Your customized news for Sun, Feb 26, 2012

With settlement talks grinding on, the trial of BP over its culpability for the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico looks set to begin Monday in a New Orleans courtroom — and two nearby overflow rooms — packed with lawyers, public relations specialists, reporters and other observers.

Avenue Capital Group founder Marc Lasry and Bruce Grossman, his senior manager of investment, were on a private jet returning to New York from Harrisburg, Pa., in 2005 when they felt the plane's cabin suddenly heat up.

Bank overdraft fees drive me crazy. It's just wasted money. Sure, overdraft protection is a good backup for the times you miscalculate, but sometimes the fees run into the hundreds of dollars a month and are the most burdensome on the people least able to afford them.

TEHRAN — More than two years after massive anti-government protests over a disputed election exposed a rift between Iran's leaders and its urban middle class, their diverging worlds are again set to collide in an upcoming vote for a new parliament.

Let's try to make this as simple as possible. Money comes into the federal government through taxes and bonds. The vast majority of it is then spent on old-people programs, poor-people programs, and defense.

Real-estate experts keep predicting that the McMansion era in the United States is over, now that the housing bubble has burst. Americans, they say, will be more cost-conscious and buy smaller homes. And yet the new homes that were actually sold last year were bigger than ever. So what gives?

Four years ago, Google launched Google Flu Trends, which estimates the prevalence of flu outbreaks based on how many people are searching for things like "fever" or "flu medication." The search metrics have tracked incredibly closely with Center for Disease Control data (as you can see above). And that, Adam Cole reports, has public health researchers thinking they may have a powerful new tool on their hands: