More Americans are looking for luxury homes and 'more space': realtor.com senior economist

Realtor.com says searches for million dollar homes surged 7.3% in the last month. George Ratiu, realtor.com Senior Economist, joins Yahoo Finance to discus.

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  • Pro Poker Player Was Bound, Sexually Assaulted, ‘Lit on Fire’ After Motel Meeting

    Susie Zhao, the professional poker player whose charred remains were found in a remote Michigan park in July, was allegedly bound with zip ties and sexually assaulted before she was “lit on fire until she died” after meeting with a convicted sex offender, according to new court documents. Zhao, 33, was last seen around 5:30 p.m. on July 12 by her mother, the White Lake Township Police Department previously told The Daily Beast. The next day, her “badly burned” body was discovered at around 8:05 a.m. in a parking lot near the Pontiac Lake Recreation Area, about an hour outside of Detroit. Last week, Jeffrey Bernard Morris, 60, was charged from his hospital bed with first-degree premeditated murder. Authorities discovered the convicted sex offender allegedly met Zhao in a motel room the night before her body was found. Morris, who is homeless and has a “lengthy criminal history” is currently in jail after being denied bail. A Pro Poker Player Was Found ‘Badly Burned.’ Was She Murdered Over Gambling?“This is not the end of the investigation into Susie’s death but the beginning of the pursuit of justice for her and her family,” White Lake Township Detective Chris Hild said in a press conference. “We can only hope that where we are today brings some level of comfort to the healing process.”In new court documents, first obtained by WXYZ, authorities revealed what occurred the night the pro poker player, known on the circuit as “Susie Q,” went missing. Cell phone records indicate Morris and the rising poker star first met on July 12. In an interview with police the night of his arrest on July 31, Morris admitted to picking up Zhao on Watkins Lake Road before they both checked into the Sherwood Motel at around 9:26 p.m.  Morris told investigators the pair left the motel at some point to buy some alcohol and that Zhao left the motel at around midnight and took everything with her. Cell phone records, however, show the 33-year-old’s phone didn’t leave the motel until around 5 a.m on July 13, according to the court documents. Surveillance footage near the motel and cell phone records also show Morris left the room at around 5 a.m., before driving to a secluded section of the Pontiac Lake Recreation area—where Zhao was found. Court documents say that evidence suggests Morris was at the 3,745-acre park for about seven minutes. When Zhao was found the following morning, she was identified by fingerprints and was bound with zip ties. She had been sexually assaulted with a large object before being "lit on fire until she died,” the court documents state. A spokesperson for the Oakland County Medical Examiner told The Daily Beast that Zhao’s cause of death is currently unknown, pending an autopsy and toxicology results. When authorities pulled Morris over on a warrant in Ypsilanti weeks later, investigators found several hairs and other evidence with possible bloodstains. They also found duffle bags with a fitted bed sheet that appeared to have blood on it and a wooden baseball bat that also appeared to have a bloodstain. The items were taken to Oakland County Crime Lab for testing. Authorities are now scrambling to understand the motive behind the “mysterious death” that occurred just weeks after Zhao moved back to her home state of Michigan from California on June 9. Two childhood friends of Zhao previously told The Daily Beast that the poker player bounced between several cities—including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Florida—both for her job and because she was “a jet-setter.” According to PokerNews.com, Zhao was successful in the professional worker world, garnering several deep runs in the World Series of Poker Main Event—placing 90th in 2012 to earn $73,805. Over the course of her career, Zhao won $224,671, according to the poker database The Hendon Mob. Despite earlier speculation, authorities have said there is no evidence that Zhao’s death was connected to her gambling.“I don’t think there was ever anything else that she wanted to do. She was playing poker from a very young age,” Meredith Rogowski, a childhood friend, told The Daily Beast. “It was not a surprise. She was very bold and did whatever she wanted to do. Whenever we talked about her job, she was very nonchalant. But I do know it was exhausting to be in that world—it was long hours and some of the people she met weren’t always genuine.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Concerns grow over rising COVID-19 infections in Germany

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  • Trump and his aides reportedly think they have Democrats in a 'real pickle' with the COVID-19 aid stalemate

    The Democratic-led House passed a huge COVID-19 aid package in May, the Republican-led Senate began discussing its more modest alternative in July, but after talks between congressional Democrats and the White House negotiating team broke down last Friday, it may well be September before any relief package reaches President Trump's desk. "In fact, we are told it could be weeks before any serious talks resume barring any significant events like Wall Street sell-offs or a run of truly dismal economic data," Ben White reports at Politico."The impasse leaves millions of jobless people without a $600-per-week pandemic bonus jobless benefit that has helped families stay afloat, leaves state and local governments seeking fiscal relief high and dry, and holds back a more than $100 billion school aid package," The Associated Press reports. "Money for other priorities, including the election, may come too late, if at all."House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are all in Washington, though rank-and-file members of Congress have returned to their districts and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, the other key member of Trump's negotiating team, "left Washington this week for an unspecified amount of time," The Washington Post reports.Talks are on hold for now because "Meadows is out for the week but mostly because the administration feels confident they have the upper hand politically," thanks to Trump's less-than-advertised executive orders, Politico's White reports. "One official said the White House feels it has Democrats in a 'real pickle.'" Pelosi and Schumer, meanwhile, "have adopted hardball negotiating tactics as they survey a tactical landscape that favors them," AP reports. "They have given some ground on the overall price tag, but say it's up to Republicans to acknowledge the scope of the crisis." Senate Republicans are sharply divided on whether more relief is even necessary.Schumer, Pelosi, and Mnuchin negotiated four huge COVID-19 relief packages in short order earlier in the pandemic, before Meadows took over as Trump's chief of staff, and Democrats largely blame his participation — and his pushing Trump to sidestep Congress with executive orders — for derailing the talks. "What the president doesn't understand is that Meadows knows how to do one thing — be a Freedom Caucus member," one senior administration official told the Post. "He isn't some consensus-builder or a dealmaker."More stories from theweek.com The case against American truck bloat Ohio drop box restrictions add new front to mail-in voting battle Trump has pretty much eliminated daily intelligence briefings. Biden has already started receiving them.

  • Trump claims he would have beaten George Washington in election while bragging about non-existent poll numbers

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  • Trump has reportedly privately said he intends to replace Mark Esper after November election

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  • France to bolster Mediterranean military presence over Turkish prospecting: Macron

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  • Kamala Harris' selection as VP resonates with Black women

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  • Trump: Biden Is Insulting Men Everywhere by Picking Woman as Running Mate

    If you’re looking for a quintessential example of fragile masculinity, look no further. President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday morning that, in pledging to pick a woman as his running mate, Joe Biden has offended men everywhere.Trump made his comments in a simpering interview with Fox Sports personality and OutKick founder Clay Travis. Travis’ fearsome questioning covered why the president thinks the media is so mean to him, what sports he likes to watch on television, and if he thought Biden had made a mistake doing something so outlandish as to choose a woman as his as-yet-unannounced vice-presidential pick.Asked by Travis who he would pick if he was in Biden’s position, the president replied: “I would be inclined to a different route to the way he’s done. First of all he roped himself into a, you know, certain group of people.” For those unable to crack the president’s mysterious code, Travis explained: “He said he had to pick a woman.”Trump replied: “He said that. Some people would say that men are insulted by that, and some people would say it’s fine. I don’t know.”Trump then completely dismissed the importance of a running mate—before appearing to realize what he was saying, stopping himself, lavishing praise on his right-hand man Mike Pence, and then trashing the importance of Pence’s job yet again.“I will say this, people don’t vote for the vice.... You know, this is history, this isn’t necessarily me, this is history because we have a great vice president,” said Trump. “Mike Pence has been incredible actually. He’s been a great vice president and done a really, really good job in everything I’ve given him—but people don’t vote for the vice president, they really don’t.”Trump went on to say that it wouldn’t affect either his or Biden’s election chances if he had George Washington as his running mate or if he brought Abraham Lincoln “back from the dead.”The president was nominally on the OutKick show to discuss sports, but only really talked about it in relation to Black Lives Matter and the peaceful protests against police brutality against Black people being carried out by players.Inside OutKick, the Right-Wing Sports Site Pushing COVID TrutherismAsked for his thoughts on the NFL reopening soon, Trump responded, “If they don’t stand for the national anthem, I hope they don’t open. But other than that I’d love to see them open and we’re doing everything possible to get them open. They can protest in other ways, they shouldn’t protest our flag or our country.”Trump went on to criticize players taking the knee in the NBA, saying there was a “nastiness” about players’ peaceful protests, but praised the predominantly white National Hockey League, saying its players “respected the mores, they respected what they’re supposed to be doing.”Toward the end of the interview, Travis also asked the president who he considers the better player, Michael Jordan or LeBron James. In what Travis lauded as a “perfect answer,” Trump picked Jordan as “he wasn’t political, so people like him better.”Travis rounded off the hard-hitting interview by wishing Trump “good luck for the rest of [his] term—and maybe the next one too!”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Ghislaine Maxwell complains of unusual guards and special uniform as she requests to be moved from ‘onerous’ New York jail

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  • 1996 Alaska Teen Jessica Baggen Rape-Murder Case Solved Through Genealogical DNA

    On a brisk early morning in May 1996, 17-year-old Jessica Baggen left a party to walk back to her home in the small town of Sitka, Alaska, after celebrating her birthday with friends.When she missed her curfew, her parents gave her a little more time and then finally called police when she didn’t show up. In 1996, teens didn’t carry cellphones or post their every move on social media, so no one knew exactly where she was or with whom she had left her birthday party at her sister’s house.In the hours that followed, her parents pieced together her last steps and search crews combed a bike trail that ran through a woodland between her sister’s house and her parents’ home on Sawmill Creek Road.Two days after she disappeared, authorities finally found her body—brutally raped and fatally strangled.“On May 6 searchers found the shirt Jessica had been wearing when she was last seen alive,” Maj. Dave Hanson, of the Alaska State Troopers, said Tuesday during a Facebook livestream. “Less than two hours later, Jessica’s body was recovered approximately 70 feet off a bike path parallel to Sawmill Creek Road. She had been discarded, and hastily buried under a log beneath the trunk of a hollowed-out tree.”The case shocked the small town of 8,000, where kids felt safe and spent their free time fishing and playing sports. Her obituary, as described in the Anchorage Daily News, told of a teen who loved to cook and listen to Willie Nelson, and had especially loved what they called “Thanksgiving pie-making marathons.” She had plans to attend college in Arizona after graduation and pursue a career in photography.For 24 years, the case remained a cold one. One man falsely confessed to the murder and more than 100 others were cleared through DNA from forensic evidence taken from the crime scene.Then on Tuesday, a week after a 66-year-old man named Steve Branch took his own life after refusing to give a DNA sample to the Lone Oak Sheriff’s Office in Arkansas—which was working on the request of the Alaska Department of Public Safety—police announced they had solved the case.Alaskan officials had recently solved two other murders through genetic genealogy by sending historical forensic DNA coding to Parabon NanoLabs, which then searched online ancestry databases. The research led them to Branch, who lived in Sitka when Baggen disappeared. When he refused to comply with the request for DNA, police left to get a warrant for his arrest. A half hour after the police left his home, Branch shot himself in the head.A week later, police say that Branch’s DNA matches the samples found on the teen’s body. The use of genetic genealogy is not tested in court. The two other Alaska cases that led to arrests have yet to go to trial.The most recent involved 44-year-old Maine man Steven Downs, who was arrested in February 2019 after genetic genealogy tied him to the murder of Sophie Sergie, who was found dead on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus in 1993, according to the Anchorage Daily News. A few months later, in September, 62-year-old Donald McQuade was arrested in Oregon for the murder of an Anchorage teen named Shelley Connolly, whose body was found in a road ditch in 1993.The focus on solving cold cases in Alaska was given a boost in 2018 by the family of another missing teen, Bonnie Craig, whose case was solved in 2016, 17 years after she was raped and murdered. The Craig family started a fund to pump money into the department that investigates cold cases, which has now led to the conclusion of the three recent cases.In the case of Baggen’s killer, after finding Branch’s family tree, they found that he had not only lived in Sitka when she was killed, but had also been investigated for sexual assault that same year. “Investigators established that Branch had lived in Sitka at the time of Jessica’s murder,” Maj. Hanson said Tuesday. “The Cold Case Unit also learned that in March of 1996, only a few weeks prior to Jessica’s murder, the Sitka Police Department had investigated Branch for sexually assaulting another teenage female. He was indicted and arrested for the incident in June of 1996, but was subsequently acquitted after a trial in 1997.”At a press conference in Anchorage on Tuesday, Department of Public Safety Commissioner Amanda Price said Baggen’s unsolved murder “haunted” the department. “While Branch will never face a jury of his peers in this case, we can finally say that Jessica’s case is solved,” she said. “There is no amount of time that can pass that a case can not be a priority for this department.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Poll shows broad support for Trump's coronavirus immigration restrictions, little else

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  • Taiwan says virus aid sent quietly to avoid Beijing protests

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  • Census officials face subpoenas if they refuse interviews

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  • SI Swimsuit model Myla Dalbesio recalls being body-shamed over her size: 'It’s been a long journey'

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  • Trump Whisked Out of Strangest COVID Briefing Yet

    The president was moments into a briefing that before long would become filled with familiar Trump mistakes and hyperbole when the scene was disrupted by something new, unexpected, and imminently concerning: a Secret Service agent who soon whisked the president and his staff from the briefing room. What became clear, only after the president returned to the briefing room later, was that there had been a shooting nearby, one that the president dubbed “an actual shooting,” that he said resulted in someone being taken to the hospital after apparently being shot by the U.S. Secret Service. But, after focusing on the shooting and taking a few questions on it, Trump returned to normal as he went through his coronavirus talking points. He trudged through the briefing as usual, touting vaccine candidates for the coronavirus pandemic, trumpeting his recent executive actions, calling on schools to reopen, and attacking former Vice President Joe Biden, his Democratic rival in the 2020 presidential race “I didn’t even think about not coming back,” Trump told reporters when asked why he came back to the briefing after the worrying scene. He was only able to provide scant details of the incident. “The suspect is now on the way to the hospital,” Trump told reporters. “I can’t tell you the condition of the suspect. There was nobody else injured. There was no other law enforcement injured.” Violent incidents involving the Secret Service are infrequent but not unheard of. An agent shot a Pennsylvania man in May 2016 when the man approached the 17th and E streets NW gate while carrying a .22 caliber gun. An off-duty agent shot a dog in a controversial incident in Brooklyn in January.Efforts to improperly access the White House grounds are more common, and the Secret Service arrested three people for scaling the fence in 2017 alone. Among the more serious incidents in the past decade were the shots fired at the building while then-President Barack Obama was away in November 2011, and a white minivan a woman crashed into the 17th and E streets gate in February 2018.When a reporter asked if Trump was concerned that the incident had come close enough that he had to be removed from the briefing room, he said he didn’t believe anything had been breached.As the president’s briefing continued, the Secret Service tweeted confirmation that “there has been an officer involved shooting at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Ave. Law enforcement officials are on the scene. More information to follow.” Just before 8 p.m. the Secret Service gave an update, tweeting: “A male subject and a USSS officer were both transported to a local hospital. At no time during this incident was the White House complex breached or were any protectees in danger.”It didn’t take long before Trump tried to push the strangeness of the start of the briefing away as he returned to his familiar comforts. He mused about possible sites for his presidential nomination acceptance speech, which he had earlier tweeted were down to “the Great Battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the White House.”  When one reporter asked Trump if he would have called on Obama to resign if he had been president when 160,000 people died as they already have in the United States during the pandemic, Trump answered, “No, I wouldn’t have done that,” before declaring he thought “it’s been amazing what we’ve been able to do.”If the country hadn’t shut down, he said, there could have been 1.5 million to 2 million people “already dead.” Trump added, “We’ve called it right, now we don’t have to close it, we understand the disease,” though the virus continues to kill and spread throughout the United States.“Nobody understood it because nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” Trump said. “The closest thing is in 1917, they say, right, the great pandemic certainly was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War, all the soldiers were sick. That was a terrible situation.”World War II began in 1939, while the pandemic he’s pointing to started in 1918. The president concluded things bizarrely by indulging in the Trump-era equivalent of comfort food, taking a question from One America News Network that allowed him to vent conspiracies about the Obama administration and criticize Susan Rice. The former national security adviser is considered a possible choice to become Biden’s vice presidential nominee. “Frankly, if he chooses her that’s fine,” Trump said before ending one of his strangest briefings yet. “But that’s a potential liability.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Seattle's first Black female police chief announced her resignation after the city council voted to cut the department's budget and ax dozens of jobs

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  • From rival to running mate: What 'fearless fighter' Kamala Harris brings to Joe Biden's ticket

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  • China: No U.S-Taiwan ties under any pretext

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  • What's keeping Washington from a virus deal, explained

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  • Kanye West met with Kushner, eyes election spot

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  • A new study finds Stockholm had the same coronavirus infection rate as London, casting yet more doubt on the herd immunity theory

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    Galileo Russell, HyperChange Founder, joined The Final Round to discuss Tesla announcing a five-for-one stock split and how the company stacks up to its competition.

  • Why Deutsche Bank is bullish on Roku

    On Wednesday, Deutsche Bank initiated coverage of Roku with a buy and $185 price target, noting that Roku is the market leader in the connected TV (CTV) market. Looking ahead, the firm believes ad-supported TV and The Roku Channel are key to Rroku’s business model. The Final Round panel discusses the bullish call.

  • This retail ETF is up over 70% YTD amid COVID-19

    Christian Magoon, CEO of Amplify ETFs, joins Yahoo Finance's Kristin Myers to discuss the growing consumer interest in performing transactions online as many Americans stay at home during the pandemic.

  • Rainey on factoring 2020 election into investments: ‘elections and politicians come and go’

    As a result of the pandemic, many investors expect a continued economic contraction in the short term, and ongoing pain in the intermediate term until a vaccine is widely available. Hennessy Focus Fund Co-Portfolio Manager David Rainey joins The Final Round panel to break down why long-term GDP and corporate profits are at as much of a risk as initially thought.