Marketplace for Wednesday, June 23, 2010

The Commerce Department reported new home sales for the month of May dropped 33% to the lowest level on record. That's because home buyers stopped shopping for homes after the government stopped offering an $8,000 home buyer tax credit. The housing market got us into this recession, and Jeremy Hobson reports we're going to need it to help get us out.

A federal judge threw out the Obama administration's six-month ban on drilling yesterday. Critics quickly discovered the judge held shares in a number of oil firms, including Transocean -- the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig. Brett Neely reports.

House and Senate negotiators are meeting to hash out the last details of their financial reform bill. That's actually no mean feat. Policymakers have been talking about financial reform since pretty much the day Lehman Brothers went under. Nancy Marshall Genzer explains there are a mind-numbing number of details to hash out.

Is your cell phone going to give you cancer? The science is murky. But that's not stopping San Francisco from becoming the first city in the country to require retailers to disclose phones' radiation levels. Janet Babin reports.

So far, more than 40,000 people have used hotlines set up by BP to offer suggestions and ideas for stopping the oil spill and cleaning things up. But a lot of regular folks feel like they aren't getting through to BP. And some are going to local governments to see if they can get anyone to pay attention. Adriene Hill reports.

General Stanley McChrystal is out. General David Petraeus is in charge of U.S. operations in Afghanistan thanks to a report in Rolling Stone, where McChrystal shot off his mouth about the administration. The story was everywhere. Even though the magazine doesn't hit newsstands until later in the week. Alisa Roth reports.

In Toronto, the G-8 and G-20 will be meeting to discuss the global economic recovery and among other items. Conservative commentator David Frum is less interested in what's on the agenda than the fact that there is an agenda.

In the U.S., some people get angry over what they see as government interference. But imagine the government telling you how many kids you can have and when. Well, if you lived in China, you wouldn't have to imagine. But in Northern China, an experiment for the past 15 years has allowed parents to have two children. Scott Tong reports.