Yukon’s resource riches spur Whitehorse real-estate records

When the federal government rushed new rules on environmental assessments into law last June, it hoped to speed up the approval of natural resource projects such as mines and pipelines. Now that plan may be backfiring, environmental lawyers say, because the details that policymakers in Ottawa didn’t iron out will likely be fought over in courts across Canada.

Real estate is a tough business. It requires you to be completely client-focused, to think on your feet, and to maintain a large portfolio of properties you may need to show at a moment's notice. It also requires persistence, business-savvy, and lots of, well, chutzpah. These 21 young brokers and agents are the newest hotshots in real estate.

Houston Association of Realtors -- "Houston home shoppers went on a buying spree in May, sending sales volume and pricing through the roof and accounting for the 12th consecutive month of positive sales. Average and median prices broke records while volume of sales reached the highest level since June 2008.

AFP - China has said it will stop publishing its much-watched national property pric

It’s now conventional wisdom that the housing market — once the anchor that sank the American economy — is the ballast that’s keeping it afloat, however tenuously. The Case-Schiller index of home prices, released last week, showed a sixth straight month of year-over-year increases. Rising home prices buttress consumer demand as home prices are the single biggest source of the average consumer’s wealth.

Shishir Nigam submits: The PowerShares Active US Real Estate Fund (PSR) is what you’d call the grandfather of actively-managed ETFs, relative to other funds in the space of course. PSR is the second oldest actively-managed ETF in the US, launched by PowerShares in Nov 2008 after its initial suite of 4 Active ETFs hit the market in April 2008.

Heck of an Afghanistan story from James Risen in the New York Times, who reports that the DOD has discovered vast mineral wealth lurking beneath that nation’s terrain: