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Consumer confidence at a five-year high.

Traders came back from the long weekend rested—and ready to buy. The U.S. stock market got off to a flying start on Tuesday thanks to reports that suggest the economy is continuing to power forward. The Case-Shiller housing index showed that between March 2012 and March 2013, housing prices rose an impressive 10.9 percent. And the Conference Board reported that its measure of consumer confidence surged to a five-year high. At midday, the Dow Jones industrial average was up more than 150 points, or about 1 percent.

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Best in seven years.

The S&P/Case-Shiller index is out, and single-family home prices gained 1.1 percent in March, beating the expectation of 1 percent. Year over year, the prices were up 10.9 percent, the largest increase since 2006. The overall gain for the first quarter, 3.9 percent, is much higher than the 2.4 percent of the final quarter of 2012, an indication of the returning strength of the housing market.

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Hits new records.

The upper Midwest got slammed during Memorial Day weekend, as gasoline prices hit new highs. In Minnesota, gas reached a record price of $4.27 a gallon, and in oil-rich North Dakota, prices reached $4.24 a gallon. Refinery outages, low inventories, and high crude-oil prices are seen as the sources for the sticker shock at the pump.

Read it at The Washington Post

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On YouTube.

Get your lists ready: BuzzFeed and CNN are partnering up to create a YouTube news channel that will be unveiled on Tuesday. Named CNN BuzzFeed, the channel will have both archival and current content on CNN that will be shared over social-media networks. BuzzFeed chief operating officer Jon Steinberg told The Wall Street Journal that BuzzFeed will invest a low “eight-digit sum” in the platform. This is the latest—and splashiest—attempt by BuzzFeed to establish itself as a news organization, following the launch of a business section earlier this month.

Read it at The Wall Street Journal

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Royal Caribbean ship was near the Bahamas.

It’s bad news for the cruise industry when a fire aboard a ship doesn’t seem as disastrous as what could have happened. The 2,200 passengers aboard a Royal Caribbean ship that caught fire on Monday are expected to fly back to the U.S. on Tuesday. A fire broke out at about 2:50 a.m. on the Grandeur of the Seas, which had left Baltimore for the Bahamas on Friday for a seven-night trip. Originally headed for CocoCay, Bahamas, the ship instead docked in Freeport, Bahamas, on Monday. It was not immediately clear what caused the fire. Royal Caribbean said all passengers had been accounted for, and they will all receive a full refund and a certificate for a future cruise.

Read it at Associated Press

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Justice Dept. said it had sent notification.

Notification of a subpoena does not seem like something you would easily forget. News Corp., the media conglomerate that owns Fox News, said Monday that it had no record of any notification about a subpoena by the U.S. government to seize the phone records of reporter James Rosen. Lawrence Jacobs, a former worldwide general counsel at News Corp. in 2010, when the subpoena was issued, said he has “no memory” of ever being notified about it. An anonymous law-enforcement official said Monday that News Corp. had been issued a notification of the subpoena, and a News Corp. spokesman said the company is currently looking into the matter. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder admitted last week that Rosen’s email had been searched to find who had leaked him a story about North Korea.

Read it at Reuters

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'Fast & Furious 6' nets $275.5 million globally alone.

Looks like an HBO original movie (Beyond the Candelabra) and a new episode of Mad Men didn’t stop Americans from running to the movies this weekend. The weekend box office brought in a record-breaking $323 million in just three days, toppling 2011’s record of $276 million. In fact, Fast & Furious 6 alone nearly broke that record with a global estimate of $275.5 million, and a domestic holiday estimate of $122.2 million. Despite a slow Wednesday opening, The Hangover III is estimated to bring in $52 million domestically over the four-day weekend. Star Trek: Into Darkness took home $48 million in its second weekend, while kids’ feature Epic brought $44 million.

Read it at Deadline

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With Obamacare on the horizon and a growing shortage of primary-care physicians rising fast, nurses could fill the void. But, ask Daniela Drake, M.D., are they good enough?

When I was 36 weeks pregnant, my nurse practitioner told me I had a urinary tract infection and prescribed an antibiotic. I didn’t have symptoms, so I didn’t believe her. But it was Friday at 4:30 and I got the feeling that she was in a hurry. “You increase your risk of miscarriage if you don’t treat,” she said as she dashed off a prescription.At a follow-up appointment three days later, the doctor discovered that this urinary tract infection was not an infection at all, but preeclampsia—a condition that can cause stillbirth and affects the mother’s brain and kidneys.

Sebastian Rich/MPOWERD

Her name is Luci, and she’s a solar-powered lantern. Janine di Giovanni on an innovative new product that could transform the lives of 1.3 billion people living without electricity.

It’s always disappointing to come across phony do-gooders. And it’s easy to scoff at celebrities working in war zones. But there is hope.I spend most of my life in areas of conflict, and I meet all kinds of people aside from the victims of war: thrill seekers, soldiers of fortune, nymphomaniacs disguised as activists. One time I even walked into someone’s bombed-out hotel room in Sarajevo, and there was Joan Baez sitting amid the rubble.And sometimes there are ordinary people who are great people doing remarkable things, and that makes it all worthwhile.

Sascha Schuermann/AFP/Getty, file

Scientists are raising funds on Kickstarter to develop genetically engineered plants that glow in the dark—thus eliminating the need for lightbulbs.

Sick of replacing broken lightbulbs? How about growing a bush instead? A group of scientists and entrepreneurs are working to engineer bioluminescence-laced indoor plants to take the place of traditional lighting.The New York Times reported earlier this month that the small group of hobbyist scientists working on the project took bioluminescence from jellyfish or fireflies and incorporated it into seed DNA so that plants could glow in the dark.