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There were solid increases in home prices during the month of February across all 20 major cities where that data is tracked, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices report.

"Despite some recent mixed economic reports for March, housing continues to be one of the brighter spots in the economy," economist David Blitzer, who directs the work done by S&P Dow Jones Indices, says in the report.

Some of the data:

— The average home price in the 20 cities rose 9.3 percent from February 2012 to February 2013.

— From January to February alone, prices rose 0.3 percent.

— "Phoenix continued to stand out with an impressive year-over-year return of 23 percent."

— There were also significant year-over-year price increases in Las Vegas (17.6 percent), Atlanta (16.5 percent) and Detroit (15.2 percent).

Bloomberg News says the report is another sign that "the U.S. housing market is strengthening."

When it comes to culinary matters, France, in many minds, is synonymous with fine dining. So it may surprise you to know that, for the first time, sales at fast food chains have overtaken those at traditional restaurants in the country that gave us the word gastronomie.

That's according to an annual survey of consumer spending, traffic and other restaurant data conducted by Gira Conseil, a food consultancy firm. The latest survey, to be released in May, found that fast food chains now account for 54 percent of all restaurant sales in France.

"In previous years, we could see fast food was gaining ground, but this is the first time it has overtaken restaurants where you are served at the table," Julien Janneau of Gira Conseil, told French newspaper Nouvel Observateur.

Consumption at casual eateries serving burgers, sandwiches, pizza and other fast food has increased 14 percent in the last year alone, according to the survey.
While McDonald's has been in France since the 1970s, many industry observers say it wasn't until the turn of this century that outlets for both American and European fast food chains really began proliferating. The fast food market is now so ripe that Subway says it has opened some 400 stores in the past decade, and Burger King, which shut its 39 French restaurants 16 years ago, recently re-entered the market with great success.

"We are the second-biggest consumer of fast food, after the U.S.," Camille Labro, a food blogger for Le Monde, tells The Salt.

The rise of fast food has come as the French have grown lax about their notoriously rigid food culture rules. Frdric Maquair, who co-founded Cojean, a Parisian chain of healthy fast food outlets, in 2001, notes that meals never used to be a solitary activity. "Before, people didn't dare go by themselves to a restaurant, eating alone, reading a magazine," he tells The Salt.

Nowadays, he and others say, the French have come to see fast food as freedom from the rigid gastronomical rules that used to bind them to sitting at a table, with other people, at specific times, for multiple courses.

But there's another, more practical concern encouraging the fast food trend: a shrinking lunch break.

The French lunch hour has collapsed from 80 minutes back in 1975, to just 22 minutes, according to a 2011 study by insurer Malakoff Mederic . That, in turn, has hurt business at traditional cafes, where offerings — like the typical 13 euro ($15) multi-course lunch — are still geared toward leisurely eating habits that are, increasingly, a relic of the past.

The number of cafes in France has dropped from more than 200,000 after World War II to just 32,000 today, according to estimates from Gira Conseil.

"The offer has not changed," says Gira Conseil's Devanne Julien, "but the consumer is different." Cafes, he says, "have not been able to adapt and compete with fast food."

Indeed, adaptation has been a key to fast food's success in France — where offerings tend to be healthier than in other parts of the world. There's less emphasis on fried, and more focus on fresh ingredients and local tastes.

At British chain Pret A Manger, known for its sandwiches, a third of the menu is dedicated to French classics like apple tart and the beloved jambon-buerre, or ham and butter — which might be called the French national sandwich.

And as we've previously reported, McDonald's has risen to the top of the fast food pack in France, with more than 1,200 outlets, precisely by fine-tuning its menu to fit the local culture (think grass-fed beef burgers). The company even opened salad-only cafes, called McSalad, 2011, which managed to win over Le Monde's Labro, a firm fast-food opponent. "The dressing was made with hazelnut and balsamic vinegar," she recalls, "just like I make at home."

But American chains like McDonald's and Subway also attract French fans for the ways in which they depart from local customs — at least when it comes to wait staff, says Labro.

French waiters tend to be "so mean and unserviceable that the American way of doing things in fast food places is almost pleasant, even if the workers aren't happy," says Labro. "I'd rather have an automated experience than a waiter ready to throw food in my face. It's more relaxing."

The signing ceremony looked rather simple, but the celebrations seemed joyous Tuesday in Amsterdam as Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands handed over the crown to her son Willem-Alexander.

He becomes, as we wrote Monday, the first Dutch king since Willem III's death in 1890.

There was orange everywhere in Amsterdam, as this Associated Press video shows. The Dutch royal family line is known as the House of Orange-Nassau.

By abdicating, the 75-year-old Beatrix is following a recent tradition. The BBC notes that "Queen Beatrix's mother Juliana resigned the throne in 1980 on her 71st birthday, and her grandmother Wilhelmina abdicated in 1948 at the age of 68."

The new king just turned 46. According to his official bio, "Willem-Alexander Claus George Ferdinand was born in the University Hospital, Utrecht, on 27 April 1967." The new queen is Mxima, "born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 17 May 1971 as Mxima Zorreguieta."

The royal couple have three daughters: "Their first child, Princess Catharina-Amalia, was born on 7 December 2003. Their second child, Princess Alexia, was born on 26 June 2005, and their third child, Princess Ariane, on 10 April 2007."

Being king does not mean Willem-Alexander can weigh in on affairs of state: "Since 1848, the Constitution has laid down that the monarch is inviolable. This means that the monarch is politically neutral and the ministers are accountable to Parliament for government policy."

In the world of television, there's nothing quite like a soap habit. People watch characters evolve not over the 10 or 15 seasons that might mark a long run in prime time, but over 30 or 40 years, until they have kids and grandkids — sometimes played by the same actors the entire time.

That's what has made the cancellation in recent years of big chunks of the soap lineup so upsetting to people — most recently in 2011, when ABC canceled both All My Children and One Life To Live. As All Things Considered reported over the weekend, both of those shows are making their debut today online at Hulu, a streaming service that will carry both exclusively, with much (but not all) of their casts intact.

The question, of course, is whether anybody is going to watch, and if so, who?

Traditionally, soaps are habit-based. People pop the TV on while they're having lunch, or in the break room, or in the dorm room, and the habit reinforces itself. It's not that soap fans didn't embrace VCRs and DVRs and time-shifting in general, but the original soap model is rhythmic; it's about the show fitting into your day somewhere that's predictable. The model for making money off that habit was relatively simple: viewers tune in, they watch ads, the show gets paid for.

Hulu has ads, too, but there are fewer of them, and they can be packaged differently — when I watched AMC this morning, it offered me one long commercial at the beginning in exchange for seeing the rest of the show without any at all — and they can't be skipped, unlike time-shifted ads on a DVR. At the same time, audiences are expected to be smaller; The New York Times reported yesterday that while these soaps pulled about three million viewers on ABC, they'd break even with about half a million when you combine Hulu, Hulu Plus (a paid service that will offer back episodes as well as new ones) and iTunes.

One big question concerns the fact that soaps on television have traditionally skewed toward older audiences. Back in 1994, one Kaiser Family Foundation study found that viewing was highest in young women (18-29) and older women (50 and over). But Reuters reported that as of the end of All My Children's run on ABC, the median viewer age was 57. Hulu, on the other hand, has a younger viewer base — earlier in April, it was reported to have an average age of 38.

So the challenge for Hulu is presumably in two parts: they need a younger audience (candidly, you can't just let the audience age and age and then die), and they need to keep a base level of the older audience that has sustained these shows always. The opening episode of All My Children on Hulu is fairly transparent on that point — it introduces some younger characters and a high school plot, but also focuses on people who were on when I was a teenager, including Angie and Jesse Hubbard, who became a so-called "supercouple" in the early 1980s and are still making out 30 years later. (And good for them.)

The tension shows at times. On the one hand, soaps can be very traditional and very corny, and on the other, Hulu has apparently opened up the opportunity for not only more explicit sex scenes than I remember from TV soaps, but different language. The way they manage it in the premiere is that the young characters swear and the older characters don't. It makes sense in its way (seeing Adam Chandler say "s—-" would be super weird for me personally), and maybe they think younger viewers won't feel like they're watching their grandma's favorite show if it's a little more salty. But if a traditional soap viewer who's been watching since the 1970s makes her way to Hulu and tunes in on the first day, and the first thing she notices is that now Adam Chandler's son says the s-word, how is that going to go over?

They're in a tough spot here. They can afford to sacrifice a certain chunk of the audience, as they've said, and they're already going to lose anybody who won't seek out online television as well as anybody who specifically liked how relatively clean soaps were.

Undoubtedly, there are older fans who previously had no interest in seeking out streaming television who, with their favorite show available nowhere else, might try out viewing on a tablet or a set-top box for the first time. But it's interesting that at the same time the new Netflix episodes of Arrested Development are representing streaming-only services as a home for content that's understood to have a niche with those who are most plugged in to what pop culture decides is cool, soaps are representing streaming-only services as a home for content that's treated as hopelessly uncool but is beloved anyway.

Previously online-only television has largely been billed as event television (like Arrested Development) or limited-run (like Netflix's House Of Cards). Soaps will make an interesting test of whether the most traditional of TV habits can be translated from broadcast to online.