Unemployment "statistics"

I am so sick of hearing about how the unemployment situation is looking up in the USA. It goes like this: 'Last week there were 674,000 new claims for unemployment benefits and this week there are only 654,000 new ones.'(actual statistics) Supposedly people aren't losing their jobs as fast and some are going back to work-no wait, that's NEW CLAIMS, not people going OFF unemployment. And to boot, some of those job figure included people being hired to take the census in 2010, but what are those people supposed to do for jobs until next year? I think as long as unemployment is increasing at such an alarming rate it is bad. Unemployment at present is higher than it has been in 25 years, so where's the good news?