With winds not as strong as had been predicted, firefighters made significant progress Tuesday in putting out wildfires that have burned several thousand acres in Southern California and destroyed dozens of buildings.

Fears that hot, strong Santa Ana winds would whip the blazes into firestorms overnight and Tuesday morning did not materialize, though gusts remained strong and authorities were not ready to declare victory.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced in a news conference that the Marek fire had been contained by 70 percent, an improvement from the 5 percent of last night.

“I want to thank God and Mother Nature,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Tuesday morning at a news conference. “Last night could have been a horrendous evening.”

Still, crews were still working to put out two major fires in the San Fernando Valley area of the city and statewide several fires have burned 26,800 acres and destroyed 64 structures, including a number of homes. The fires still threatened neighborhoods, but most evacuation orders and freeway closings were ended Tuesday morning. Read more …

As an eerie orange moon set over Ventura, Calif., three glowing bands of fire continued to burn in the smoky sunrise in Los Angeles County. But firefighters started their day encouraged that the first major Santa Ana winds of the season had calmed in some areas.

Officials continue to fight the three blazes — the Marek Fire, Porter Ranch and San Bernardino — from both the ground and the air. Mark Savage, a Los Angeles County Fire captain told KABC-TV: “Even without high winds, we still have a lot of work to do.”

Channel 7 in Los Angeles has live web streaming with updates.

The winds, according to local reports, have slowed to about 15 to 20 miles an hour, though there were still gusts in canyons of up to 45 miles per hour. On Monday, stronger gusts stoked the fires that scorched more than 12,000 acres and killed two people.

Although the forecast does not show the winds intensifying, Santa Ana winds, officials warned, are unpredictable. Evacuees were still not allowed back into their homes as of 6:30 a.m. in the affected areas.

The National Weather Service kept its high-wind advisory but only through noon Pacific time for San Bernardino and Riverside County Valleys.

Another day, another roller-coaster ride on Wall Street. Following Monday’s massive rally, The Lede will keep tracking financial markets on Wall Street and across the globe, posting relevant and interesting developments as they occur. Jack Healy, Mark Getzfred, Patrick J. Lyons and Sharon Otterman will contribute, and more business and market coverage is available throughout nytimes.com.

Closing time | 4 p.m. Eastern After starting strong, then sliding deep into negative territory around 3 p.m., the Dow Jones Industrial Average is ending up with a small loss, one day after its historic 936-point rally. Read more …

The Boeing Company, which was struck last month by members of the machinists union, went back to the negotiating table this weekend for the first time since the walkout started.

Investors must like that news, because Boeing shares were up 7.5 percent, to $44.96, in midday trading. (Of course, investors seem to like nearly everything today: the major stock indexes were up 6 to 7 percent at midday.)

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers posted news of the restart to talks on its Web site Sunday. It said talks had resumed with the assistance of a federal mediator, and that a news blackout would be observed until the new round of negotiations had concluded.

Some 27,000 machinists’ union members in Washington State, Oregon and Kansas struck Boeing on Sept. 6, disrupting airplane production and threatening further delays in the development of the company’s new plane, the Dreamliner. The dispute centers on job security demands by the union, as well as Boeing’s insistence on remaining free to send work to non-union suppliers. Boeing is losing about $100 million a day in revenue while the strike continues.

N.Y.S.E. traders on Monday. (Richard Drew/Associated Press)

All day long on The Lede, we’ll be watching the market and policy action in the United States and around the world, taking note of relevant developments as a complement to the extensive coverage you’ll find in our business section and elsewhere at nytimes.com. Contributors to this post stream include Mark Getzfred, Jack Healy, Patrick J. Lyons and Sharon Otterman.

Last thoughts: Will the gains hold? For anyone with money in the stock markets or a retirement account, the big question looking ahead to Tuesday is, What comes next? Stock markets recovered some of last week’s devastating losses during Monday’s 936-point rally, but the Dow is still down about a third from its peak of 14,164 of a year ago. Anything could happen after the opening bell rings tomorrow:

Will the rally hold? Will prices fall again as investors cash out on their quick earnings from Monday? How will reopening bond markets affect the broader picture? Will the realities of sluggish growth pull stocks back? Read more …

It’s been 17 months since I picked up where Tom Zeller left off, filling this blog of many interests. There were days spent live-blogging major stories, including my first (when a monster opened fire at Virginia Tech) to my last (today’s market convulsions).

On other days, new stories from across the world and across the Web were “spiral[led] off in new directions,” as promised in our little “about” box.

And when the news day slowed to crawl, there was a whole other level of fascinating fodder: real-life treasure hunters and pirates on the high seas, satellites falling from the heavens, men hoping not to be tased and a profoundly ambiguous “Sopranos” ending to argue to the floor. Sometimes, the urgent and the offbeat came together for even more surprising posts, such as that Iranian missile launch image that had one missile too many. Read more …

WASHINGTON — People listening to President Bush appeal for faith and calm amid the financial tempest could almost have imagined themselves traveling by time machine 75 years into the past.

“This uncertainty has led to anxiety among our people,” the president said. “And that is understandable — that anxiety can feed anxiety, and that can make it hard to see all that is being done to solve the problem.”
“Fellow citizens,” the president said. “We can solve this crisis — and we will.”

Mr. Bush’s words may have been reminiscent, especially to older Americans, of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous reassurance at his inauguration in 1933 that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Read more …

The Closing Bell, 4:05 p.m. To end the day, an A.P. that strikes a positive note: “Dow Jones industrials end week with loss of about 65 points, best showing of tumultuous week.” By the time all the trades were in, however, it was down 128 points, or 1.49 percent.

Down the Stretch, 3:49 p.m. In just a few minutes, the Dow drops back into negative territory. Read more …

From Congress to the presidential debates to the office water cooler, talk invariably gets to the problems of Wall Street and their effect on Main Street. As reported earlier this week by Stephanie Rosenbloom, some retailers saw double-digit declines in retail sales for September.

But that is not the case in Fargo, N.D., where Mila Koumpilova reports in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead:

Nationwide, September marked an alarming downturn in consumer spending, with retailers from luxury goods stores to discount chains reporting dismal performances. But based on input from area retailers and preliminary information from North Dakota’s Tax Commissioner’s Office, Fargo-Moorhead consumers haven’t cut back in the face of bleak economic news.

Read more …

With wages flat and jobs harder to find, the cost of heating a home or keeping the lights on just seems to grow ever more burdensome. And reports are popping up across the country that more people are having their power cut off by utility companies for nonpayment.

Take this, for example, from the Associated Press: It reported that shut-offs have jumped 17 percent in New York compared with last year. That shakes out to about 230,000 residential customers left in the dark for failing to pay the bills in the first eight months of 2008. (Some of those, naturally, are vacant or foreclosed houses.)

It’s even worse in economically beleaguered Michigan, home of the nation’s highest unemployment rate. There, the number of shut-offs has jumped 22 percent since last year, according to the A.P. Read more …

Italian newspapers are buzzing with complaints from Italian nuclear physicists that Nicola Cabibbo, a theoretical physicist at Rome’s La Sapienza University, was snubbed on Tuesday by the Nobel Committee.

This year’s physics prize was awarded for work that explored hidden symmetries between subatomic particles. Three scientists shared the award: Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute; Makoto Kobayashi, 64, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan; and Toshihide Maskawa, 68, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University.

As The New York Times article on the subject noted, winning scientists Kobayashi and Maskawa built on the work of Dr. Cabibbo when they shed light on a puzzling asymmetry among subatomic particles known as the CP violation. In 1972, they postulated the existence of six different types of subatomic particles known as quarks to explain the asymmetry. Only three kinds of quarks were known at the time. Later discoveries proved them right.

The 3-by-2 matrix they postulated, which maps out the six kinds of quarks, is commonly known as Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix, a fact which was brought up by the Italian scientists as evidence Cabibbo should have been included in the prize. Read more …

Vacancy rates in the office towers of the Manhattan skyline are starting to climb because of the credit crisis and the slowing economy, especially in the financial sector, new statistics show. (Tom Starkweather/Bloomberg News)

You might call it the collateral damage of a 6.1 percent unemployment rate and 760,000 lost jobs. As companies fold or cut back and lay off workers, they’re shrinking physically, too, leaving behind acres and acres of emptied office space.

It’s a national phenomenon, but the numbers are especially striking in Manhattan. In the epicenter of the financial meltdown, vacancy rates have spiked to two-year highs. Read more …

It has been 20 years since Dustin Hoffman’s character Raymond Babbitt in “Rain Man” made Qantas synonymous with air safety, claiming he would only fly the Australian airline because it had never crashed.

One of its 747’s skidded off a runway in 1999, although no one died. But recently Qantas has been beset by enough high-profile incidents that Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority last month directed the airline to improve its maintenance program, specifically on Boeing airplanes.

On Monday, a terrifying mid-air incident occurred, this time with an Airbus plane. Qantas Flight 72, an A330-300 with 303 passengers and 10 crew on board, was traveling from Singapore to Perth when it suddenly dropped in the air. After the pilots issued a mayday call, they made an emergency landing in Learmonth air base, near Exmouth, Australia, about 680 miles northwest of Perth.

Several news agencies reported that as many as 36 passengers were injured with broken bones and lacerations, with as many as 20 of those seriously hurt. Read more …

The $700 billion bailout may not have thrilled voters, politicians or even financial markets, but it’s made at least a few people happy: bike commuters. Here’s a taste of how some have been reacting:

“Awesome! It’s about time.”

“Great news for any potential US bike commuter.”

And two-wheel enthusiasts have sent messages to the League of American Bicyclists, exulting: “Finally!!! This is very exciting!!!!” and “It’s a small step forward, but a beginning of something very positive.”

Well, it wasn’t the bailout per se that thrilled them, but a provision tucked into the law that sets aside a $20 per month tax credit for employees who bike to work. Critics (many bike-riders among them) have derided the bicycle reimbursement as just one more giveaway stuffed into an already porcine piece of legislation, but to the long-suffering bicyclists who dodge trucks and ride through freezing rain on their commutes, it represented a small but meaningful victory. Read more …