The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says 175,000 new jobs were added in February, well above Wall Street's consensus estimate of 149,000.

162,000 of those hires were to private payrolls, while government took on 13,000 new employees.

However, the unemployment rate unexpectedly rose to 6.7 percent from 6.6 percent, underlining the difficult task that the country faces in getting jobless Americans back to work.

The huge story, though, is that this stronger job growth (compared, at least, to December and January) came in spite of a mammoth 601,000 employed workers being out of work due to the weather. That number was far higher than the 273,000 out of work in December due to the weather, and the 262,000 in January. Had the number of people out of work in February due to the weather been comparable to the January and December ones, we would have seen job growth of closer to 500,000 this month!

This means that the Federal Reserve will not feel pressure to delay tapering its quantitative easing programs further. The economic recovery is starting to look stronger and more secure. John Aziz

Secretary of Defense James Mattis spoke with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Friday, a conversation in which Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) reports Mattis said he is mulling expanded U.S. military action in Africa in the wake of the attack in Niger that killed four U.S. soldiers.

"The war is morphing," Graham said. "You're going to see more actions in Africa, not less; you're going to see more aggression by the United States toward our enemies, not less; you're going to have decisions being made not in the White House but out in the field."

Meanwhile, other lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have argued the Niger incident highlights the need to reconsider the broad war-making authority the executive branch has claimed in the post-9/11 era. "The many questions surrounding the death of American service members in Niger show the urgent need to have a public discussion about the current extent of our military operations around the world," said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). Likewise, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said present threats necessitate "a sober national conversation about Congress' constitutional role in authorizing the use of military force." Bonnie Kristian

Ousted White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon attacked fellow Republican former President George W. Bush while speaking at the California GOP convention banquet Friday evening.

"There has not been a more destructive presidency than George Bush's," Bannon said, arguing that Bush "embarrassed himself" with a "high falutin" speech in New York City on Thursday. Bush's talk did not mention President Trump by name, but its decrial of "discourse degraded by casual cruelty" was widely regarded as a critique of Trump.

Bush "has no earthly idea of whether he's coming or going," Bannon added Friday, "just like it was when he was president."

Watch Bannon's full speech below — the Bush comments begin around the 24-minute mark — and read The Week's Paul Waldman on why even Trump critics shouldn't misremember Dubya as a representative of a nobler age and a nobler GOP. Bonnie Kristian

The White House on Friday called it "highly inappropriate" to question Chief of Staff John Kelly's mischaracterization of Rep. Frederica Wilson's (D-Fla.) 2015 speech at the dedication of a new FBI building. In addition to skewering Wilson for sharing the details of a phone call between President Trump and the widow of a U.S. service member killed in Niger on Thursday, Kelly claimed Wilson once "talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for" the FBI building. In a video from the dedication surfaced by the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Friday, Wilson takes credit for naming the building but does not claim to have secured its funding.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders maintained that Wilson "also had quite a few comments that day that weren't part of that speech and weren't part of that video that were also witnessed by many people that were there."

"[Kelly] was wrong yesterday in talking about getting the money," a reporter pressed.

"If you want to go after Gen. Kelly, that's up to you," Sanders said. "But I think that, if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that's something highly inappropriate." Jeva Lange

Conditions in the United States are driving more people than ever to seek refugee status in Canada, Reuters reports. More than 15,000 people have crossed the border illegally this year alone, Reuters says, citing data through late October. That's in comparison to a total of 10,370 asylum claims made in Canada during the entirety of 2013.

Interestingly, many of those asylum-seekers told Reuters that they had been living in the U.S. legally, and would have considered staying if not for the Trump administration's recent immigration crackdown and forceful rhetoric. A transcript of one asylum hearing from January, in which a Syrian refugee expressed fears about the new U.S. government, showed a tribunal member saying, "That seems to be playing out as you have feared, and today on the news I know that President Trump has suspended the Syrian refugee program. You have provided, in my view, a reasonable explanation of your failure to claim in the U.S."

Lawyers working the refugee cases told Reuters that members of the tribunals who interview asylum-seekers have "grown more sympathetic toward people who have spent time in the United States." Sixty-nine percent of the claims filed by border-crossers that were processed between March and September of this year were accepted by the Immigration and Refugee Board, higher than the overall acceptance rate for all types of refugee claims in Canada last year.

Much of the recent influx is said to be taking place at the Quebec/New York crossing, and the Canadian military has set up a temporary tent encampment in response. Right-wing, anti-migrant Canadian groups, however, are staging rallies against upticks in immigration, prompting Canadians to worry that such displays "set back the cause of tolerance a couple of years." Watch scenes from one such rally below, or read more at Reuters. The Week Staff

A 1992 law set a deadline of Oct. 26, 2017, for the president to decide whether or not to unseal the 3,600 top-secret files about the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. The decision, then, falls on President Trump to determine if the documents should be made public. Alternately, he could seal them away if he certifies that they would cause "an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations [that] outweighs the public interest in disclosure," BuzzFeed News reports.

Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) has introduced a House bill urging Trump to allow the documents about the 1963 assassination to be released. "Obviously it's hard for me to believe that there wasn't a certain amount of complicity in all this development," said Jones. "I don't know about the second shooter, I still have questions about whether there was a second shooter or not, I think maybe there could have been, I don't know. This might help me find out. But I do think there were people behind [shooter Lee Harvey] Oswald, I have no question about that."

In the Senate, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sponsored a bill that mirrored Jones'. It is cosponsored by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.) who said: "Americans have the right to know what our government knows."

In the spring, Judge John R. Tunheim, the former chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, said he knew of "no bombshells" in the papers. Murphy added: "I will say this: This collection is really interesting as a snapshot of the Cold War." Read more about Congress' effort to make the papers public at BuzzFeed News and more about what could be in the documents at The Dallas Morning News. Jeva Lange

Let's get this said right off: Dadybones Puff Ball Phone Case ($35) "isn't designed for this world." Sure, it's easy to fall for. Created by artist Lola Abbey, whose pom-pom placement skills are "exceptional," it's a portable rainbow that you'll love looking at and that other people will love looking at, too. But the pom-poms are glued to a cheap plastic case, they make an iPhone so fat that you can no longer fit it in a pocket, and after a few weeks of shedding confetti, the case also starts shedding pom-poms. Is it worth all that trouble? Not really, but it "does seem like a piece of art." The Week Staff

Starwatchers are saying that this year's Orionid meteor shower, which will be at peak visibility this weekend, is set to be particularly dazzling because it'll coincide with low levels of moonlight. The Orionids are actually left-behind fragments of Halley's Comet, which won't be visible from Earth until 2061 (its last appearance was in 1986).

Viewers in the eastern and southwestern U.S. will have the clearest skies for meteor-watching; between midnight and dawn is when the meteors will be flying the fastest. EarthSky estimates that people living in places with low light pollution could see up to 10 to 15 meteors per hour, as the Orionid meteor shower is one of the fastest and brightest we can see from Earth because its trajectory hits the planet almost head-on. Fortunately for us, the meteors are small enough that they burn up in Earth's atmosphere before they can make contact with ground. The Week Staff