Sheriff's response time is longer in unincorporated areas, audit finds

It took Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies a minute longer to respond to emergency calls from unincorporated parts of the county than from cities that contract with the department for police services, according to a county audit.

The finding comes days after Supervisor Gloria Molina accused Sheriff Lee Baca of "stealing" police resources from residents in unincorporated neighborhoods and threatened to hire "independent private patrol cars" to backfill cuts in sheriff's patrols. She has accused Baca of providing better service to contract cities than to unincorporated areas.

According to the audit, which examined the last fiscal year, it took deputies, on average, 4.8 minutes to respond to emergency calls in contract cities compared with 5.8 minutes in unincorporated areas.

Sheriff's officials said the extra minute was because neighborhoods in unincorporated areas are more spread out and have more difficult road conditions.

The audit also found that Baca provided 91% of promised patrol hours to unincorporated areas, compared with 99% for cities and agencies that buy his services. Sheriff's officials blamed the difference on deep budget cuts imposed by the board that caused the department to leave dozens of deputy positions unfilled.

Adjusted for those cuts, the department was much closer to its goal — averaging 98.5% fulfillment of its pledged patrol hours, according to the audit.

The findings by the county's auditor-controller are expected to add more fuel to the ongoing debate between the sheriff and the board about whether the sheriff is shortchanging county residents who live outside city borders.

Baca and his predecessors have long wrangled with supervisors over funding and patrol resources.

Although the board sets the sheriff's budget, Baca, an elected official, has wide discretion on how to spend it. The Sheriff's Department polices about three-fourths of the county. Along with the unincorporated areas, Baca's deputies patrol more than 40 cities within the county that don't have their own police forces. The patrol obligations for those cities are set in contracts with the department, so county budget cuts are more likely to affect unincorporated areas.

On Tuesday, the board is expected to discuss Molina's idea to empower unincorporated neighborhoods to negotiate police contracts with the Sheriff's Department or some other agency — the same way incorporated cities do.

According to the audit, it costs the sheriff about $552 million to provide police services for contract cities and agencies, but the department gets approximately $371 million back. The auditor-controller suggested pursuing changes in state law or board policy to allow the sheriff to recoup more.

State law prohibits sheriffs from billing contract cities for non-patrol services provided countywide. So the department has provided a broad range of services — such as homicide and narcotics detectives, bomb squads and the county crime lab — at no extra charge.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said those rigid agreements — with contract cities, the county's courts, community colleges and public transit lines — limited where the sheriff could slash in the face of county budget woes.

The board has cut the sheriff's budget — now at $2.8 billion — by $128 million in 2010, $96 million in 2011 and $140 million last year, according to Whitmore.

The sheriff has already reassigned about two dozen gang enforcement deputies to patrol in unincorporated areas and has identified more than 90 other deputies to do the same, Whitmore said.

Molina's spokeswoman declined to suggest other areas where sheriff's officials should slash in light of funding cuts from the board but said that services to unincorporated areas should not be one of them.

"We respectfully request they go back to the drawing board," spokeswoman Roxane Márquez said.

robert.faturechi@latimes.com

Read More..

How Science Invented a Remarkable New Harder-Than-Diamond Nanomaterial

How do you design industrial tools that can top the most heavy-duty diamond-tipped devices? Easy: you create a new material that’s even harder than diamond.

Yes, it’s an oft-misstated “fact”: Diamond is the hardest material in the world. That title has been contested for some time now, and a paper published this month in Nature offers yet another contender.

“Ultrahard nanotwinned cubic boron nitride,” describes how researchers from the University of Chicago, the University of New Mexico, Yanshan University, Jilin University, and Hebei University of Technology compressed a form of boron nitride particles to an ultrahard version.

The transparent nuggets that resulted rivaled — and even exceeded — diamond in their hardness, according to tests run by the researchers. With a Vickers score of 108 GPa, it surpasses synthetic diamond (100 GPa) and more than doubles the hardness of commercial forms of cubic boron nitride.

The secret is in the nanostructure. Yongjun Tian and the other researchers started with onion-like boron nitride particles shaped a bit like a flaky rose — or, as Tian describes them, like Matryoshka dolls. When they compressed them at 1,800 Celsius and 15 GPa (around 68,000 times the pressure in a car tire), the crystals reorganized and formed in a nanotwinned structure.

In a nanotwinned crystalline structure, neighboring atoms share a boundary, the way neighboring apartments do. And like some apartments, the twins mirror each other. Typically, to make a substance harder, scientists decrease the size of the grains, which makes it harder for anything to puncture it — small grains equals less space between them for any point to enter. But the process hit a wall: in anything smaller than about 10 nm, inherent defects or distortions are nearly as big as the grains themselves, and thus weakens the structure.

But the nanotwinning also makes substances harder to puncture, and in the case of boron nitride, maintained that characteristic strength at sizes averaging about 4 nm, explains Tian. And as a bonus, the cubic boron nitride was stable at high temperatures as well.

“In our nanotwinned cBN, the excellent thermal stability and chemical inertness are maintained with hardness competitive to or even more than diamond, making it the most desirable tool material for industry,” says Tian.

He anticipates that, with further research, the product will be comparable in price to the softer, commercial forms of cubic boron nitride that are currently available. Probable uses include machining, grinding, drilling and cutting tools, as well as scientific instrumentation.

Of course, the problem is, to accurately measure the hardness of a material, scientists take an even harder substance, shape it into a pyramid, and see how much pressure is required to drive that pyramid into the material. That doesn’t work unless you have something you’re sure is harder, so the Vickers number for Tian’s cubic boron nitride is not necessarily the final word on the measurement, notes crystallographer Natalia Dubrovinskaia in Scientific American.

Read More..

Philadelphia opera co.: New name, new vision

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The Opera Company of Philadelphia is getting a name change that officials say is in better harmony with its move toward more innovative programming and greater diversity in its repertoire.

The company said Tuesday it will now be known simply as Opera Philadelphia. The new name and logo will appear on all of its brochures and ads.

The announcement was made in conjunction with the unveiling of the 2013-2014 season.

The company plans to continue bringing opera to new audiences with surprise “pop-up” concerts in famous Philadelphia locations. Past performances at a downtown Macy’s and the Reading Terminal Market have received millions of views on YouTube.

Opera Philadelphia says it has five new operas in development and aims to present challenging contemporary works along with classics like “Carmen” and “La Boheme.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: Philadelphia opera co.: New name, new vision
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/philadelphia-opera-co-new-name-new-vision/
Link To Post : Philadelphia opera co.: New name, new vision
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Well: Celery Recipes for Health

For many people, celery is best used as a garnish, part of a snack tray or perhaps to stir a Bloody Mary. But to Martha Rose Shulman, the Recipes for Health columnist, celery can be a main course. She writes:

I’m a big fan of celery, both raw and cooked, as the main ingredient or as one of several featured ingredients in a dish. You can do the traditional thing with raw celery and dice it up and add it to a potato, tuna or egg salad, or you can make a celery salad, slicing the branches as thin as you can get them and tossing them with herbs, radishes, oil and vinegar, and blue cheese. If you are cooking with celery, don’t stop at one branch when you make soup. The celery contributes a wonderful herbal flavor dimension. It retains its texture for a long time when you cook it, so I used it as the main vegetable in a risotto and loved the way it stood up to the creamy rice.

Here are five ways to move celery off the snack tray and on to center plate.

Lentil, Celery and Tomato Minestrone: With extra celery, traditional minestrone soup takes on a whole new layer of flavor.

---

Pan-Cooked Celery With Tomatoes and Parsley: A way to serve celery as a side dish, or as a topping for grains or pasta.

---

Celery and Radish Salad With Gorgonzola: Use the delicate hearts of celery for this light and delicious salad.

---

Celery Risotto With Dandelion Greens or Kale: Celery contrasts nicely with the rice in this aromatic risotto.

---

Puréed Broccoli and Celery Soup: A broccoli soup with an added dimension of flavor.

---

Read More..

Appeals Court Suspends Peugeot's Job-Cut Plan

PARIS — PSA Peugeot Citroën, the struggling French automaker, has been ordered by an appeals court to temporarily halt carrying out its plan to shed workers in France. But the company said the ruling would not affect its overhaul in the long run.

Lionel Bonaventure/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Striking workers at the P.S.A. Peugeot Citroën plant in Aulnay-sous-Bois, France, on Monday.

The Paris Court of Appeals partially overturned a September decision by a lower tribunal, agreeing with a union complaint that Peugeot had failed to adequately discuss its revamping plans with workers at Faurecia Intérieurs Industries, an auto parts maker in which it owns a majority stake.

The appeals court reached the decision Monday, but did not make it public until Tuesday.

The appeals court held that Faurecia — which is also seeking to cut jobs — must formally consult with its workers before Peugeot can begin putting its own plan into effect. Faurecia said Tuesday that it would begin the consultation process “without delay.”

A Peugeot spokesman, Pierre-Olivier Salmon, said the decision would have little practical effect on the company's plans because “we’re only in the negotiation phase now, anyway.” The appeals court left untouched the tribunal’s dismissal of the union’s request to overturn Peugeot’s restructuring plan.

Peugeot is battling to regain its footing in a European auto market that shrank by more than 8 percent last year. It is particularly vulnerable to the slump because it does not have a large presence in high-profit luxury vehicles and is dependent on the European market, including southern European countries that have been badly dented by the sovereign debt crisis.

The company said last year that it would close its plant in Aulnay-sous-Bois, near Paris, and was aiming to cut 8,000 jobs of the roughly 97,000 people it employs in France. Peugeot said it hoped to achieve the staff cuts mainly by offering early retirement and buyouts. It has also said it will not replace some other departing workers as it seeks to reduce its total French work force by around 11,200 jobs by mid-2014. Strikes and other industrial actions have become common, with union employees on Monday interrupting production at the Aulnay facility for a time.

The French company last year sold a 7 percent stake to General Motors, which has its own problems in Europe with its struggling Adam Opel unit. The two companies have formed a loose alliance to cooperate on vehicle projects and logistics.

Peugeot’s legal setback serves to illustrate the difficulty of streamlining operations in France, particularly in an industry that the government views as a strategic priority amid wide concerns for the country’s competitiveness. President François Hollande, a Socialist, has said Peugeot restructuring plan was “not acceptable.”

Monday’s ruling also shows how seriously courts here take companies’ legal obligations to workers. Earlier this month, a court threw out the overhaul plans of Le Crillon, a landmark luxury hotels in Paris, just months before it was to close for a two-year renovation. The hotel’s owner, the tribunal found, had failed to adequately consult with its 360 employees.

Read More..

'Argo' producer scours for the next stranger-than-fiction story

Hunched over a desk in his spartan Westwood apartment, David Klawans squints at his computer monitor and knits his brow in concentration. "I'm perusing," he says.

His eyes dart between headlines almost indecipherable on a Web page displaying about 800 stamp-sized images of newspapers from 90 different countries.

"Two kids running? What's that?" he exclaims before clicking on a photo. "Oh, it's refugees. Whatever. Moving on."

SAG 2013: Winners | Quotes | Photo Booth | Red carpet | Backstage | Best & Worst

Nearly every day, for upward of 10-hour stretches, the independent film producer speed-reads police blogs, articles from RSS feeds and niche-interest journals in dogged pursuit of an elusive prize: a story on which to base his next movie.

His biggest hit to date is "Argo." Before the film landed seven Oscar nominations (including one for best picture) and two Golden Globes (including best drama picture), before it generated more than $180 million in worldwide grosses, "Argo" existed as a declassified story in the quarterly CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, which Klawans happens to have been perusing one day in 1998.

"It's like going on the beach with a metal detector," the self-described news junkie says of his process. "Like Kanye West looks through records to sample on his songs, I'm looking for stories to turn into films."

Klawans, 44, has established himself as Hollywood's least likely movie macher by heeding the advice of his mentor, the old-school producer David Brown ("Jaws," "A Few Good Men"): "Read everything you can get your hands on."

Indefatigable in his quest to root out oddball, overlooked true-life stories, Klawans spins material most others ignore into cinematic gold.

OSCAR WATCH: "ARGO"

"Argo" took nearly 14 years to reach the big screen after Klawans read about CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez's rescue of six American diplomats hiding in Tehran during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Mendez (portrayed in the movie by "Argo's" director, Ben Affleck) posed the group as Canadian filmmakers scouting locations for a science-fiction film, created a fictitious production company and planted articles about the bogus project in Hollywood trade papers.

Throughout the '90s Klawans was scraping by as a production assistant for an L.A.-based Japanese TV commercial firm. He didn't own a car, so he bicycled to UCLA's magazine archive to check the story. In microfiche files, he came across the CIA's planted articles in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety from January 1980. "My jaw dropped," he says.

Problem was, Mendez already had representation at Creative Artists Agency and was preparing to publish a memoir, "The Master of Disguise." Even so, Klawans persuaded Mendez to let him attempt to set up a movie project. He eventually bought the rights to Mendez's life story as well.

OSCARS 2013: Nominations

"I'm cycling to pitch meetings wearing a backpack with a change of clothes. It's summertime and I'm sweating. And I'm getting to know studio security. They call me 'bike boy,'" remembers Klawans, who would switch from bike to business attire outside the studio gates. "I would basically throw my backpack behind a bush — I was embarrassed to look like a messenger guy."

The New York University film school graduate was born in Chicago. His family moved to Belgium when he was 2 and he grew up in Europe and the U.S. consuming a steady diet of sci-fi and fantasy films including "Star Wars."

He came close to setting up the "Argo" project as a cable TV movie. But when that deal fell through, Klawans says, "it hit me that Tony had planted stories in Variety and Hollywood Reporter as a cover. For the CIA, it's all about illusions and perception. I thought, 'That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to plant an "Argo" story in a magazine.'"

The producer had met former L.A. Weekly staff writer and "This American Life" contributor Joshuah Bearman through friends who thought the two shared an appreciation for offbeat material. Bearman also had experience turning a magazine story into a movie; an article he reported for Harper's became the 2007 documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," about two die-hard video game players vying for the world's highest score in the vintage arcade game "Donkey Kong."

Klawans handed over his research and contacts to Bearman and proposed that the journalist write "Argo" as a magazine article that would entice movie backers.

Bearman landed an assignment from Wired magazine, then interviewed everyone he could: Mendez, officials in the State Department with knowledge of the exfiltration and Ken Taylor, the Canadian ambassador to Iran who housed some of the fugitive American diplomats, as well as the six embassy "houseguests."

Read More..

The Power of Paying: What Consumer Hotshots Can Learn From Corporate Drudges

Sometimes these days interoperability seems like a lost cause in the technology world. Twitter has been making life hard for startups that make Twitter clients; Facebook has been making life equally hard for Twitter; and Google is preventing anyone else from adding content to its own social network, Google+.

But even as the aforementioned advertising-driven companies have made life hard for developers, enterprise companies have proven that software interfaces for web interoperability can be reliable and robust – powerful enough, even, to build a company on.

Leading the charge has been Amazon, whose web services and software interfaces, or APIs, have emerged as key startup building blocks. Amazon’s S3 storage service and EC2 virtual server service have been like the polar opposite of the Twitter API: Steady where Twitter has been unpredictable, scalable where Twitter has imposed tight limits, and open ended where Twitter has been closed.

But the biggest and most obvious difference between the constrictive Twitter API and the empowering Amazon API is this: The former is free, while the latter costs money. In other words, paying Amazon up front can actually reduce costs long term compared to a free API like Twitter’s, since there’s less volatility and risk in the API itself. (A fair number of startups who bet big on the Twitter API are now cursing the decision, as Wired has documented previously.)

Amazon is hardly the only example of how it pays to bet on software interfaces with a solid revenue stream behind them. Salesforce.com, for example does brisk business with its paid platform cloud Heroku and with its App Exchange, which sells software that runs on its paid core customer relationship management offering. Even Apple’s iOS app store, while essentially free for developers, illustrates how much money can be made writing for a platform that serves paying customers.

“In the consumer world, API’s are usually driven by companies who also have their own direct-to-consumer offering, and thus there is inherent potential conflict in them leveraging their data and user base versus enabling others,” says Matt Murphy, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who has overseen the venture capital firm’s mobile-focused iFund.

Outside of the consumer world, the case for providing a robust API is more clear-cut. Murphy cited as on example of this Twilio, which offers a paid API to connect applications to phone services like text messages, recorded information lines, and conference calls.

Companies like Twilio that make lots of revenue offering software interfaces have an incentive to maintain and improve those interfaces and to keep those interfaces open and running smoothly. That means building on such interfaces is safer, as a rule.

“You need to be mindful of the competitive dynamics,” says Paul Buchheit, a former Google engineer whose startup FriendFeed built on APIs from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and others. “The simplest question to ask is if the platform is the product, or if it exists mainly to support another product. The Amazon Web Services platform is the product, and so it’s unlikely that Amazon would do anything to harm the platform. However, in the case of Twitter, the platform is just a feature, and so they will do whatever they believe is best for the core Twitter product, even if that means killing the platform.”

“iOS is kind of in the in-between space of platform as product and platform as feature, and the obviously exercise much more control than Amazon does. I’d be very wary of building an iOS app that somehow competes with Apple, for example.”

Of course, paying customers don’t guarantee a software interface is reliable, just nor does a lack thereof mean a software interface is flaky. Google’s App Engine, for example, offers a paid API that has been criticized as unreliable and constrictive.

GitHub, meanwhile, has built an innovative business around the native API of the free, open-source software revision tracker git.

As a general guideline, however, you can safely assume that if you’re not paying money for an API now, there’s a good chance you’ll be paying, somehow, for your usage later.

Read More..

“Zero Dark Thirty” hits the U.K.: did critics zero in on torture scenes?

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Zero Dark Thirty” landed this week in the United Kingdom, where the Kathryn Bigelow drama continued to stir debate over its depiction of the use of torture in the CIA’s decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.

As they have in the U.S., some critics accused the filmmakers of implying that enhanced interrogation techniques could be a useful form of intelligence gathering, while others believed that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were more ambiguous in their portrayal of torture’s efficacy.

Most reviewers were floored by the propulsive storyline, the performance of star Jessica Chastain and the gripping dramatization of the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

In the Evening Standard, David Sexton argues that the film is ambivalent about waterboarding and other brutal methods, noting that a key piece of information is only discovered after interrogators ply a detainee with food and kindness.

“This has proved offensive to those who, to avoid having to accept there may be negative consequences from taking the moral high ground, prefer to believe that torture must always be ineffective as well as wrong,” Sexton writes. “Some of these critics – most notably nitwit Naomi Wolf, who has tastefully compared Bigelow to Leni Riefensthal and dubbed her ‘torture’s handmaiden’ – have claimed the film’s disturbing representation of torture amounts to a blithe commendation of the practice, not really a possible interpretation for those who have actually seen the movie.”

In a four-star review, Sexton went on to hail “Zero Dark Thirty” as “terrifically good” and said the depiction of the raid was a “masterclass in action filmmaking.”

In The Independent, Anthony Quinn praised the film for avoiding simplistic conclusions about America’s controversial interrogation methods.

“The waterboarding, the beatings, the dog collars, all the stuff you’ve heard about is here, and perhaps some you haven’t – the spectacle of a man being forced inside a small wooden box is as harrowing as any,” Quinn writes. “Is this an abhorrent crime? Would the information be impossible to gain by other means? The film isn’t saying either way; it is asking us to make up our own minds.”

Quinn also argued that the film is more effective because it was directed by a woman and that because of her gender, Bigelow has a less “gung-ho” relationship to violence than a Ridley Scott or Michael Mann might bring to the same material (he may not have seen “Point Break”)

Robbie Collins maintains in his review of the film in the Telegraph that Bigelow and Boal leave it to audiences to decide whether torture is right or wrong.

“These scenes are every bit as hellish to watch as they should be, and Bigelow’s genius is to make them feel at once gratuitous and necessary,” Collins writes.

He also praised the film for eschewing jingoism and for having the courage to end on a deflated note.

“Where, then, does Zero Dark Thirty leave us?” Collins asks.

“In the same place it leaves Maya: with our thirst for justice quenched, but our sense of rightness shaken. “Where do you want to go?” a pilot asks her, and she starts shedding tear after tear. This, finally, is what victory looks like, and its likeness to defeat is terrifying.”

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian was more unsettled by the film’s relationship with torture and seemed to wish it had taken a firmer position.

“There is nothing in Zero Dark Thirty comparable to Gavin Hood’s soul-searching 2007 movie, Rendition, in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s CIA agent denounces waterboarding information as valueless; he quotes Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and says torture victims ‘speak upon the rack,/ Where men enforced do speak anything,’” Bradshaw writes. “I can well believe that, but for me the most sinister depiction of torture is non-depiction. Many Hollywood movies about the war on terror have managed to ignore the subject, implying non-existence. Despite its fence-sitting, I prefer Bigelow’s account.”

Bradshaw was also less enamored of the film on an artistic level, writing that “It is well made, with a relentless, dour drumbeat of tension and a great final sequence, but nowhere near as good as the first season of Homeland.”

Empire Magazine’s Kim Newman mostly skirted the political debate surrounding “Zero Dark Thirty,” but was ecstatic about Bigelow’s directing, the film’s pacing and star turns.

“Like Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, it’s a relatively new kind of American patriotic war movie, counterprogramming jaded paranoid fantasies like the Bourne movies or the liberal horror stories (Redacted, Rendition, In The Valley Of Elah, Green Zone etc.) thrown up by the War On Terror,” Newman writes. “It’s measured, seething with suppressed emotion, unafraid of slow stretches and false trails, snapping shut like a mantrap when blood is shed. If it grips in a more intellectual, journalistic manner than its Oscar-winning predecessor, it’s because Chastain’s character is necessarily absent during the climax – though she has a terrific post-traumatic outburst when the case is closed.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

Read More..

U.S. Durable Goods Orders Exceed Estimates

WASHINGTON — Orders for durable goods jumped 4.6 percent in December, while a gauge of future business spending also rose, a sign that corporate worries over tighter fiscal policy at the end of 2012 may not have held back investment plans as much as feared.

The Commerce Department said on Monday that overall durable goods orders jumped 4.6 percent, more than expected.

In addition, nondefense capital goods orders excluding aircraft, a closely watched proxy for investment plans, edged higher 0.2 percent. The government also revised higher its estimate for November.

Analyst estimates for goods orders averaged around 2 percent.

Separately, the National Association of Realtors said contracts to buy previously owned homes in the United States unexpectedly fell in December after three months of gains.

The trade group said its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed last month, dropped 4.3 percent to 101.7.

The drop in contracts, which the Realtors group blamed on the tightening stock of homes, suggested resales could fall again in January after slipping in December.

“The supply limitation appears to be the main factor holding back contract signings in the past month,” said Lawrence Yun, the group’s chief exonomist. “Supplies of homes costing less than $100,000 are tight in much of the country, so first-time buyers have fewer options.”

The NAR expects sales of previously owned homes to increase 9 percent this year after a similar gain in 2012.

Home resale contracts were down in three of the country’s four regions last month. They increased in the Midwest.

Read More..