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Across the country, homes are beginning to take longer to sell, a sign that the hot real-estate market of the last decades is starting to cool. In the Boston metropolitan area, which has seen a faster appreciation of home values than most of the country, homes prices are not rising as fast they used to. Fred Thys of member station WBUR reports.

As a chemical spill in the Songhua River heads toward Russia's Far East, the nearly 4 million people of Harbin, China, do without running water for a fourth day. The BBC's Louisa Lim tells Scott Simon that Chinese newspapers are criticizing the central government's slow response to the disaster.

Computer entrepreneur Abdelhadi "Hadi" Abushahla faces plenty of challenges to doing business in the Gaza Strip. The roads are cluttered with slow-moving donkey carts, the phones often don't work and permission to enter Israel can be nearly impossible to get.

Ford Motor Co. announces plans to eliminate 25,000 to 30,000 jobs in North America -- more than 20 percent of the workforce. The long-awaited restructuring plan also includes closing 14 plants in the United States, Mexico and Canada over the next six years.

The first nationwide study on day laborers has been completed. Based on 2,660 interviews with workers in 20 states and the District of Columbia, it reveals high levels of abuse towards the workers.

Campaigning for this week's Palestinian parliamentary elections officially ended Monday. Opinion polls show many Palestinians are fed up with the ruling Fatah movement, and the militant Islamist group Hamas is expected to make a strong showing in Wednesday's voting.

Canadians are voting in a national election and are expected to have a new prime minister by Tuesday morning. Polls show that Stephen Harper, head of the Conservative Party, is likely to replace Prime Minister Paul Martin. But it's not clear the Conservatives can win a majority in Parliament.

At a sentencing trial to determine whether he will be executed or sentenced to life in prison, Zacarias Moussaoui takes the stand and testifies that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and crash it into the White House.

Ayesha Rascoe talks with Kinley Salmon, Africa correspondent for The Economist, about the widespread fuel shortages affecting the continent.

CeCe Winans takes pride in having never strayed from the principal message of gospel music: love and reverence. But her new CD, Purified, updates the sound with touches of soul, R&B, and even hip-hop to give her tunes a contemporary feel.