CNN 2011-03-08

Mondays: not as awesome 1 as Fridays. But it does mean the start of a new week of CNN Student News! Welcome! Hello, everyone. I'm Carl Azuz. Today, we're talking about space, sports, labor 2 and Libya.

We begin in that north African nation of Libya, where a political uprising has turned into warfare 3. Libyans are fighting against their leader, Moammar Gadhafi. They were able to fend 4 off Gadhafi's troops in the city of Misrata. Witnesses said the rebels used machine guns, sticks, anything they could find against the military's tanks and heavy artillery 5. Images like these seem to tell a different story. This demonstration 6 was in Tripoli, Libya's capital, yesterday. The people here are speaking out in support of Colonel Gadhafi. Some even said they were celebrating a victory in Misrata. Meanwhile, the U.S. military is helping 7 some of the foreigners who left Libya to get back home again. Libya is in between Tunisia and Egypt. Many Egyptians who were in Libya escaped to Tunisia. Now, the U.S. is flying them back to Egypt.

The U.S. unemployment rate is down one-tenth of a point. It went from 9 percent in January to 8.9 percent in February. That's the lowest unemployment has been since April of '09. But experts still have some concerns about the future of the U.S. economy. Samantha Hayes explains some of those concerns and breaks down some more details from this month's unemployment report.

The Obama administration was cautiously upbeat Friday after the Labor Department's February jobs report showed a slight dip in unemployment, to 8.9 percent from 9 percent in January.

More people are going to work. We're adding jobs. We're finding that there is growth in manufacturing, construction and health.

But there is also concern the rising price of food and gas could thwart 8 any economic gains unless Americans change their ways.

Cut our dependency on foreign oil by making those investments in fuel-efficient cars, lithium batteries, wind turbines and global energy and solar power.

Private businesses added 222,000 jobs in February, the best month in a year. But the news was not good for public workers. State and local governments cut 30,000 jobs. University of Maryland economics professor Peter Morici says jobs losses in the public sector 9 indicate an overall problem with the recovery.

If the economy were growing like it should, states like Wisconsin, New Jersey 10, California, they'd have enough money, they wouldn't have to lay people off.

The jobs report also offered some good news for the hardest hit sector of the economy during the recession: construction. Thirty-three thousand jobs were added in construction and manufacturing in February, the biggest one-month gain in nearly four years. The number of uncounted unemployed 11, those who are not actively 12 seeking a job, remained about the same at 2.7 million. For CNN Student News, I'm Samantha Hayes.