Democrat Kathy Hochul will be representing New York’s 26th congressional district in Congress. The Erie County clerk won in a special election Tuesday defeating Assemblywoman Jane Corwin (R) and businessman Jack Davis, who was running under the banner of the Tea Party. New York's 26th District — formerly represented by Rep. Chris Lee (R), who resigned after a shirtless picture appeared on the Internet — is economically struggling, and has an older electorate than the national average. Democrats have called the election a "referendum" on Paul Ryan's plan to reform Medicare.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday in Brown v. Plata that California's overcrowded prisons violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and ordered the release of 30,000 prisoners. The 5-4 decision was sharply divided. Justice Kennedy, leading for the Majority, described “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets,” used to house suicidal inmates. Justice Scalia, offering a vigorous dissent, called the prisoners who will eventually be released “just 46,000 happy-go-lucky felons fortunate enough to be selected.”

As Greece’s economic stress continues, the  rifts between the eurozone members are deepening. Persistent worries over Greece's looming debt drove down Europe's stock indexes by two percent and the euro dropped nearly one percent against the dollar, and Wall Street too took a hit. Meanwhile, there are doubts over whether the eurozone can resolve this regional debt crisis. Louise Story, Wall Street and finance reporter for The New York Times, charts the growing rift.

Relations between the White House and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remain strained, after a confluence of U.S. policy statements and Israeli response has left the two countries' leaderships at odds on the path towards peace. The diplomatic strife comes mainly from comments the president made in a speech last week saying that land swaps and a general return to pre-1967 borders in the area was the best way forward for Palestinians and Israelis. But what has America's relationship been with these borders for the last 44 years? 

The Morganza Spillway was all over the front pages this weekend. You probably saw a picture of it – the big wall of the levee with its gates open, spewing muddy Mississippi water at thousands of cubic feet per minute. The decision to open those floodgates has diverted the surge of the Mississippi, and probably saved Baton Rouge and New Orleans from flooding. But all that water has to go somewhere, and salvation downriver came at the expense of folks upriver. When the gates were opened, it set into motion a slow moving disaster; one that's arriving in the homes of the Cajun communities in the Atchafalaya Basin. 

New York Police boarded an Air France plane as it waited for takeoff at JFK this Saturday and took French economist Dominique Strauss Kahn into custody. The 62-year-old man was the head of the International Monetary Fund and until Saturday, was considered the likely candidate to challenge Nicholas Sarkozy in France’s 2012 elections. By Sunday, Strauss-Kahn was standing in a Manhattan court, in front of a crowd of tabloid reporters. The incident has caused a "political earthquake" as the IMF — and the French Socialist Party — struggle to replace him.

Within hours of the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed and buried at sea, the Internet lit up with commentary, speculation, and the beginnings of conspiracy theories. The more conspiracy minded wondered: How do we know it wasn't a double? And how do we know that the real Osama is not still alive — or on the other hand, hasn't been dead for years?

James B. Stewart, author of the new book "Tangled Webs: How False Statements are Undermining America from Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff," says that perjury is “threatening to become an epidemic” in American society. Stewart has delved into Freedom of Information Act requests, interview transcripts, investigative notes, secret letters, court documents, and hundreds of emails to give an in-depth look at recent high-profile cases of lying. With a look into the trials of Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, Bernie Madoff, and Barry Bonds, Stewart makes the argument that the practice of lying under oath has breached the highest levels of American society, threatening to unsettle the foundations of our legal system.

It’s been one year since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico. All week, The Takeaway is talking to Gulf Coast residents about how the spill has affected their lives. Today, we check in with Southern writer Rick Bragg, author of "All Over but the Shoutin."

Following a CBS "60 Minutes" report that found factual errors in the best-selling book, "Three Cups of Tea," author Greg Mortenson and his charitable work in Afghanistan and Pakistan have come under fire. In the book, Mortenson writes about stumbling into a tiny village in northeastern Pakistan and coming across a group of schoolchildren doing their lessons with sticks and dirt. It was then, he writes, that he discovered his passion to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But "60 Minutes'" producers found factual errors in the book and suggest that Mortenson's charity may be spending money poorly and exaggerating their accomplishments. Mortenson is denying the allegations.

This is the ninth and final edition of Wave of Change, a special podcast from The Takeaway, covering the mass protests in Egypt and the consequences for the wider Arab world, hosted by John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee.

Egypt's three-week-long anti-government revolt reached a happy denouement today when Hosni Mubarak, the country's autocratic leader of nearly thirty years, stepped down, ceding power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. In today's Wave of Change, we bring you a medley of jubilant voices from Cairo, where after 18 days of protest, people power won over the forces of an oppressive regime.

This is the eighth edition of Wave of Change, a special podcast from The Takeaway, covering the mass protests in Egypt and the consequences for the wider Arab world, hosted by John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee.

This episode was recorded shortly before President Hosni Mubarak announced that he was transferring some of his power to Vice President Omar Suleiman, but refused to step down. While protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square are furious now, before Mubarak spoke, the expected him to step down and were jubilant, thinking Mubarak was about to step down. We take you there with a BBC interview with one of the protesters. Also, a discussion with Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, on how U.S. policy has affected and may continue to affect democracy in the Middle East. Plus, in an excerpt from today's Takeaway, a look at Omar Suleiman with Patrick Lang, retired Army colonel, former head of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, who has known Suleiman for 20 years.

This is the seventh edition of Wave of Change, a special podcast from The Takeaway, covering the mass protests in Egypt and the consequences for the wider Arab world, hosted by John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee.

In this episode, we get the latest from Cairo, where anti-government protesters have been buoyed; a "face in the crowd" interview with protester Ahmed el Gaddar, who, at 30 years old, has lived his entire life under the Mubarak regime; Tarik Yousef, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East," on the disconnect between Egyptian youth and their leaders; and, in an excerpt from this morning's Takeaway, former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim on what lessons Southeast Asia's Muslim democracies can offer Egypt.

This is the sixth edition of Wave of Change, a special podcast from The Takeaway, covering the mass protests in Egypt and the consequences for the wider Arab world, hosted by John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee.

In this episode, we get the latest from the streets of Cairo, where protesters have been reenergized after the broadcast of an interview with Wael Ghonim, a young Google executive credited with stoking the pro-democracy movement on the internet, who was freed after being detained for 12 days; we ask Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, if Wael Ghonim is a revolutionary leader or merely a messenger of the people; and, in an except from today's Takeaway, Human Rights Watch's Daniel Williams gives his own harrowing account of being held for 36 hours in captivity in Cairo.

(Watch Wael Ghanim's interview with Egypt's DreamTV after the jump.)

This is the fifth edition of Wave of Change, a special podcast from The Takeaway, covering the mass protests in Egypt and the consequences for the wider Arab world, hosted by John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee.

In this episode, get up to date on all the events that transpired over the weekend in Egypt; in an exclusive interview, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times takes us inside the generational divide in the Egyptian Army; and, Bush administration deputy national security advisor Elliot Abrams tells us why he thinks George W. Bush's "freedom agenda" was right for the Arab world.

This is the fourth edition of Wave of Change, a special podcast from The Takeaway, covering the mass protests in Egypt and the consequences for the wider Arab world, hosted by John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee.

Maps and cholera outbreaks have been linked since at least 1854, a year when London residents were dying in droves from a serious outbreak of the disease. At that time, no one really understood how cholera spread, or how to stop it. But then a man named John Snow painstakingly mapped the outbreak – by knocking on doors, identifying cases, and marking them down with pencil and paper. His resulting discovery — that the disease was waterborne — saved thousands and thousands of lives. One hundred fifty years later a lot has changed, but in Haiti, Snow's technique is still using mapping technology to fight disease and it's spread.

Many Americans are angry about the sluggish state of the economy. On Tuesday, they went to the polls and took their anger out on elected officials. But the people who have a very large effect on the American economy aren't elected at all. They’re the appointed officials at the Federal Reserve Bank, headed by Ben Bernanke. As if to underscore that point, The Fed announced Wednesday that they’ll buy $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds, in an effort to stimulate economic growth.

The Federal Reserve Bank announced Wednesday that it will once again make a large purchase of Treasury Bonds — $600 billlion worth — as part of a Quantitative Easing to help the struggling economy. The response of many to this news: "Quantitative what?" Louise Story, Wall Street and Finance Reporter for our partner The New York Times, joins the show to break it down.

When future generations look back on this election, the first after President Obama's dramatic victory in 2008, will they see it as a repeat of the 1994 Gingrich Revolution? An unraveling of the Obama agenda? Or a chance for the president to rebrand himself?