Google is laying off 12,000 workers, or about 6% of its workforce, becoming the latest tech company to trim staff as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbs.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the parent company of Google, informed staff Friday at the Silicon Valley giant about the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company's news blog.

Japan's consumer inflation rate hit a 41-year high of 4% in December, as prices for everything from burgers to gas surged.

That rate is still relatively low, compared to some other nations, including the U.S. Japan, the world's third-largest economy, has been fending off deflation, or chronically falling prices, for decades.

Since an unprecedented financial crisis hit Lebanon in late 2019, the currency has lost more than 95 percent of its value and much of the population has been plunged into poverty.

Factional deadlock has left the country largely leaderless in the face of the political and economic turmoil, with a vacant presidency, a central bank chief under European investigation and a government with only caretaker powers.

Global shares were mostly lower Thursday as investors grew cautious after Wall Street's biggest pullback of the year.

France's CAC 40 lost 0.4% in early trading to 7,052.61, while Germany's DAX edged down 0.5% to 15,106.21. Britain's FTSE 100 fell nearly 0.6% to 7,787.49. The future for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 0.4% lower while that for the S&P 500 declined 0.3%.

The countdown toward a possible U.S. government default is in the offing — with frictions between President Joe Biden and House Republicans raising alarms about whether the U.S. can sidestep a potential economic crisis.

The Treasury Department projects that the federal government will on Thursday reach its legal borrowing capacity of $38.381 trillion, an artificially imposed cap that lawmakers have increased roughly 80 times since the 1960s. Markets so far remain calm, as the government can temporarily rely on accounting tweaks to stay open, meaning that any threats to the economy are several months away. Even many worried analysts assume there will be a deal.

A hoped-for boom in Chinese tourism in Asia over next week's Lunar New Year holidays looks set to be more of a blip as most travelers opt to stay inside China if they go anywhere.

From the beaches of Bali to Hokkaido's powdery ski slopes, the hoards of Chinese often seen in pre-COVID days will still be missing, tour operators say.

The value of the Lebanese pound hit an all-time low Thursday, trading at 50,000 to the U.S. dollar, as the country's deeply-divided parliament failed to elect a president for an 11th time.

The cash-strapped country's national currency, once valued at 1,500 to the dollar, has been tanking since late 2019 and has since lost over 90% of its value. The financial crisis has plunged three-quarters of the population into poverty, with millions struggling to cope with some of the world's sharpest inflation. Experts blame the country's entrenched ruling elites for decades of corruption and financial mismanagement.

Workers in many French cities took to the streets Thursday to reject proposed pension changes that would push back the retirement age, amid a day of nationwide strikes and protests seen as a major test for Emmanuel Macron and his presidency.

Demonstrations gathered thousands of people in the cities of Paris, Marseille, Toulouse, Nantes, Lyon and other places as strikes were severely disrupting transport, schools and other public services across the country.

Thousands of nurses in Britain walked out Wednesday in a new protest over pay, with no end in sight to a wave of strikes that has piled pressure on the U.K.'s overburdened public health system.

Two 12-hour strikes on Wednesday and Thursday affect about a quarter of hospitals and clinics in England. Emergency care and cancer treatment will continue, but thousands of appointments and procedures are likely to be postponed.

U.K. inflation eased for a second month in December, boosting confidence that the cost-of-living crisis has peaked.

Consumer prices rose 10.5% in the year through December, down from 10.7% the previous month, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday. Inflation peaked at a 41-year high of 11.1% in October.