Andrew Torgan
CNN Financial News Producer

Sales of previously-owned homes fell in August, snapping a four-month streak of increases.

Existing home sales fell 2.7% last month from July to a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 5.1 million units, but were up 3.4% from a year ago, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Sales had jumped 15.2% in the previous four months.

Lawrence Yun, the NAR's chief economist, said the drop may reflect delays in completing sales due to tough lending standards and new rules for appraisals.

Nationwide sales are up nearly 14% from their bottom in January, but are still down nearly 30% from their peak about four years ago. For the housing market to stabilize, Yun says sales would need to rise to a pace of around 5.5 million to 6 million.

Additionally, the median sales price was $177,700, down 12.5% from $203,200 in the same month last year.

One bright spot in the report: Despite the decrease in sales, the supply of homes on the market fell significantly in August. Total housing inventory fell by 10.8% to 3.62 million existing homes for sale. That's an 8.5-month supply, down from a 9.3-month supply in July.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight to learn more from Randi Kaye about the investigation into the alleged Craigslist murder. Tonight AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

U.S. Department of Justice

The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) in the Department of Justice is responsible for implementing the Department's national strategies in combating computer and intellectual property crimes worldwide.

According to the DOJ's website, the Computer Crime Initiative is a comprehensive program designed to combat electronic penetrations, data thefts, and cyberattacks on critical information systems.

CCIPS prevents, investigates, and prosecutes computer crimes by working with other government agencies, the private sector, academic institutions, and foreign counterparts. Section attorneys work to improve the domestic and international infrastructure-legal, technological, and operational-to pursue network criminals most effectively.

To view a list of other cybercrime investigations and to learn how to report cybercrime go here.

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Mideast Affairs

A Muslim call to prayer can now be accessed any time and anywhere thanks to social media networks such as Facebook and You Tube.

Across the world, Muslims are creating online communities to discuss and promote their religion. At the same time, this open discussion is exposing and highlighting issues and concerns considered taboo within Islam and the cultures in which they live.

Syrian blogger Ammar Abdel Hamid sees Facebook as a niche for the otherwise voiceless. “The internet came and gave an opportunity for activists for new voices for young people, for democracy promoters, for human rights activists' he says.

In the Arab world, gays and lesbians are taking to the internet to mingle with like-minded people and promote tolerance and understanding. This is especially significant because in their culture they are mainly rejected and still referred to in derogatory terms.

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David Gewirtz | BIO
AC360° Contributor
Editor-in-Chief, ZATZ Publishing

President Roosevelt may have had to contend with Hitler and Stalin, not to mention an occasionally naked Churchill (look it up), but at least he didn't have to deal with the blogosphere.

President Obama has no such luck. He's the second President who not only has a fourth estate, but a completely unruly and often full-goose-bozo body of bloggers, just looking for any excuse to increase their "hits" and drive up the pennies they're given for their thoughts from Google's ad revenue service.

This time, trumpets the blogs, the White House has a "secret plan" to "harvest personal data from social networking sites."

First, it's not a plan, and, second, it's not exactly a secret.

It's a publicly available government procurement document, and just for you, I've read all 51 excruciatingly boring pages of the thing.

The White House isn't trying to get at your secrets. Instead, the White House is proactively attempting to comply with the Presidential Records Act (PRA) by interpreting postings to social networking sites - if posted by members of the Executive Office of the President - as possible Presidential records.

This is a good thing.

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Andrew Torgan
CNN Financial News Producer

In these tough times, we’re all cutting back on everything from eating out to taking a vacation. But there’s one thing that millions of us seem to be able to afford: an iPhone.

We spent $1.7 billion dollars on iPhones in just the last three months.

Apple sold 5.2 million iPhones last quarter, including the new 3GS model. That’s more than seven times the number the company sold a year ago.

Sales are so strong that Apple’s having a hard time keeping up with iPhone demand. And even though iPod sales slipped from a year ago, they still topped 10 million players.

Heath care in the spotlight

President Obama holds a prime time press conference at the White House tonight amid his continued push for health care reform legislation.

So what does health care reform mean for you? More than 160 million Americans get their health insurance through work. 14 million Americans buy health insurance on their own. And 49 million Americans have no coverage at all.

How will the health care bills moving through Congress affect these groups? Will it lower premiums? CNNMoney.com has the breakdown.

Stocks churn on Wall Street

Stocks bounced in and out of positive territory this morning as investors took a breather from the recent run-up to sort through earnings reports from the likes of Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Apple.

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Government and private Web sites were recently hit in a cyberattack

Suvro Banerji
AC360° Intern

The United States government faces an increasingly formidable threat: a cyber attack.

The term ‘cyber attack’ is used to define the use of computers and the internet to conduct “warfare,” or attacks, in cyberspace. Cyber-attacks use the global computer network to cross international boundaries with ease. Critical infrastructures such as gas, water and propane lines, power grids and chemical manufacturing systems can be easily accessed from a remote location via cyber space. An enemy could potentially infiltrate these systems and manipulate them without even getting caught. In some cases, they may even cause physical damage.

In the past few weeks, The White House, the Pentagon and State Department joined a roster of large corporations such as the New York Stock Exchange and Yahoo Finance that have been threatened with cyber-attacks since the 4th of July. The Department of Treasury and Federal Trade Commission websites were shut down because of these attacks. The Pentagon and the White House, however, faced little disruption.

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This is a rendering of XCOR Aerospace's Lynx, which would be used to send people on suborbital spaceflights.

Buzz Aldrin
For The Washington Post

On the spring morning in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh set off alone across the Atlantic Ocean, only a handful of explorer-adventurers were capable of even attempting the feat. Many had tried before Lindbergh's successful flight, but all had failed and many lost their lives in the process. Most people then thought transatlantic travel was an impossible dream. But 40 years later, 20,000 people a day were safely flying the same route that the "Lone Eagle" had voyaged. Transatlantic flight had become routine.

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and I began our quarter-million-mile journey through the blackness of space to reach the moon.

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Chris Anderson
Special to CNN

When Christine Varney was confirmed in May as the Obama administration's top antitrust cop, some of her words from last year sent a chill through the Googleplex, the search engine's headquarters in Silicon Valley.

During the waning days of the Bush administration, Varney worried that the government would not do enough about Google: "I think we're going to continually see a problem, potentially, with Google, who I think so far has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising lawfully."

Now she's in a position to do something about it.

Having a legally obtained monopoly is not a crime, but abusing it to gain unfair advantages in other markets can be.

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Without a converter box, satellite service or cable hook-up, analog TVs only deliver static now.

Mary Tuma
For the Houston Chronicle

Without power for 12 days during Hurricane Ike, Houston secretary Donna Clanton relied on her battery-powered TV for news updates, road closings and notices of flooded intersections.

“Actually seeing what was happening made me feel more connected and a little less isolated,” Clanton said.

But portable sets, which played an instrumental role in connecting Houstonians to the outside world during Ike’s lengthy power outages, are now useless, thanks to the digital conversion.

Though Americans were given four extra months to prepare for the nationwide switch from analog to digital signals, the conversion date last week coincided with the advent of this year’s hurricane season, creating challenges for those like Clanton, who depend on battery-operated sets during emergencies

Because digital converter boxes are plugged into the wall, on-the-go analog TV sets won’t function during a blackout. The audio from analog TV broadcasts received on radios are now tuned out, as well.

In September, former Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin warned of a possible shortage of battery-operated digital TV equipment and called on groups such as the Consumer Electronic Association to encourage their availability.

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