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...bottom shows that house prices are beginning to creep back up. The S&P/Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 cities saw a 1.4% gain between May and June. That's only the second time the index has risen since the summer of 2006 (the other time was the month before). Once you adjust the data for seasonality - the fact that houses tend to sell for more money in the warmer months - the increase in July was actually the first since May 2006. Home-price data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which tracks homes with mortgages owed or guaranteed...
...other number stirring up significant optimism about housing is the Commerce Department's measure of new-home sales. In July, for the fourth month in a row, the number of new homes sold, on a seasonally adjusted basis, rose. July's jump, of 9.6%, seems downright striking...
...Despite his grass-roots support, it's uncertain if Williams can muster a council majority next month to pass the ordinance, which would likely be the first such law to emerge amid the Great Recession. (A Pennsylvania judge last year mandated a program in Philadelphia that requires lenders there to at least participate in a modification-mediation process before resorting to foreclosure.) John Mechem, spokesman for the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington, D.C., argues the ordinance is "ill-conceived" because it would "encourage banks not to do business [in] the city, which would limit competition." But even if it doesn...
...Still, advocates like Airan-Pace say the banks, perhaps because of Geithner's grousing or because they've gotten up to speed on MHA's procedures, have stepped up their modification activity in recent weeks. That's giving them hope that MHA perhaps has a future after all. "This month we've actually been raking them in," says Airan-Pace, who's now confident that she'll be able to work something out for Milligan...
Khat fields are typically flooded twice a month, consuming about 30% of the country's water - most of which is pumped from underground aquifers filled thousands of years ago, and replenished only very slowly by the occasional rainfall that seeps through the layers of soil and rock. A recent explosion of khat cultivation has drawn water levels down to the point where they are no longer being replenished. The option of pumping desalinated water over long pipelines from coastal plants is too expensive for such a poor country. Yemen is in real danger of becoming the world's first country...