NPR News

She might be called "Chemical Carol." Carol Anne Bond, a 41-year-old Pennsylvania woman, tried to poison her husband's mistress with chemicals she stole from work. The federal government then charged her with violating U.S. laws enacted to implement a global chemical weapons treaty.

On Tuesday, Bond's case will come before the Supreme Court to test important constitutional questions.

Labor unions and their supporters are planning protests in more than a dozen states this week. These rallies are nominally to support government workers in Wisconsin, who could lose many of their union protections as a result of legislation there. But the movement is going national now because anti-union efforts are cropping up in many states.

And what happens in these statehouses could cripple a labor movement that has been in slow decline.

In Bahrain, the economic cost of a week of demonstrations is rising, with the news that a multimillion-dollar Grand Prix race will not be held next month because of the unrest.

The violence has died down, but there has been no discernible progress on the crown prince's call for a national dialogue between the Sunni-led government and the mostly Shiite protesters.

There are signs the government is willing to offer more reforms than it has implemented in the past.

For decades, high installation costs put solar energy out of most homeowners' reach. Now a California company is offering a way to make solar panels affordable by leasing them. But there's a catch: Consumers won't get to take advantage of the offer unless their home state provides incentives for clean energy.

SolarCity, a four-year-old company, leases solar panels to its customers, so they don't have to shell out a lot of money up front to buy them. Customers often pay less for the leases and their electric bills than they used to pay for their electric bills alone.

Tennessee's state Medicaid program faces hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts in the coming months. The program, known as TennCare, won't pay for overweight patients to get counseling from dietitians, but it will pay for the morbidly obese to lose weight through surgery, such as gastric bypass.

That has led some critics to complain that TennCare won't pay for an ounce of prevention but will pay for a pound of cure.