Morning Edition

The trial of the former police chief who ignited one of the worst political scandals in China in decades wrapped up Tuesday. Wang Lijun is accused of trying to defect to the United States, and covering up a murder involving the wife of a powerful Communist Party official.

Space shuttle Endeavour begins a kind of farewell tour this week. The shuttle will set off on a cross-country trip to its retirement home, flying from Florida to Los Angeles on the back of a modified jumbo jet.

Along the way, the spaceship will stop off in Houston, home of NASA's Mission Control and, weather permitting, fly over NASA centers and various landmarks in cities that include San Francisco and Sacramento.

There is a new crisis in Mexico. It's not the ongoing drug war or a plunge in the peso: It's eggs.

The recent violence sparked by the film Innocence of Muslims recalls a very different controversy from more than 20 years ago:

When it comes to healing the wounds of its troubled racial past, the United States is still in its "adolescent phase," says novelist Attica Locke. The 2008 presidential election changed everything she had been taught about race, she says — and, as an African-American writer, she felt compelled to write about that new reality. The result is The Cutting Season, a thrilling, century-spanning story of two murders.