Stock Market News: Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT)

Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) disclosed that it agreed to sell its Diners Club North America credit card business to Canada’s BMO Financial Group as it discards unwanted assets and focuses on its main units. This agreement gives BMO exclusive rights to issue Diners Club cards in the United States and Canada. It will also more than double the company’s corporate card business, as many business travelers use Diners Club cards. -Forbes

Publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News may pull some of their stories from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) news site, a move that would emulate News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch. News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS) is considering blocking Google’s search engine from displaying its news articles and is talking to Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) about displaying stories on its Bing site. -Bloomberg

U.S. home prices rose for the second straight quarter, according to S&P/Case-Shiller data released today. Compared to the third-quarter of 2008, however, house prices remain down, with the national home price index dropping 8.9%. But this is better than the 19% annual slump recorded in the first quarter as well as the 14.7% slump in the second quarter. Compared to the second quarter, U.S. house prices rose 3.1%. "We have seen broad improvement in home prices for most of the past six months," says David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s, in a statement. –MarketWatch

Kuwait could follow Saudi Arabia and switch its benchmark for pricing oil sold to U.S. customers to the Argus Sour Crude Index from Platt’s West Texas Intermediate, officials said. "Kuwait could look at it definitely because we don’t think the pricing peg today to the [West Texas Intermediate] is really representative of the market," a senior Kuwaiti oil official told Zawya Dow Jones. Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has dropped the WTI benchmark, which is based on a formula tied to light, sweet crude futures traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange. –The Wall Street Journal