U.S. stocks rose on Thursday after the government said weekly jobless claims edged down.
The lower jobless number suggests that employers may accelerate hiring this month.
In morning trading, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 78 points to 12,913. The Standard & Poor's 500 index gained 10 points to 1,365. Shares of energy companies, financials, and industrials all rose more than 1 percent.
Technology stocks were mixed. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index rose 12 points to 2,947. Cisco Systems, one of the 30 stocks in the Dow average, plunged 8 percent after the networking giant warned investors that technology spending could slow down. Cisco said its revenue would rise much less than analysts had been expecting this quarter. Hardware maker Oracle fell 2 percent.
Stocks that rose included drugmaker Pfizer, which rose 2 percent after the company got preliminary approval for an arthritis drug.
Before Thursday, the Dow had fallen for six days in a row, its longest losing streak since August. Investors were encouraged by the Labor Department's report that applications for unemployment benefits dropped 1,000 to 367,000 in the week ending May 5. The four-week average, which economists watch more closely, fell 5,250 to 379,000. When that figure remains consistently below 375,000, it suggests that job growth is strong enough to lower the unemployment rate.
The numbers could dispel nascent fears that that strongest yearly start for hiring since the recession ended 2009 was sputtering.
European stocks rose as talks to form a Greek government push into a fourth day. Britain's FTSE 100 rose 0.5 percent, Germany's DAX rose 0.9 percent and Spain's IBEX 35 index jumped 3.7 percent as that country's borrowing costs dropped.
Oil prices rose 64 cents to $97.45 per barrel.