Curt Anderson

ORLANDO, Fla. -- After spending a week in a jail cell by himself, the neighborhood watch volunteer charged with murdering Trayvon Martin stands a good chance of being granted bail Friday, despite the severity of the second-degree murder charge he faces.

SANFORD, Fla. -- The attorney for the family of a black teenager fatally shot by a neighborhood watch captain said Tuesday that the boy was talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone when the confrontation began. She did not hear the shooting.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Emergency officials from Florida to the Carolinas were closely watching Irene Tuesday as the first hurricane to seriously threaten the U.S. in three years churned over energizing tropical waters. The storm has already cut a destructive path through the Caribbean.

Forecasters say the hurricane could grow to a monstrous Category 4 storm with winds of more than 131 mph before it's predicted to come ashore this weekend on the U.S. mainland. The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami expected Irene to reach Category 3 strength on Tuesday, said spokesman Dennis Feltgen.

MIAMI -- After being hammered for a year over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP is going on the offensive with multibillion-dollar lawsuits seeking to shift at least part of the blame to those who owned the ill-fated rig or designed a failed safety device or supplied cement that didn't hold.

Those companies -- Transocean, Cameron International and Halliburton -- each filed lawsuits of their own, and it will now be up to the courts to divvy up fault.

BP, which has rebounded remarkably in the year since the April 20, 2010, disaster, will face an uphill battle in trying to shed the albatross of the Gulf oil spill. The lawsuits filed late Wednesday were likely just opening salvos in what's expected to become lengthy negotiations over assigning responsibility and, more importantly, liability. And experts said the companies in the end will most likely reach deals to divide the responsibility and costs.