Author: Paul Toscano

Housing has been at the center of US woes for years, but it's also key to recovery. Although April’s Case-Shiller home price index offered a cloudy outlook on home prices, real estate website Zillow  is forecasting that the bottom may be near.

A national holiday for more than 80 countries worldwide, International Workers Day, also known as “May Day,” is a celebration of the global labor movement. Around the turn of the 20th century, the movement saw the establishment of an eight-hour workday and an improvement in workers rights. Around the globe, May Day has traditionally seen organized demonstrations and marches attended by working-class individuals and unions to press for workers’ rights.

It's the ultimate National Basketball Association popularity contest: The annual list of the league's best selling jerseys. While some players remain consistently popular there are always surprises cracking the top 10.

To understand the effect that events have  on global oil markets a key figure to watch is the amount of crude produced daily in each country. With data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a division of the Department of Energy, CNBC.com took a look at the countries that produce the most crude oil on that basis. (Production is defined as extraction from the Earth’s crust, prior to the refining process.)

Recession, Dodd-Frank rules, and criticism from their own shareholders may have slowed the growth of corporate pay in recent years, but according to initial reports on 2011 compensation, the chief executives of publicly traded companies are hardly going wanting.

A day after up to a dozen twisters struck the Dallas metropolitan area, residents are trying to salvage their belongings. The American Red Cross says an early estimate has found 650 damaged or destroyed homes.

With the 2012 MLB season getting under way, the biggest moves in baseball’s off-season were focused on who would own the teams rather than who plays for them.

While shifts in home values are important in any market, a key thing for sellers to know is how long a property can expect to be on the market before being sold. The faster that homes sell, the faster an inventory backlog can be cleared, suggesting heightened demand and an upward trajectory.

As the fiscally troubled nations of Europe struggle with overwhelming debt loads, votes on cost-cutting austerity measures and the implementation of reforms have sparked riots and protests around the continent.

The grass really is greener on the other side of the fence in some places around the country. According to a Census Bureau report, U.S. household income inequality has grown by 18 percent since 1967, although this trend has slowed in recent years.

After serving as CEO of McDonalds for more than seven years, Jim Skinner announced that he would step down from the post on July 1, 2012. Skinner, widely regarded as a no-nonsense CEO, is credited with managing a turnaround of the world’s largest fast-food chain, while significantly growing the company’s stock price in the process.  But where does Skinner stack up against the other Dow CEOs? Find out here.

It's the basic question when investing in a stock: is it on the way up or will it go down? To answer this question,  Wall Street has developed numerous ways of attempting to predict what will happen, estimating various attributes tied to stock performance in order to determine what the future holds for a company's valuation.

From the entire S&P 500, which stocks are analysts expecting to have the biggest pops?

As a “super-cell” of tornadoes passed across the U.S. Midwest and South last week, small towns in Southern Indiana, Eastern Kentucky, and Ohio were hit the hardest. Following tornadoes that touched down on Feb. 29 on March 2, The Weather Channel reported that there were 279 tornado warnings issued, with an area of “high risk” spanning across four states.

Apple — darling of retail investors and hedge funds alike— has been creating buzz in the market for years as it continues its meteoric rise. In February,  the company's market capitalization moved above the $500 billion mark.