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Sales of existing homes rose 0.4 percent in January from December and were up 9.1 percent from January 2012, the National Association of Realtors reports.

The trade group also says "a seller's market is developing and home prices continue to rise."

Bloomberg News writes that the news signals the housing sector is "showing more momentum" after enjoying "its best year since 2007."

The NAR's chief economist, Lawrence Yun, says in the group's report that:

"Buyer traffic is continuing to pick up, while seller traffic is holding steady. In fact, buyer traffic is 40 percent above a year ago, so there is plenty of demand but insufficient inventory to improve sales more strongly. We've transitioned into a seller's market in much of the country."

The New York Times Co. will continue shedding assets, this time announcing it is looking to sell The Boston Globe.

The New York Times reports the company said it was looking to sell off the Globe and "other New England properties" to "focus energy and resources on its flagship newspaper."

The Boston Globe reports the Times bought the paper in 1993 for $1.1 billion, "a record in the newspaper business."

The Globe adds:

"The Times Co. last tried to sell the Globe in 2009, after first threatening to shut the newspaper down because it was losing money. After receiving wage cuts and other cost-saving concessions from Globe employees, the Times Co. decided not to sell at that time, because it had received bids lower than it had hoped from two different business groups.

"Since then, the Times Co. has sold a number of its other properties. The Globe and its online businesses BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com turned an operating profit in 2012, according to people involved in the company's results."

Consumer prices were flat in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. But a driving force behind that good news has reversed itself since then. According to BLS, gasoline prices fell 3 percent last month. In February, though, gas prices have risen sharply. So watch for next month's BLS report on consumer prices to tell a different story.

Also this morning, the Employment and Training Administration reports that the number of first-time claims for jobless benefits rose by 20,000 last week, to 362,000. The increase was slightly larger than economists expected.

For the most part, the number of weekly claims has stayed within a range of 350,000 to 400,000 since the fall of 2011. They've been another in a series of signs that the U.S. labor market is only slowly recovering from the 2007-09 recession.

OK, yes: To gay comics fans like me, DC Comics' decision to hire an anti-gay activist like Orson Scott Card to write Superman — an iconic character who exists to represent humanity's noblest ideals of justice and compassion — is deeply dispiriting.

But it doesn't change the fact that today's mainstream superhero comics contain more LGBT characters than ever. Surely this is a good (if, let's agree, weirdly specific) thing. After all, superheroes remain the comics medium's dominant genre, and having the characters who populate that genre more closely resemble those of us who populate the world at large must count as progress.

Northstar. Batwoman. Hulkling. Wiccan. The Green Lantern of Earth-2. Bunker. Midnighter. Apollo. Shatterstar. Daken. Billy the Vampire Slayer. None of them is a household name, yet they're making their way into more and more households as an increasing number of storylines deal matter-of-factly with the sexuality of LGBT heroes. To organizations like GLAAD, which campaign for greater LGBT visibility in pop culture, that's what counts.

But visibility is a first step. And while I'm happy that the superhero genre is finally taking it, it must be noted that creators of manga and independent comics like the ones below have already taken many steps down this road, telling nuanced, compelling and at times discomfiting stories about the varied and complicated LGBT experience.