welcome back to cnn newsroom. i m suzanne malveaux. numbers are in nor the most anticipated jobs report of the year. this is the final report before the presidential election on tuesday. it shows the economy added 171,000 jobs last month. the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9%. here s what president obama said about these numbers this morning in ohio. today our businesses have created nearly 5.5 million new jobs, and this morning we learned that companies hired more workers in october than at any time in the last eight months. i want to talk about the economics and the politics of the report with our chief business correspondent ali velshi and john avalon. they re in ohio talking to the voters. ali, let s start with you since you have an economics, numbers guy here. yeah. we looked at this, and the economy stated by cnn money, they were twpg 125,000 jobs, so this number was higher at 171,000. so you have figures in august and september, also higher than we thought.
first, we re starting to learn more about the young man accused in the alleged plot to bomb the federal reserve bank of new york. the 21-year-old was in the united states from bangladesh. he was at southeast missouri university where he studied from january through may of this year. nafis is in federal custody this morning, charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. the bank building is located in lower manhattan in the heart of the financial district, a few blocks east of the world trade center and all that rebuilding under way now at ground zero. our national correspondent suzanne candiotti has been on this story. walk us through this plot and how the fbi says they busted him. sure. after coming here and after studying in college and then moving on to new york, not surprisingly this guy uses social media. he gets on facebook. according to prosecutors, he hooks up, he connects with someone that he thinks is going to be able to help him. then he can recr
hooks up, he connects with someone that he thinks is going to be able to help him. then he can recruit for the cause. unfortunately for him, fortunately for us it turns out that this is someone who is a source for the fbi. well then it s for him, according to prosecutors, it s all about jihad. it s all about destroying america, wrecking the economy. he even talks about the possibility of doing something that would stop the presidential election. and what he didn t know was that the people that were brought in to this in this undercover elaborate fbi sting were all people who were working undercover for the fbi and for the new york police department. then he set about to select a target. prosecutors say it was his idea after new york police commissioner has to say. he comes here with, again, the purpose of committing some sort of jihad here in the united states. he goes to the new york stock exchange. he see that s there is significant security there. he shifts his target to
many of us witnessed the highest temperatures in our entire lifetime. the weekend storm was so big, powerful and fast, it s a phenomenon that has its own name derecho. it only happens in the d.c. area once every four years and this derecho was a doozy that spanned from northern illinois all the way to the delmarva peninsula, wind gusts of up to 90 miles an hour slammed into parts of indiana and ohio killing at least 16 people and that derecho s aftermath is causing problems today. brian todd is along the d.c. beltway in montgomery county, maryland. and better you than me, brian. reporter: a lot of frayed nerves on the road as we knew there would be. last night we could see this coming, a nightmarish commute. here in montgomery county 250 traffic lights out. we re at the corner of a very busy intersection. my photojournalist brian and i will show you up randolph road about 250 yards. there is a light out over there where the buses are coming through. some of these intersecti
expected. fredricka? susan, yesterday, you told us that someone was being questioned, that his story was being met with healthy skepticism. are police now confident that pedro hernandez is etan patz s killer, or at least the suspect? is this the same person that they had some trepidation about initially? reporter: well, we are still hearing from different law enforcement sources. we are hearing both, that they believe that this is a solid case and certainly police are on the record saying that they believe the credibility of this man based on the detailed statements that they say he made to them over the course of 3 1/2 hours on videotape. but we also have other law enforcement sources who are telling us that while this investigation is still going on, there is naturally always skepticism involved here as they continue to look for any possible physical evidence to link this man to the case. we already know that there isn t any, according to police here. and also to try to