Hsi-Chang Lin

In 1996, Curtis Flowers, a 39 year-old African American, was accused of murdering four people in Mississippi. He now prepares to go to trial for a sixth time. The previous court appearances resulted in two mistrials and three overturned convictions. The stark racial divide in the small Mississippi community of Winona is making it nearly impossible to build a jury of Flowers’ peers, says Charlie Smith, news editor at The Greenwood Commonwealth, who has been following the trial.

BP has promised to clean up "every drop" of the spill. This is an expensive prospect, which has prompted business analysts to advise investors to sell their BP stock. With the cleanup costs and the possibility of litigation, investors may be betting that BP is going down. However, is the company facing banrkruptcy? The New York Times Wall Street and finance reporter Louise Story reports on Wall Street's reaction to the crisis.

As energy legislation makes its way to Capitol Hill, lawmakers are beginning to hint at how they'll work together. Sen. John Cornyn said that he is ready to work with Democrats to deal with some of our environmental concerns. However, it is unlikely that senators like Cornyn will accept the president's comprehensive energy and climate change legislation.

This week is all about "angst," says Takeaway economics editor Charles Hermann. Politically, it's about "watching the women," says Takeaway Washington correspondent Todd Zwillich. Those are the terms setting the agenda for this week, as we look ahead at news on the economic impact of the oil spill and whether anti-incumbent fever will affect Tuesday's primary elections.

Discount retailing giant Wal-Mart is facing the largest class action lawsuit in American history. Over one million women say that the corporation pays both salaried and hourly female workers less than their male counterparts.

On Wednesday, Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga was moments away from a near perfect game, only to be foiled by a questionable call. Without that call, Galarraga would have been the third pitcher to throw a perfect game in as many weeks. What gives?

It's a big weekend for sports lovers. In basketball, the Lakers and the Celtics head to game two of the NBA finals in Los Angeles. Tennis fans can look forward to watching the showdown between Francesca Schiavone and Samantha Stosur in the women's final at the French Open. And tonight in Chicago, the Blackhawks will face the Flyers in game four of the Stanley Cup Finals. As always, Takeaway sports correspondent Ibrahim Abdul-Matin has everything you need to know.

Don't miss that train, because there might not be another one for a while. Across the country, many state and local governments have been forced to make severe budget cutbacks, impacting the services they provide. Unfortunately for commuters, some of the greatest cuts are being made to transportation budgets.

The Personal Democracy Forum gets under way on Thursday, and many leaders of American politics and social networking will meet to discuss what happens when technology intersects with policy.

Al and Tipper Gore shocked friends and political observers when they announced that they would separate after 40 years of marriage. The couple that weathered some of the harshest marriage conditions including the scrutiny of life in the White House, the grueling demands of congressional and presidential campaigns, and the tragic loss of a child, were considered to be one of the rare stable pairs in American political life.

Yesterday, artist Louise Bourgeois passed away at the age of 98. Although the French-born artist had been developing her craft since at least the early 1930’s, and found some success in the New York City art scene of the 1960’s, fame eluded her until 1982 when she had her first retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. And the international art world took notice of the 70-year-old sculptor, painter, thinker and explorer of the human psyche.

M.I.A., the Sri Lankan born rapper who’s crossover appeal reached critical mass when her single “Paper Planes” was featured in the film “Slumdog Millionaire," was enraged when she read a profile of herself in The New York Times. Lynn Hirschberg wrote the profile that took down the artist, questioning her ties to the Tamil Tigers, saying that she likes truffle-oiled french fries, and writing she hates Lady Gaga. In response, M.I.A. released a song attacking Hirschberg and shared the journalist's personal cell phone number via Twitter. Dave Itzkoff, reporter for The New York Times fills us on in on the story.

Over the past six years, viewers (or perhaps the better term is devotees) of television’s hit mystery show, "LOST," have been patiently perplexed by the same questions as the show’s main characters. While these questions far outnumber answers in this show made famous for its mind bending twists and turns, that hasn’t stopped the legions of faithful to hope for the best when the show wraps in a 2 ½ hour series finale, set to air this Sunday.

The Environmental Protection Agency has given BP 24 hours to find a less toxic chemical dispersant to break up the oil gushing from their ruined pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico. These dispersants are used to break up the crude into droplets that will sink into the water, making them more easily diluted by ocean currents and less likely to threaten shoreline ecoystems or marine life on the surface.

Following last year's debacle where a pair of Washington D.C. socialites snuck in and hobnobbed with Obama's top brass, the Obama White House was on high alert at last night's state dinner for Mexican president, Felipe Calderon and his wife Margarita Zavala. However, the leaders were still having fun, according to Latoya Peterson, editor of the blog Racialicious.

To many political strategists, pundits and observers, the results of yesterday’s primary elections may offer key insights to voter behavior in November’s midterm elections. Did yesterday’s results challenge the popular notion that the 2010 elections will be a correction to the Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate? Or was there even bigger surprises in the form of viable, Tea Party candidate?

Mt. Saint Helens erupted thirty years ago today. For the Takeaway's John Hockenberry, this was the first natural disaster he witnessed and it started his career as a reporter. He remembers back to a time when the idea of an erupting volcano seemed outlandish.

To date, at least 88 lawsuits have been filed seeking compensation from the April 21^st oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The rig explosion killed 11 oil workers and the subsequent oil gusher poses a serious threat to the economy and ecology of the entire coastal region.

Yesterday, a rare piece of positive news came from the BP camp when they announced that engineers were successful in their attempt to siphon off some of the millions of gallons of crude oil still leaking from the Deepwater Horizon well site in the Gulf of Mexico. But, even as they admit that the procedure of threading a four inch diameter tube through the broken pipe is successfully pulling out some of the oil, this isn’t a complete solution to the region's environmental catastrophe

Over the weekend, BP made major headway in containing the flow of oil still leaking from the site of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead, which ruptured back on April 20. Since that day, oil has flowed into the gulf at a rate of at least 210,000 gallons a day, and some argue that the rate may be as high as 3,000,000. (For comparison, a standard gasoline tanker truck holds 9,000 gallons: Imagine a line of 24 tanker trucks pulling up to the Gulf every day, dumping their crude oil, and driving off.)