Here's your midday brief for Wednesday, July 23rd.

I'm Alex O'Sullough for the Wall Street Journal.

U.S. home sales in June fell to a nine-month low as home prices hit a record high.

The National Association of Realtors said today that the national median existing home price in June rose to $435,300, a record in data going back to

1999 and a 2% increase from a year earlier. Prices aren't adjusted for inflation. High prices,

along with fizzling spring sales, signal that a housing market recovery is unlikely this year.

News Corp, owner of the journal,

also operates realtor.com, under license from NAR. We're exclusively reporting that an internal

probe at the World Economic Forum found that its founder, Klaus Schwab, engaged in a pattern

of workplace misconduct over the past decade, including unauthorized spending by him and his wife,

bullying behavior, and inappropriate treatment of female staffers. The preliminary findings were

described by people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

Through a spokesman, Schwab broadly rejected the findings. A forum spokesman declined to comment. And the UK's competition

watchdog said it is proposing to impose guardrails around how tech giants Apple and Alphabet's Google run

their mobile ecosystems under a new law governing business conduct for big tech. The CMA said today

that both Apple and Google hold an effective duopoly within the

mobile platform economy. Google's senior director of competition, Oliver Bethel, said in a blog

post that today's announcement is disappointing and unwarranted. Apple also criticized the CMA's

plans, saying asking it to change how its iPhones work could scupper its own security provisions.

Before we go, we made a mistake in an earlier version of this podcast. We said incorrectly that

home sales in June fell to a 10-month low instead of the correct nine-month low.

We'll have more coverage of the day's news on the WSJ's What's News podcast. You can add it to your playlist on your smart speaker or listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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