Struggling Internet company AOL plans to shed up to 2,500 jobs—more than a third of its work force—as it prepares to separate from Time Warner and finally sever their ill-fated marriage. Major job cuts had been expected and seemed certain after Time Warner said last week that AOL would take $200 million in charges for severance and other restructuring-related costs. But the magnitude was not known until yesterday.

Job openings are at rock-bottom levels, according to government and private surveys released yesterday. It’s a trend that could keep the unemployment rate high even as layoffs slow. Small businesses in particular are reluctant to add workers as they struggle to obtain credit. Many are pushing their employees to produce more. Economists say small businesses account for about 60 percent of new jobs.

The unemployment rate has surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983. Nearly 16 million people can’t find jobs and employers cut a net total of 190,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department says.

Job-seekers beware: There’s a new warning on Craigslist.com. The Web site recently posted a scam alert, telling applicants to be on the lookout for bogus ads that promise work that doesn’t exist. “The ones that sound too good to be true, they usually are,“ said Kevin Jackson, chief investigator for Florida’s Hillsborough County Consumer Protection Agency.

More than any other of the industrial cities and towns that dot Southside Virginia, Franklin is a company town. Just about everyone and everything in and around the city has a vital connection to the paper mill on the Blackwater River.

The nation’s bouncing economic data shot up yesterday, leading politicians, economists and Wall Street to declare the recession over, though roughly one in 10 working Americans still is out of a job. The latest indicator: The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in July, August and September, according to the government’s first estimate of gross domestic product, the sum total of goods and services produced in the country.

The recession may be over, but the recovery is just beginning—and it’s doesn’t promise to be much easier. While the Commerce Department won’t its release gross domestic product data until this morning, economists forecast that the nation’s total output grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent between July and September after contracting for a record four straight quarters.

They boost the jobless rate when schools’ summer vacations start, and again a few weeks after their college terms start. Returning college students looking for work for a few extra bucks boosted the local unemployment rate slightly last month. But some, evidently, may have found work. The Virginia Employment Commission yesterday reported that the number of people working in metropolitan Richmond rose by 1,300 to 607,900—even as the number of people looking for work, the official definition of the unemployed, also rose. That number was up by 260, to 49,760.

Even with an economic revival, many U.S. jobs lost during the recession may be gone forever and a weak employment market could linger for years. That could mean a “new normal” of higher joblessness and lower standards of living for many Americans, some economists suggest. The words “it’s different this time” are always suspect. But economists and policymakers say the job-creating dynamics of previous recoveries can’t be counted on now.

About 95,500 more Virginians have lost both their jobs and their health insurance this year, according to Families USA, a nonprofit organization pushing for universal health coverage. “That’s why health-care reform is so important,“ Ron Pollack, executive director of the Washington-based group, said during a telephone briefing with reporters yesterday.

Educational Credit Management Corp. plans to close its office in Chesterfield County and lay off all 60 employees, the nonprofit agency said yesterday. They will lose their jobs Dec. 1. Educational Credit Management has been insuring loans under the Federal Family Education Loan Program, as well as servicing other guarantors’ loans when a borrower files for bankruptcy, but the federal government now is taking over insuring student loans, spokeswoman Marianna O’Brien said.

Big losses in what’s usually the Richmond economy’s most stable sector—government—hit the area’s job market hard in August, Virginia Employment Commission figures show. More than half of August’s month-to-month drop in employment came in government, accounting for 1,800 of 3,100 lost jobs. However, college students’ return to classes took enough people out of the work force to bring the Richmond metropolitan area’s unemployment rate down.

Virginia will need to borrow as much as $1.27 billion from the federal government over the next three years to keep making unemployment compensation payments.

The number of newly laid-off workers seeking unemployment benefits fell for the third straight week, evidence that layoffs are continuing to ease in the earliest stages of an economic recovery. The Labor Department said yesterday that initial claims for unemployment insurance dropped to a seasonally adjusted 530,000 from an upwardly revised 551,000 the previous week. Wall Street economists expected claims to rise by 5,000, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

Adding to evidence that the recession has ended, housing construction rose in August and fewer laid-off workers sought jobless aid last week. Still, the reports suggest a slow and fragile economic recovery. The rise in housing starts was solely because of a jump in the volatile apartment-building category, and unemployment claims remain far above levels associated with a healthy economy.