flashed

Unemployment may be holding steady, but many Americans are still struggling. Last month:

• Wage growth increased slightly, to 3.6%. That was below expectations and below the 4.2% rate that economists predict all-items inflation will hit this year due to tariffs and the Iran war.
• A gauge for 1) part-time workers who would prefer full-time employment and 2) job-seekers who gave up on finding work hit its highest rate since December.
• The percentage of the population that’s working or seeking work hit its lowest level since October 2021.

Meanwhile, vibes are bad: Consumer sentiment fell to another record low this month as surging gas prices—which hit a nearly four-year high this week—compounded cost-of-living anxiety, according to the University of Michigan’s survey.

Looking ahead…we’ll get a better idea of how much overall prices have risen recently when the latest CPI data comes out next week. With the job market appearing strong overall, the Federal Reserve could hinge its next interest rate decision primarily on inflation.—ML

Pentagon releases the X files documents on UFOs. Yesterday, the Defense Department began releasing a large batch of never-before-seen files declassified on a new website that includes details of alleged UFO sightings and photos of unidentified aerial phenomena (see for yourself here). The government did not offer any analysis of the documents, and President Trump said on Truth Social, “The people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”—AR

US disabled two Iranian oil tankers while waiting for peace plan response. American forces fired on the Iranian oil tankers yesterday, although the US insists the ceasefire is still in effect. The US military said the tankers were trying to breach its blockade of Iranian ports. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said he hoped to receive “a serious offer” from Iran regarding a peace deal by late Friday, according to the Associated Press, but the day ended without a public update.—HVL

ABC claims the Trump administration is trying to stifle free speech. In a legal filing that’s pretty spicy for network TV, ABC accused the Federal Communications Commission of threatening “to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech.” At issue is the FCC’s scrutiny of The View and whether the daytime talk show is subject to the equal time rule when it brings on politicians for interviews. The FCC told the AP that it was reviewing ABC’s claim that The View is an exempt news program. The filing comes as the network has also clashed with the administration over comedian Jimmy Kimmel.—AR

Procrastinating Intro to Romantic Lit students at thousands of schools were granted a surprise extension on their final essays. Canvas, the platform that about half of all colleges and universities in North America use to manage assignments and share grades, shut down all its sites for a few hours on Thursday, after its parent company, Instructure, suffered a massive cyberattack—just in time for final exams.

Instructure reported late Thursday that Canvas was back for most users, but not before schools like Penn State canceled some exams scheduled for Thursday and Friday.

A hacking group called ShinyHunters took credit for the attack, which it claimed affected 8,800 universities and K-12 schools around the globe and 275 million people’s data. It’s unclear exactly how many users or schools were targeted, as hacker groups sometimes exaggerate the impact to gain media attention or to get a ransom, according to TechCrunch. Some users at Harvard reported seeing a message from the hackers on the school’s Canvas login page during the outage.

The outage was temporary, but:

• Instructure first noted a cybersecurity incident on May 1, when it found that some Student IDs, names, and emails, as well as messages between users on Canvas, were breached.
• Hackers also told some school officials that they’d need to negotiate a settlement with them by May 12 or data would be leaked.

Big picture: ShinyHunters has taken credit for a slew of similar high-profile breaches, hacking and exposing users’ personal information from some of the biggest data-hoarders in the country like Microsoft, Ticketmaster, and Salesforce.—MM