BP Plc was sued by members of its employee savings plan over losses tied to the company’s plunging stock price amid the oil leak disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP has lost more than half of its market value since the April 20 explosion that caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The fire and blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that was working on a well for London-based BP killed 11 members of its crew.

The lawsuit, for which the workers are seeking class- action, or group, status was filed yesterday in federal court in Chicago.

“Defendants knew or should have known that investment in BP Plc equity was -- and continues to be -- an imprudent investment of the ESP’s assets due to serious mismanagement and improper business practices that resulted in catastrophic incidents of international significance, including, among others, the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico,” the plaintiffs claimed.

Full-time, part-time, occasional and temporary employees are eligible to invest in the employee savings plan, or ESP, according to the lawsuit. Regulatory filings show that the plan held $2.45 billion worth of BP American depositary shares, or 29 percent its $8.27 billion of assets, at the end of 2009, according to the complaint.

A man was convicted Monday of murder as a hate crime during his retrial on charges that he beat an Ecuadorean immigrant with an aluminum baseball bat after mistaking him and his brother for a gay couple.

Jurors deliberated for about seven hours before convicting Keith Phoenix in the death of Jose Sucuzhanay. He also was convicted of attempted assault as a hate crime in the attack on Romel Sucuzhanay.

The trial started about six weeks after the mistrial was declared on May 11 when a juror refused to deliberate.

The brothers were walking home from a bar after a party at a Brooklyn church on Dec. 7, 2008. Romel Sucuzhanay had put his coat around his brother to keep him warm and was helping him walk because he was drunk.

Meanwhile, Hakim Scott, 26 and Phoenix, 30, also leaving a party, pulled up in a sport utility vehicle. They began yelling anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs, according to Assistant District Attorney Josh Hanshaft.

Baton Rouge rapper Torrence "Lil Boosie" Hatch has pleaded not guilty to several charges including first-degree murder.

Hatch appeared Monday before state District Judge Mike Erwin.

Hatch's attorney, Marcus Allen, spoke after the hearing and said Hatch is "absolutely not guilty."

The Advocate reports that Hatch is accused of paying a man to kill 35-year-old Terry Boyd, who was shot to death through a window while inside his home on Oct. 21. Two other Baton Rouge men also face first-degree murder charges in Boyd's death.

President Barack Obama is turning his attention to energy and immigration legislation Tuesday.

He'll meet with a bipartisan group of senators to discuss passing comprehensive energy and climate legislation this year.

The president also will meet with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss the possibility of an overhaul of federal immigration laws — an iffy proposition in this election year.

Obama also will have a working lunch with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

The Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that Philip Morris does not have to pay $100 million in punitive damages to the family of a smoker who sued the tobacco giant over its low-tar cigarettes.

The case, however, is going to another jury to decide just how much the death of Michelle Schwarz from lung cancer in 1999 will cost Philip Morris — and legal experts say it could easily be another big award.

A Multnomah County jury in Portland originally awarded the Schwarz family $150 million in March 2002 before the trial judge reduced it to $100 million.

On Thursday, the Oregon Supreme Court vacated the $100 million award and sent the case back to the trial court to reconsider the punitive damages after ruling the judge failed to properly instruct the jury.

The court said the judge should have told the jury it could not punish Philip Morris directly for harm caused to others besides Schwarz.

But the court also supported the trial judge, who had rejected jury instructions the tobacco company had requested.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday extended gun rights to every state and city in the nation in a ruling involving Chicago's 28-year-old handgun ban.

By a 5-4 vote and splitting along conservative and liberal lines, the nation's highest court extended its landmark 2008 ruling that individual Americans have a constitutional right to own guns to all the cities and states for the first time.

The right to bear arms, under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, previously applied to just federal laws and federal enclaves, like Washington D.C., where the court struck down a similar handgun ban in its 2008 ruling.

Gun rights have been one of the country's most divisive social, political and legal issues. Some 90 million people in the United States have an estimated 200 million guns.

The United States is estimated to have the world's highest civilian gun ownership rate. Gun deaths average about 80 a day, 34 of them homicides, according to U.S. government statistics.

The ruling, issued on the last day of the Supreme Court's term, was a victory for four Chicago-area residents, two gun rights groups and the politically powerful National Rifle Association.

It was a defeat for Chicago, which defended its law as a reasonable exercise of local power to protect public safety. The law and a similar handgun ban in suburban Oak Park, Illinois, were the nation's most restrictive gun control measures.

"We hold that the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the states," Justice Samuel Alito concluded for the court majority in the 45-page ruling.