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The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values in 20 cities rose 9.3 percent in February from the same month in 2012, more than forecast, after rising 8.1 percent in the year ended in January. Compared with the prior month, prices rose the most since October 2005. From January to February, Las Vegas was the big winner NSA. Minneapolis was the biggest loser (followed by Chicago and Cleveland). The supply of homes in the US is back to 2005 levels. Low supply, low mortgage rates, rising house prices? In related news, the Chicago Purchasing Manager Index fell below 50 and the Milwaukee...

AFP - Taiwan on Wednesday reported the first case of the H7N9 bird flu outside of mainland China. The 53-year-old man, who had been working in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, showed symptoms three days after returning to Taiwan via Shanghai, the Centers for Disease Control said, adding that he had been hospitalised since April 16 and was in a critical condition. A passenger (right) has her temperature checked by a Centers for Disease Control staff member at the entrance of Sungshan Airport in Taipei on April 4, 2013. Taiwan on Wednesday reported the first case of the H7N9...

A new virus from the same family as SARS that sparked a global alert last September has been found in a further patient in Britain, health officials said on Monday. This latest case of infection with the new virus known as a coronavirus brings the total number of confirmed cases globally to 10, of which five have died. The British patient, who had recently travelled to the Middle East and Pakistan, is receiving intensive care treatment in hospital in Manchester, northern England.

All is not as it appears in the case of Richard Windsor, the alias used by outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, apparently to shield email messages from discovery and disclosure. Under court order to cough up the email messages to Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and having turned over a first installment of 2,100 such email messages earlier this week, the Obama administration is making this a case that might challenge the ingenuity of Sherlock Holmes. With Horner’s assistance, my daughter Eliana tries to pierce the fog of administrative war in her NRO column “Lisa Jackson’s gadfly.”

The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values in 20 cities increased 4.3 percent from October 2011, the biggest 12-month advance since May 2010. The median forecast projected a 4 percent gain. On a month-over-month basis, house prices rose 0.48% in October. I should not that these are seasonally adjusted numbers. On a non seasonally adjusted basis, house prices actually fell slightly in October by -0.1%. oct12-case-shiller The Case-Shiller 20 (green), FNC 30 (yellow) and FHFA Purchase Only (purple) indices are all showing house price recovery from the the disastrous housing bubble. Of course, The Federal Reserve and the fiscal fiasco in...

A copy of a letter received in the past hour by Gun Rights Examiner addressed to Eric Holder from Senator Chuck Grassley questions the attorney general about a leak on a gun trafficking case tied to the Fast and Furious gunwalking operation that resulted in the indictment of the husband of the then-head of the New Mexico U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division. The letter, sent on Wednesday, provides further details to a story related last Monday in this column, concerning Danny Burnett, married to federal prosecutor Paula Burnett, charged with leaking wiretap information to a suspect in an ATF gun...

Owning or Renting: High Risk or Tragedy of the Commons? The tragedy of the commons is the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one’s self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to their long-term best interests. Examples abound such as common grazing on public land, depletion of fish in the ocean and why public restrooms are usually filthy. Homeownership is an example of the “tragedy of the commons.” Public housing projects, such as the infamous Cabrini Green in Chicago, are an example. Public housing is often poorly maintained...

This coming Wednesday features a myriad of important economic, housing and mortgage reports: GDP, Pending Home Sales, Mortgage Purchase Applications, Pending Homes Sales and Corporate Profits. But on Tuesday, the Case-Shiller home prices indices will be released (and that means a busy day on TV for Yale Professor Robert Shiller). What are we expecting for Tuesday’ Case-Shiller 20 metro home price index? In a nutshell, it will show that house prices are recovering. FNC (blue) and FHFA (gold) have already released their home price indices last week and both show an uptick in their recent release for June 2012. What...

President Obama’s first chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, wrote a paper with her husband, David Romer, showing that higher taxes reduce economic growth. ...After looking at data from 1947 to 2006, and studying the legislative record, the Romers concluded that legislated tax changes have far more effect than automatic tax increases. They wrote, “Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1% of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3%.” Their major reason is that higher taxes have a markedly negative effect on investment. In another finding that argues against raising rates,...

The NYPD is questioning a New Jersey man in connection with the Etan Patz case, the 6-year-old boy who vanished more than 30 years ago as he walked to the school bus from his SoHo home, NBCNewYork.com reported Thursday

SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35) - Just hours after George Zimmerman walked out of the Seminole County jail $150,000 bail, the court unsealed several documents. (see below for documents) Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester issued an order to unseal several documents. According to one of the documents released Monday, Zimmerman's arraignment was pushed forward from May 29 to May 8. Zimmerman's location is being kept a secret for his safety and could be outside the state of Florida.

I strongly disagree with David French’s analysis. I’m inclined, instead, to agree with commentators ranging from former Reagan Justice Department official Mark Levin to Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz that the affidavit is stunningly weak — “unethical,” as Prof. Dershowitz puts it. In fact, I go further (which, after nearly 20 years of writing and supervising the writing of complaint affidavits, I think I’m qualified to do). This affidavit is not law, it is agitprop: invoking, for example, the explosive term “profiled” but carefully avoiding any discussion of what it means and failing to note that (a) there is no evidence of...

The Department of Justice has given up its bid to prosecute a pro-life counselor and agreed to pay her $120,000 in a case a judge said never should have been brought. Mary Susan Pine, who stands outside abortion clinics and advises women not to have the procedure, was accused of blocking a car from entering a Florida abortion clinic in 2009. In December, a judge threw out the case, in which the government sought $10,000 in fines and a permanent injunction barring Pine from counseling women outside the Presidential Women's Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. The government had been...

March 26, 2012 Gingrich: Case against Obama is 'clear cut' GOP candidate weighs in on 'Your World'

Sanford officials have released a response to the reward offered for the arrest of George Zimmerman, saying, "The City of Sanford does not condone the actions and recommendations of the New Black Panther Party. The City is requesting calm heads and no vigilante justice."

January 17, 2012 The case for American exceptionalism Mark Levin defends constitutionalism in new book

Sandusky seems determined for trial in abuse caseBy Ian Simpson | Reuters – 14 hours ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky appears determined to hold out for a trial on child sexual abuse charges that could put him in prison for the rest of his life, legal experts said. **SNIP** Sandusky has already laid out his potential defense, saying in an interview with Bob Costas of NBC television that he engaged in horseplay with alleged victims but stopped short of sexual intercourse or penetration, Mallios said. "Now that he's said that, unless he recants or...

The Arizona Daily Star's Tim Stellar is reporting the federal case file against illegal Mexican bandits accused of killing Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, has disappeared. The case against the alleged killers of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry has disappeared from federal court records, apparently sealed by a federal judge. In May, federal prosecutors won an indictment against Manuel Osorio-Arellanes and others, and they announced it with a press release. Only Osorio-Arellanes’ name was visible in the indictment, but there were blacked-out words where other defendants’ names go. Osorio-Arellanes was charged with second-degree murder and was not considered the likely...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Stunning accusations that a top California Democratic campaign treasurer looted the war chests of her big-name clients have left candidates across the state scrambling to raise more money as election season looms. Kinde Durkee, who controlled the funds of roughly 400 candidates and groups, ranging from Senator Dianne Feinstein to local Democratic youth clubs, was arrested in September and charged with fraud. While the extent of the losses isn't yet clear, the coffers of dozens of Democratic politicians have been frozen, prompting the crippled campaigns to ask the California Fair Political Practices Commission to permit further...

The judge ruled the defendant could not prove her case.

Prosecutors are reportedly set to ask a judge to abandon the case against Dominique Strauss Kahn. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance is preparing to ask that all charges against the former head of the IMF accused of attempting to rape hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo are dropped Tuesday. Such requests from the DA 'are never denied', an expert told the New York Post meaning Strauss-Kahn could finally return to his home country after being forced to remian in the U.S for months.

Durham, N.C. — A judge on Tuesday dismissed a murder charge against a Mebane man arrested last year with the remains of a Durham woman in his backpack. Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson ruled that the state withheld evidence by allowing the family of Lakiea Lacole Boxley to cremate her remains. Durham County District Attorney Tracey Cline immediately said she would appeal the ruling. Michael Charles Dorman, 33, of 1411 Sundown Drive, was arrested in July 2010 after one of his friends told investigators that Dorman admitted to killing a prostitute and asked him to help dispose of her remains....

The Justice Department's inspector general has opened an investigation into possible retaliation against a whistle-blowing agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to two people briefed on the inquiry. Watchdogs are examining whether anyone at the Justice Department improperly released internal correspondence to try to smear ATF agent John Dodson, who told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last month that he repeatedly warned supervisors about what he called a reckless law enforcement operation known as "Fast and Furious." Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate have spent months pursuing allegations that the ATF...

Now that Casey Anthony has been found not guilty of murdering her daughter Caylee, she faces a civil lawsuit from a woman who says Anthony falsely accused her of kidnapping the girl...

Matt Bracken, author of the Enemies Foreign and Domestic trilogy and the upcoming novel Castigo Cay, sends: I was out for a routine morning run on trash day last week, and snagged this empty plastic tool box off a pile of rubbish set to be collected. At one time it carried a "saws-all" type electric tool. It's very rugged yet light, with good hinges and clasps. This particular plastic case is 24 inches long, and it can contain a 31" overall carbine, broken into upper and lower and nested. Plus a few magazines. As a novelist I have free rein...

Months before authorities announced the arrest of a 77-year-old Reno man in four slayings going back to 1977, they alerted law enforcement in California, Nevada and elsewhere to review cold case homicides for possible connections. Piquing their interest was the fact that all four of Joseph Naso's alleged victims – two in Yuba County and two in the Bay Area – had first and last names starting with the same initials.

The president can’t distinguish the Libya campaign from the Iraq War. In the Democratic primary campaign of 2008, candidate Barack Obama scored points because he, unlike many Democrats, had opposed the Iraq War from the start. Although he was a state senator at the time of the 2002 congressional vote authorizing military action, Obama had delivered a speech to an anti-war rally in Chicago. He said, “I don’t oppose all wars. . . . What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical...

You may not believe this part of the story but it is very true. Somewhere under a giant rock, located by the northern part of the Potomac river where it splits and forms a pattern that kind of looks like a wishbone, there is a secret lair filled with computers and television screens. The people who work there spend all day watching Fox news, reading conservative columnists, and listen to talk radio and surfing the net trying to identify anyone who disagrees with a project that George (Spooky Dude) Soros is behind. The name of this nefarious organization is Media...

The facts are as follows. Our Constitution reads: ARTICLE 3SECTION 1: The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.SECTION 2 “In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction.�In fact, a State is Party in the case in question, and as such, the Constitution commands that the “supreme Court shallhave original Jurisdiction�, which means “shall“, not should, or maybe, but "shall"...

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Friday called ethics charges against Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel "very troubling" and said he hopes the longtime lawmaker can end his career with dignity. Several House Democrats went further, flat-out urging the New York congressman to resign."He's somebody who's at the end of his career," Obama said in an interview that aired Friday on "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric." "I'm sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens."Obama, speaking on the issue for the first time, praised the 20-term...

Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings haven’t even begun, and the score is already 1-0 against her. The Supreme Court on Monday morning ruled against Ms. Kagan in a case she had argued as solicitor general when it decided that a quasi government agency that audits public companies is unconstitutional. The board’s members are appointed and removed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and not the president – a violation of Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president, the court ruled.

What/when will there be a decision on the McDonald vs. Chicago 2A case? I thought it was the beginning of June...

The criminal case against oil giant BP has essentially been proven and investigators should be determining how harshly it will be penalized, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said Tuesday. Whitehouse (D-R.I.) — a former U.S. Attorney who successfully prosecuted the North Cape oil spill in 1997 — said that BP "absolutely" broke the law for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "It's pretty much agreed they did that. It's only a misdemeanor statute, but it provides for at least the avenue of criminal prosecution and that leads to potential criminal fines, potential criminal restitution to individual parties who...

Case Drops Hawaii Bid May 30, 2010 7:22 PM By Reid Wilson Ex-Rep. Ed Case (D-HI) will abandon his bid for Congress a week after finishing third in a special election that divided Dems and helped the GOP pick up their first special election win in 2 years. Case made his announcement in an email to supporters today, saying the race has become the "wrong fight" for him. His decision leaves state Senate Pres. Colleen Hanabusa (D) as the only major Dem in the race. "This past week since Election Day has been a roller coaster. We've taken apart the...

May 22, 2010 Republicans Capture House Seat in Obama's Hometown Honolulu -- Republicans scored a midterm election victory Saturday when Honolulu City Councilman Charles Djou won a Democratic-held House seat in Hawaii in the district where President Obama grew up -- the latest triumph for the GOP as it looks to take back control of Congress. Djou's victory was a blow to Obama and other Democrats who could not rally around a candidate and find away to win a congressional race that should have been a cakewalk. The seat had been held by a Democrat for nearly 20 years and...

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President Barack Obama won Hawaii’s first congressional district in 2008 with 70% of the vote, but on May 22 the president’s hometown seat is probably going to fall to the GOP in a special election. Maryland Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who runs the Democrats’ campaign operation, told reporters that they would “have to re-evaluate” their efforts to win. Translation: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is likely going to pull out of the race altogether. The news is welcome to House Republicans, but this race shouldn’t be viewed as a bellwether because of the quirks in the Hawaii election. For...

A Washington truism: to conservatives, potentially troublesome judicial appointments justify immediate action no matter how injurious to the smooth functioning of a legislative body. It's been this way since Roe, as Republicans have grasped how the subtle formalism of American life can be influenced by judicial rulings. And so Senate Republicans are holding up the nomination of Goodwin Liu, .. Liu presents a classic dilemma for intellectually honest conservatives: he is undeniably brilliant, undeniably qualified to serve, has a great story behind him (son of immigrants ..) , was a Rhodes scholar, went to Stanford, Yale Law) respected by colleagues...

Cracks are beginning to appear in the military's prosecution of three Navy SEALs accused of striking a most-wanted terrorism suspect they had captured in Iraq. Maj. Gen. Charles Cleveland last week signed grants of immunity for five Navy colleagues of the accused. Some of those five, three enlisted men and two officers, are expected at trial to flatly contradict the prosecution's key witness, according to a Navy source close to the case, which centers on the September 2009 capture of Ahmed Hashim Abed. The witness, the master-at-arms at the base in Anbar province where the captured terrorist was brought, told...

LOS ANGELES, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. government's majority stake in General Motors Co GM.UL has no bearing on the response of regulators to safety problems at Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T)(TM.N), Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said on Friday. "That argument is baloney," LaHood said when asked about the issue during an appearance in Los Angeles. Questions about whether the government stands to benefit as a GM shareholder from its regulatory crackdown on Toyota gained some steam this week with a number of critics suggesting at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.

James O'Keefe, accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, was "framed" by the media and the U.S. attorney's office, Andrew Breitbart, publisher of BigGovernment.com, told Fox News Monday. The same day the man who first published James O'Keefe's explosive videos exposing wrongdoing at community organizer ACORN came to his defense Monday, claiming the conservative filmmaker "sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney" while the prosecutor made his case to the media, the U.S. attorney involved stepped down. O'Keefe, accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary...

Larry Franklin, the former Pentagon analyst convicted of revealing classified information, says he worked undercover as an FBI double agent to gather information on the pro-Israel lobby in the United States before the bureau turned on him and pressured him to plead guilty to spying for Israel.

Anti-Semitism was behind the highly publicized arrests last week of rabbis, including three from the Aleppo-Syrian Jewish community in New York and New Jersey, according to Yitzhak Kakun, editor-in-chief of the Shas weekly Yom Le'Yom. "There is a feeling here that the FBI purposely attempted to arrest as many rabbis as possible at once in an attempt to humiliate them," Kakun said in a telephone interview Sunday. "Regardless of the details of the case - I am not familiar with the precise charges and the evidence - you would never see the FBI and police behaving that way with Muslim...

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department conceded Friday that it lacks the evidence to hold a teenage Guantanamo detainee as an enemy combatant after a federal judge last week ruled that his confession was inadmissible. In a hearing last week, U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle ruled that Mohammed Jawad's confession to Afghan officials was inadmissible because it had been extracted through torture. She also questioned whether the Justice Department had any evidence to proceed with a trial to determine whether he can be held as an enemy combatant.

(IsraelNN.com) The Tel Aviv Police Department “invented” a new machine that seemed likely to change the face of criminal interrogations – but it will apparently not be used more than once. The contraption was called a “memory machine,” and was used to persuade a murder suspect that, contrary to his impassioned and repeated claims, he in fact did remember what happened the night of the murder. Maariv/NRG reports that the story began two weeks ago

NEW YORK (AP) - The Associated Press will collect undisclosed damages as part of a settlement of its lawsuit against All Headline News, a site that allegedly misappropriated AP stories online. The AP considered the lawsuit an important test of the "hot news" doctrine, which was established in a 1918 Supreme Court case involving the AP. That principle holds that while facts cannot be copyrighted, news organizations can sue when competitors copy time-sensitive stories.

A man accused of making threatening statements about killing President Obama has been arrested in Nevada, the Secret Service said Saturday. Daniel James Murray was arrested Friday night in the parking lot of the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino in Laughlin, Nevada, said Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley.

The U.S. Justice Department filed a motion Wednesday to drop its case against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who was convicted of seven counts of corruption last fall. Justice Department sources told FOX News that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder decided to abandon the case due to prosecutorial misconduct.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Supreme Court refused to weigh in Friday on whether US presidents have the authority to indefinitely detain a terrorist suspect in the United States without charges. But it sent the issue back for a new hearing before the federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, which ruled in July that former president George W. Bush had that power in the case of Ali al-Marri, an alleged Al-Qaeda sleeper agent. The high court's action effectively delayed resolution of an issue that, while different, could have implications for the estimated 245 "enemy combatants" still being held by the...

Books claiming that science disproves ‘young-earth’ creationism are very common, and books that claim the Bible itself does not mandate a literal interpretation of the first few chapters of Genesis are not in short supply either. David Snoke’s book A Biblical Case for an Old Earth ostensibly falls in the latter group, though his main reason for rejecting biblical creation is really uniformitarian ‘science’. Books like these generally don’t pose a threat to informed creationists, and this one is no exception. In fact, Snoke could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had actually taken the time to...