ECONOMY

Durable-Goods Orders Up in August: Orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket items such as cars and computers rose for the second time in three months, the government said. Economists took the report as evidence that American manufacturing is starting to recover from a slump earlier this year, but they said the rebound hasn’t been fast enough to produce significant new hiring. Orders rose 2% to a seasonally adjusted $131.2 billion, after a 2.8% drop in July and a 4.3% gain in June, the Commerce Department said. Before that, new orders had declined for three consecutive months, from March through May, and factories had to struggle to bring their production in line with a stall in consumer demand.