The Labor Department on Thursday said that the number of Americans filing initial claims for jobless benefits rose last week while the total jobless benefit rolls reached a new record. The Labor Department said first-time requests for unemployment insurance increased to 654,000 from the previous week's figure of 639,000, which came above analysts' expectations. The number of people receiving benefits for longer than a week increased by 193,000 to 5.3 million—the most on records dating back to 1967. That is the sixth time in the past seven weeks that the jobless claims rolls have set a new record.
