Latest from Independent
The Independent
37 minutes ago
- Business
- The Independent
Housing red flag: Data show increase in cancellations of home purchase agreements versus a year ago
The latest sign of trouble in the U.S. housing market: A pickup in home purchase agreements falling through before they're finalized. Some 6% of pending contracts to buy a home were canceled in May, down from 7% in April, but up from 5% in May last year, according to data from National Association of Realtors. May is the third consecutive month with an annual increase in pending home sales cancelations. A separate analysis of housing data by Redfin found that 14.6% of all pending sales in May fell out of contract, up from 14% in May last year, and the highest cancelation percentage for the month of May going back to at least 2017. The trend underscores how even home shoppers who manage to ink a deal with a seller can end up having to back out because of unexpected costs, changes in their credit, employment or financial status, or a low appraisal, among other reasons. 'Stock market fluctuations, restrained consumer confidence and broader economic and geopolitical uncertainties may be leading to higher-than-normal cancellations rates in recent months,' said Lawrence Yun, NAR's chief economist. The U.S. housing market remains in a sales slump going back to 2022, as elevated mortgage rates and rising home prices nationally keep pushing the cost of homeownership well beyond what many would-be homebuyers can afford. While sales of previously occupied U.S. homes in May remained at the slowest pace since 2009, pending U.S. home sales rose 1.8% from the previous month and increased 1.1% from May last year, NAR said Thursday. A home sale is listed as pending when the purchase contract has been signed but the transaction has not closed. There's usually a month or two lag between a contract signing and when the sale is finalized, which makes pending home sales a bellwether for future completed home sales. A snapshot by Redfin of pending U.S. home sales for the four weeks that ended June 22, shows they fell 2.3% from a year earlier, the biggest drop in three months. Economists at mortgage buyer Fannie Mae revised their outlook for existing U.S. home sales this week, citing expectations that the average rate on a 30-year mortgage will end this year at 6.5%. Fannie Mae now expects existing U.S. home sales will rise 2% this year to 4.14 million. The economists' previously forecast the sale of 4.24 million homes. Still, they project home sales will jump 9.5% in 2026 on the back of mortgage rates easing to 6.1%.
The Independent
37 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Fans bid teary farewell to four giant pandas at a zoo in Japan before their return to China
Thousands of fans bid a teary farewell Friday to a family of four giant pandas at a zoo in Japan's coastal town of Shirahama as the animals made their last public appearance before their return to China. Around 3,000 visitors flocked to the Adventure World theme park to get a last glimpse of the beloved animals. Many rushed straight to the panda exhibit zone, calling out the names of their favorites. Although the 24-year-old mother Rauhin and her three daughters — Yuihin, Saihin and Fuhin — were all born and raised at the park, they remain on loan from China and must now be returned. Once they return to China, Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo will be the only pandas left in Japan. More than 1,000 people, many wearing panda-themed attire, queued outside the entrance of the theme park hours before it opened while some camped outside the night before. Junko Ikeda, who came from the neighboring prefecture of Nara, slept in her camper van Thursday night to secure a parking spot for the pandas' send-off. 'I still can't believe they are all leaving,' Ikeda said. Giant pandas are native to southwestern China and serve as an unofficial national mascot. Beijing lends them to other countries as a sign of goodwill but maintains ownership over them and any cubs they produce. Born in 2000, Rauhin had seven other cubs with Eimei, a male panda sent from China in 1994. Eimei returned home two years ago. Despite strained political ties between Japan and China, giant pandas are hugely popular in Japan. 'We feel comforted just by looking at pandas,' said zoo director Koji Imazu. Imazu said the departure of the four pandas marks the end of the zoo's 30-year joint project with China. He thanked Chinese specialists for sharing their expertise with the Japanese staff and said the zoo will be ready for a new arrival at any time. 'Of course we all miss them, but I hope you could wish them good health when they go to China,' Imazu said. In Beijing, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said giant pandas are 'friendly ambassadors" conveying the goodwill of the Chinese people. Guo said that China and Japan have collaborated on panda conservation and research since 2000, and that China is ready to further strengthen international cooperation, including with Japan. Rauhin and her daughters will be flown to China on Saturday where they will join other pandas at a facility in Sichuan province near their original habitat. There, the three young ones will find partners. ___
The Independent
38 minutes ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Supreme Court decision hands Trump citizenship powers victory
The Supreme Court 's conservative majority, in a 6-3 ruling, limited federal courts' authority to issue nationwide injunctions that have blocked key parts of Donald Trump 's agenda. Written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the ruling stated that federal judges exceeded their authority by blocking Trump's executive order attempting to redefine who gets to be a citizen. Liberal justices, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, strongly dissented, warning the decision put the legal system and government in 'grave jeopardy'. Critics argue the ruling could lead to a patchwork system of constitutional rights and citizenship benefits, potentially denying citizenship to over 150,000 newborns annually under Trump's order. The administration sought to curb nationwide injunctions, which have significantly impeded its executive actions.
The Independent
42 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
How do you make a 'Jurassic World' movie? With these 'commandments'
If you're going to let dinosaurs run amok, it's good to have some ground rules. That's how screenwriter David Koepp saw it, anyway, in penning the script for 'Jurassic World Rebirth,' which opens in theaters July 2. Koepp wrote the original ' Jurassic Park and its 1997 sequel, 'The Lost World. But 'Rebirth,' the seventh film in the franchise, marks his return to the franchise he helped birth. And Koepp, the veteran screenwriter of 'Carlito's Way' and 'Mission: Impossible,' saw it as a chance to get a few things in order for a movie series that had perhaps strayed too far from its foundational character. Inspired by the animator Chuck Jones, Koepp decided to put down a list of nine commandments to guide 'Jurassic World Rebirth' and future installments. Jones had done something similar for the Roadrunner cartoons. His 'commandments' included things like: the Roadrunner never speaks except to say 'meep meep"; the coyote must never catch him; gravity is the coyote's worst enemy; all products come from the ACME Corporation. 'I always thought those were brilliant as a set of organizing principles,' Koepp says. 'Things become easier to write when you have that, when you have a box, when you have rules, when you agree going in: 'These we will heed by.' So I wrote my own, nine of them.' Koepp shared some — though not all of them — in a recent interview. 1. The events of the first six movies cannot be contradicted 'I hate a retcon. I hate when they change a bunch of things: 'Oh, that didn't actually happen. It was actually his twin.' I don't like other timelines. So I thought: Let's not pretend any of the last 32 years didn't happen or happened differently than you thought. But we can say things have changed.' 2. The dinosaurs are animals, not monsters 'On the first movie, anyone working on the movie would get fined for referring to them as monsters. They're not monsters, they're animals. Therefore, because they're animals, their motives can only be because they're hungry or defending their territory. They don't attack because they're scary. They don't sneak up and roar because they want to scare you.' 3. Humor is oxygen. 'You can't forget it.' 4. Science must be real 'The tone that Steven (Spielberg) found and I helped find in that first movie is really distinctive. I haven't gotten to work on a movie with that tone since then. So to go back to that sense of high adventure, real science and humor, it was just kind of joyful.' 5. The tone must never been ponderous or self-serious 'And then there were a number of other rules that I would define as trade secrets. So I'll keep them to myself.'
The Independent
42 minutes ago
- Health
- The Independent
WHO expert group fails to find a definitive answer for how COVID-19 began
An expert group charged by the World Health Organization to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic started released its final report Friday, reaching an unsatisfying conclusion: Scientists still aren't sure how the worst health emergency in a century began. At a press briefing on Friday, Marietjie Venter, the group's chair, said that most scientific data supports the hypothesis that the new coronavirus jumped to humans from animals. That was also the conclusion drawn by the first WHO expert group that investigated the pandemic's origins in 2021, when scientists concluded the virus likely spread from bats to humans, via another intermediary animal. At the time, WHO said a lab leak was 'extremely unlikely.' Venter said that after more than three years of work, WHO's expert group was unable to get the necessary data to evaluate whether or not COVID-19 was the result of a lab accident, despite repeated requests for hundreds of genetic sequences and more detailed biosecurity information that were made to the Chinese government. 'Therefore, this hypothesis could not be investigated or excluded,' she said. 'It was deemed to be very speculative, based on political opinions and not backed up by science.' She said that the 27-member group did not reach a consensus; one member resigned earlier this week and three others asked for their names to be removed from the report. Venter said there was no evidence to prove that COVID-19 had been manipulated in a lab, nor was there any indication that the virus had been spreading before December 2019 anywhere outside of China. 'Until more scientific data becomes available, the origins of how SARS-CoV-2 entered human populations will remain inconclusive,' Venter said, referring to the scientific name for the COVID-19 virus. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was a 'moral imperative' to determine how COVID began, noting that the virus killed at least 20 million people, wiped at least $10 trillion from the global economy and upended the lives of billions. Last year, the AP found that the Chinese government froze meaningful domestic and international efforts to trace the virus' origins in the first weeks of the outbreak in 2020 and that WHO itself may have missed early opportunities to investigate how COVID-19 began. U.S. President Donald Trump has long blamed the emergence of the coronavirus on a laboratory accident in China, while a U.S. intelligence analysis found there was insufficient evidence to prove the theory. Chinese officials have repeatedly dismissed the idea that the pandemic could have started in a lab, saying that the search for its origins should be conducted in other countries. Last September, researchers zeroed in on a short list of animals they think might have spread COVID-19 to humans, including racoon dogs, civet cats and bamboo rats. __ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
