The U.S. economy added just 199,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent from 4.2 percent. The December data, released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fell far short of economists' expectations of 422,000 job gains.
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Economists noted the barrage of mixed messages coming out of recent job market data: The BLS report came two days after private payroll processor ADP reported that the private sector added 807,000 jobs in December, more than double what economists projected, while the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey reported on Tuesday that a record 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in November.
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The sluggish labor force participation rate adds to the confusion, said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research. Omicron also has threats for labor market inflation. “There’s going to be some hesitation on the part of employees coming back to work,” said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott.

The announcement comes weeks after Mr. Abiy’s forces scored a string of battlefield victories against rebels from the country’s northern region of Tigray, and stoked rare hopes that some form of conciliation might be possible. But there was no mention of peace talks with his main enemy, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Mr. Abiy has previously ruled out any negotiation with them.
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Since Mr. Abiy, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2019, launched a military action in Tigray in November 2020, the conflict has been marked by accusations of widespread human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing and a humanitarian crisis that has pushed at least 400,000 people into famine-like conditions.
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Analysts and foreign diplomats say Mr. Abiy’s stunning military comeback in recent months was largely made possible by armed drones supplied by foreign allies, including the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, that turned the tide on the battlefield.

[Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine's National Defense and Security Council secretary] noted that before and after Iran's pre-dawn missile strikes on Flight PS752, Iranian authorities had allowed other civilian jets to take off from Tehran airport. "We have the impression that they [the Iranians] had been waiting specifically for our plane. We can assume this," he said.
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Iran has acknowledged firing missiles that struck the plane and killed all 176 people on board, but it called the incident an accident and blamed it on a misaligned air defense system and human error by the missile operators. The plane had taken off from Tehran minutes earlier, carrying mostly Iranians and Iranian Canadians who were flying to Kyiv en route to Canada.
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The Iranian forces who shot down the Ukrainian plane had been on alert for a U.S. response to a missile strike that Iran launched on American troops in Iraq several hours earlier. Iran had attacked the U.S. troops, wounding dozens, in retaliation for a U.S. airstrike that killed top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad five days previously.

Thanks in part to the persistence of women who spoke out on social media and documented their side effects in an online database created by two researchers, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced in August it was committing $1.6 million in funding to launch research studies [on menstruation and Covid-19 vaccines] at five universities across the country.
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One [study], led by researchers at Oregon Health and Science University, formally documents what women described experiencing. [It] found that vaccination can cause temporary changes to the timing of menstruation, with the typical experience being a period that's late by about one day after vaccination. The effects were temporary, with a normal menstrual cycle returning within one or two months after getting the shot.
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Getting vaccinated produces a strong immune system response in the days following the shot, which may cause temporary changes to menstrual cycles. Studies have also documented temporary menstrual cycle changes among women who get Covid-19 infections.

A new fossil site that can most aptly be described as "exceptional" has turned up fossils of spiders, insects, fish, plants and even a bird feather, dating to the Miocene 11 to 16 million years ago. The assemblage, named McGraths Flat, is so exceptional that it has been classified as a Lagerstätte – a sedimentary fossil bed that's so extraordinary that sometimes even soft tissues have been preserved.
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"The fossils we have found prove that the area was once a temperate, mesic rainforest and that life was rich and abundant here in the Central Tablelands, NSW," said paleontologist Matthew McCurry, from the Australian Museum Research Institute.
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According to an analysis of the pollen grains in the assemblage, the McGraths Flat rainforest was being encroached upon by arid climate areas. This is not unexpected; during the Miocene, global temperatures had started to rise; it was during this period that the Australian continent started to transform from lush to arid.