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Why home sales ditched last month, despite a recent decline in mortgage rates.

Plus, Elon Musk's XAI becomes the latest tech company to gain a foothold in the federal government.

The government is really trying to set up sort of a hunger game scenario among all the big AI companies.

So they're doing deals with all of the best model providers and saying,

here you go, federal workforce.

You pick which ones you want to use.

Whichever one wins, that'll be the one we'll go with moving forward.

And Microsoft disables some cloud services used by Israel's defense ministry.

It's Thursday, September 25th. I'm Alex

O'Sullough for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines

and business stories that move the world today.

The National Association of Realtors said today that sales of existing homes were down 0.2% in August from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4 million.

That was less than the 1.2% decline economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal had forecast.

But the drop comes amid three straight years of dismal home sales. Nicole

Friedman covers the housing market for the journal. Nicole, we recently reported that mortgage rates

had hit their lowest point of the year so far, and yet August sales were still down. What's up with

that? It takes about 30 to 60 days to close a home sale between going under contract and the actual

close of the contract. So the August data, it's a little bit backward looking. It reflects

people putting in offers in June and July. And so it doesn't really capture the low that

mortgage rates hit for the year, which was in early September.

...