President Obama has lifted restrictions on travel and remittances for Cuban-Americans who wish to visit family or send money to their kin in Cuba. The Takeaway talks to Michael Voss, BBC correspondent in Havana and Joshua Johnson a reporter and anchor with WLRN, Miami Herald News, who has been covering the story from South Florida.

Ken Salazar always wore his signature Stetson hat, but the sheriff's badge is new. When he was handed the reins of President Obama's Interior Department, he discovered that the department had been operating like a frontier town with oil and gas leases sparking a modern-day gold rush, rather than a law-abiding governmental body. So Salazar pinned on the badge and is going about reinstating law and order. In Rolling Stone, Contributing Editor Tim Dickinson paints a portrait of the Interior Department under President Bush as an environment of "cronyism", "corruption", and "pervasive scandals" that will have a lasting effect on the environment and America's pocketbook. He joins The Takeaway to talk Wild West politics, the legacy of the Bush Interior Department, and whether Salazar looks good in a sheriff's badge.

An excerpt of Tim Dickinson's article, Obama's sheriff is available on Rolling Stone's website.

Former Maine Senator George Mitchell was appointed by President Obama to serve as Special Envoy for Middle East Peace in January. Since then he’s visited Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Filling his dance card with the rest of the Arab world, he’s now traveling in the North African countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. But the role of these countries in the Middle East peace process is not well known. I. William Zartman, Professor Emeritus at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, joins The Takeaway with some history and an analysis.

Fore more information on George Mitchell's upcoming visit to the Middle East, watch the video below.

After the five-day standoff with Somali pirates ended at dusk on Sunday, and the ship’s captain Richard Phillips was released, the nation breathed a sigh of relief. But that relief was felt with even more fervor in the town of Underhill, Vermont where Captain Phillips lives with his wife and children. Steve Zind, editor and reporter for Vermont Public Radio spoke with residents who felt like they knew Captain Phillips, even if they had never met him. He joins The Takeaway to talk about community reactions to the captain’s capture and release.

"Hacker Spaces" are physical spaces for ordinary people to play with electronics. But they're also helping to create the technology we'll see in our households years from now. Takeaway producer Jim Colgan checked in on a “hacker space” in Brooklyn called NYC Resistor, where they were testing a homemade 3D printer that can be mass produced.

Plus: Click here for a Producer's Note from Jim.

As the nation awaits President Obama's speech on the state of the economy, some of the country's largest banks are reporting positive earnings. Both Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs reported even larger than expected first-quarter returns. Is this the hope we've been waiting for as we wait results from the other "too big to fail banks" this week? And what does it mean to be profitable when you owe the nation a multi-billion dollar debt? For some perspective on what this means for the state of banking and the public's perception of banks, The Takeaway is joined by James Surowiecki who writes The Balance Sheet blog and is a business columnist for The New Yorker.

When President Obama gave the order to rescue Captain Richard Phillips who was being held hostage on a lifeboat after bandits seized his boat, the Maersk Alabama, U.S. military snipers jumped into action. Moments later Captain Phillips was freed. But even when there is a standing order to shoot when the right opportunity arises, there are still a lot of decisions that have to be made. For example, what exactly the phrase “right opportunity” means. Our next guests know the challenges of making split second decisions in very special operations. The Takeaway is joined by Bryan Adams, a former Army Sniper, and William Dennis Brown Jr., a former Navy Seal.

For more of The Takeaway's coverage of the Somalian pirates, click here.

A strange thing happened yesterday on web megastore Amazon.com: all the gay-themed literature was suddenly recategorized as "adults only" and was removed from the all-important Amazon rankings. When the blogosphere and the twitterers noticed, the debated over Amazon's actions erupted online. Twitter went crazy. The hashtag #amazonfail quickly rose through the Twitter ranks as a top topic.

The company claims it was only trying to limit access to adult material, and that gay literature was inadvertently swept up in the category changes. So is Amazon anti-gay? Or just clumsy? It's not completely clear what happened, rumors of hacks and customer hate-based tagging abound, but the company is not helping clear the air over exactly what happened although they did apologize for being "ham-fisted".

Baratunde Thurston, better known by some as @baratunde, joins The Takeaway with his thoughts on what happened on Amazon.com.

Today we’re kicking off our series, “The Color of Money,” in an effort to examine how the economic downturn is affecting minorities. We’re starting the conversation with a look at modern day debtors’ prison—a 19th century relic that is alive and well in parts of 21st century America. While imprisonment for debt was officially abolished in the 1800s, for Edwina Nowlin, it is a harsh reality. Her teenage son was kept in prison until she could come up with the funds to pay the court-ordered $104/month fee. When she couldn't pay, she was sent to jail for 30 days. It took a lawsuit by the ACLU of Michigan to get her out.

With unemployment rates higher among African Americans and Hispanics, and the median income about $20,000 lower than it is for whites, these groups run a greater risk of falling into debt and bearing the consequences. Joining us to talk about these penalties and the rise of debtors' prisons is Stephen Bright. He’s the president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights. He also teaches at Yale and Georgetown Law School .

To protest the United Nation Security Council's condemnation of its missile, er...satellite launch, North Korea has withdrawn from six-party talks over the nation's use of nuclear power. Pyongyang has also vowed to start up the nuclear weapons program, er...power plant, it was supposed to be dismantling. We turn now to the BBC's Jonathan Marcus for an overview of of North Korea's actions and the international response.

For more of The Takeaway's coverage of North Korea, click here.