First there was one report of an unruly town-hall meeting this week, then another—and another. Over the past week, people on both sides of the "ObamaCare" debate have shown up to community meetings in Missouri, Florida, Texas, and Michigan with their fists raised, as members of Congress have been yelled down, hanged in effigy, and taunted. Raucous demonstrations have led to actual fistfights, too, as well as arrests and hospitalizations. Opponents of the health-care bill have undoubtedly been projecting their voices above the rest, as conservative groups encourage the use of disruptive tactics. “Become a part of the mob!” read Sean Hannity's Web site on Friday. Some opponents, including Rush Limbaugh, have even compared the Obama administration to the Nazis and the health-care logo to a swastika to rile the crowds. (The Anti-Defamation League has protested these efforts.) On Thursday, White House officials passed along tips to lawmakers about avoiding disastrous public forums. “If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard,” Jim Messina, the deputy White House chief of staff, reportedly said. But as of Sunday, there was no end to the chaos in sight.

A tourist helicopter carrying six collided with a small aircraft over the Hudson River near New York City on Saturday afternoon. Despite emergency crews rushing to the scene, one person was confirmed deceased, with all nine passengers likely dead. Mayor Bloomberg gave a press conference, saying, "It appears that this was not survivable. This is not going to have a happy ending." The small plane reported engine failure shortly after leaving Teterboro airport and crashed into the helicopter, which was owned by the sightseeing group Liberty Tours, and contained five Italian tourists. One bystander who observed the crash from Hoboken, said, "There was a loud pop, almost like a car backfire...The helicopter dropped like a rock."

It's a big day for Sonia Sotomayor. Obama’s No. 1 draft pick was administered two oaths in an 11 a.m. ceremony: the first among a small group of friends and family; then the judicial oath, which was the first televised ceremony of its kind. Sotomayor is the third woman and first Hispanic to join the Supreme Court. On Wednesday, Obama will host a reception for Sotomayor at the White House and the court will formally inaugurate the 55-year-old New Yorker in a month’s time. But what lies ahead in Sotomayor’s rookie years? “She is going to really disappear into her work, for a year, if not more,” said Dawn Cardi, a lawyer in New York and a close friend of Sotomayor’s. The justices are rarely seen because hearings aren’t televised (a notion Sotomayor is open to amending), so the judge will likely fall off the radar after her first case Sept. 9, which will reevaluate campaign-finance reform. Studies show that a justice’s decisions in the first term are not accurate forecasts of their career-long jurisprudence. For new justices, who are given very little guidance from the surrounding eight chambers on learning the High Court ropes, this news likely comes as a relief. Said Stephen R. McAllister, who was one of Justice Clarence Thomas’s clerks: “You’re a justice now; you figure out how to do it.”

A Taliban spokesman denied reports that the organization's leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed last week by a U.S. predator drone. Mehsud's deputy and a spokesman called the Associated Press to say Mehsud is alive and that the reports are meant to destroy the Taliban's morale. Though on Sunday, the aide said Mehsud is "gravely ill" for reasons unrelated to the drone attack, suggesting the Taliban is preparing to announce his death. Another Mehsud aide confirmed his death on Wednesday, so an internal power struggle is behind the conflicting reports. Interior Minister Rahman Malik said authorities heard word of a fight during a meeting led by two of the Taliban’s most powerful commanders, one of whom would replace Mehsud if he was killed. Reports of the meeting are unable to be verified, as it took place in an area off-limits to journalists.

After months of constant criticism from left and right alike, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke might finally be winning over some critics. "What if in the end they got it right?" David Leonhardt asks in The New York Times on Saturday, pointing to better-than-expected unemployment numbers, a surging stock market, and improving credit markets as evidence of a possible policy success. While much could still go wrong, the officials who have confronted the crisis recently scored some praise for their efforts from top economists, including Nouriel Roubini, the famously pessimistic economist who predicted the crisis. “Bernanke, Obama, Geithner, and Summers were intelligent enough to know that the right-wing crowd was crazy to say, ‘Let the banks go bankrupt,’ and confident enough to ignore the left-wing ‘Nationalize the banks’ crowd,” economist Robert Barbera, who has criticized the Fed for not seeing the crisis coming, told the Times. “I give them very high marks.”

Republicans may not have a health-care plan to compete with President Obama's, but some critics of the administration seem to have come up with their own imaginary version of Congress' proposals that operates in a parallel universe to our own. Obama used his radio address on Saturday to take on some of the most egregious myths about the proposed health-care reforms, including a false but widely circulated rumor cited by Sarah Palin this week that claims senior citizens would be pressured into killing themselves under Obama's reform plan. "Let me explain what reform will mean for you. And let me start by dispelling the outlandish rumors that reform will promote euthanasia, cut Medicaid or bring about a government takeover of health care," Obama said. "That's simply not true." The president said the attacks were part of a plan to derail "the best chance of reform we have ever had" by "the defenders of the status quo and political point-scorers in Washington."

The world's online community was crippled this week by cyberattacks that temporarily brought down Twitter and slowed popular site Facebook and LiveJournal. But if that wasn't enough to make you contemplate the fragility of our great Internet civilization, consider this: The successful assault on some of the Web's most trafficked institutions was apparently aimed at just one obscure blogger in Europe. The blogger, a professor and refugee from the Abkhazia region of Georgia, writes under the pen name Cyxymu. His posts describing the conflict between Georgia and Russia that took place last summer drew the ire of tech-savvy critics, who, as one security expert put it, performed "the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” with a string of nasty tools.

Soon, Michael Jackson fans will be able to buy official mementos—including calendars, posters, and maybe even stuffed animals that play Jackson songs—honoring the late King of Pop, after a Los Angeles judge approved various merchandise deals this week. The judge also agreed that Jackson's estate could sell songs and videos via iTunes of Jermaine Jackson performing "Smile" at Jackson's public memorial. On Monday, the court will consider the possibility of a film featuring Jackson's final rehearsals. Columbia Pictures has agreed to pay $60 million for the rights to the footage. The judge will also be considering a deal for worldwide distribution rights of Jackson-themed trading cards, lighters, and yes, musical stuffed animals.

In her first communication since officially resigning as Alaska's governor (and just days after telling the media to quit "makin' things up"), Sarah Palin stated Friday on her Facebook page that health-care reform, or what Palin calls Obama's "death panel," may kill her infant son, Trig. “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil,” Palin writes. Palin’s spokeswoman pointed to page 425 of the House Democrats’ bill when asked what Palin was referring to, which contains a section that refers to “advance-care planning consultation” for seniors, which includes voluntary discussions of living wills, power of attorney, or the decision to reject “extraordinary measures of life support.” The proposal, which has nothing to do with euthanasia, has been widely circulated by conservative critics of the administration as part of a false rumor that a health-care overhaul would pressure senior citizens into killing themselves. As for Palin's description of mandatory Sparta-style murder of Down syndrome babies, the paranoid vision doesn't match up with any component of any health-care plan being discussed.

As mass trials of protesters resume in Iran Saturday morning, the international community has its eye on one defendant in particular, an Iranian named Hossein Rassam, who happens to be the British Embassy's chief political analyst. Rassam is charged with spying and inciting unrest over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection in June. While nine British Embassy workers were arrested, Rassam was the only one charged. "This is completely unacceptable and directly contradicts assurances we had been given repeatedly by senior Iranian officials," said a British Foreign Office spokeswoman. "We deplore these trials and the so-called confessions of prisoners who have been denied their basic human rights." Britain also refutes Tehran's accusations that Foreign Office staff helped to instigate mass demonstrations. Iran, meanwhile, has repeatedly accused the U.S. and U.K. of stoking the protests.

The White House is asking the Supreme Court to block the detainee abuse photos that President Obama sought to suppress from public view in a high-profile reversal in May. The Justice Department filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking them to overturn a lower court's decision requiring the government to disclose the photos, which are being sought by the American Civil Liberties Union through the Freedom of Information Act. "The government need not disclose records causing danger to human life and safety," the Department of Justice complaint read. The filing says the photos show "soldiers pointing pistols or rifles at the heads of hooded or handcuffed detainees," while one shows a soldier who is acting "as if" he is violating a prisoner with a broom handle. Obama said in May that the photos would endanger troops by inflaming anti-American sentiment. Critics accused him of abandoning his stated goal of bringing transparency to the White House.

According to an official in Jakarta and local media, Indonesian police have killed top terrorist suspect Noordin Mohamed Top after storming his hideout in Central Java and staging a 17-hour siege. Malaysian-born Noordin is suspected to have planned the Bali bombings of 2002, as well as the attacks on two Jakarta hotels last month that killed nine people and injured many others. The anti-terror operation followed the arrest on Friday of several suspected militants loyal to Noordin, police have said. While bodies have been seen being removed from the hideout, they've not yet officially confirmed that Noordin was one of those killed. The apparent death of Noordin, who had ties to al Qaeda, comes on the heels of reports that Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan's most-wanted terrorist, was killed in a drone attack earlier this week.

Cash for Clunkers worked so well, why not cash for junk? The U.S. and Britain are staging a country-wide intervention in Afghanistan, hoping to detox the war-torn country of its poppy problem. Over the next two months, the administrations plan to spend millions of dollars to encourage Afghan farmers to stop planting opium poppy, "by far the country's most profitable cash crop," The Washington Post reports, and a significant source of Taliban funding and government corruption. "We need a way to get money in [farmers'] hands right away," said a senior U.S. military official. Their plan? To sell wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers for a pittance, offer cheap credit, and pay poppy-farm hands to work on roads and irrigation ditches, all before the planting season begins in early October. The program takes a different approach than the Bush administration's focus on simply destroying the poppy crops, which "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars," according to the Obama administration. Wiping out the crops succeeded only in "alienat[ing] poor farmers" and "driving people into the hands of the Taliban," Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters.

A day after Paula Abdul announced she was leaving American Idol, the show's producers contacted Victoria "Posh" Beckham about filling the judge's spot at next week's Denver auditions. She was downright giddy: "When I got the phone call, I just couldn't believe it," she told Ryan Seacrest on Friday. "I'm still grinning from ear to ear, and I'm going to try hard to pout and not shatter the illusion that I'm a moody cow, but I don't know if I can—I'm just so happy." She wants to maintain Abdul's role as the "really sweet" judge, she says. "I know how it feels to be stood there and be judged and how it can feel when nerves get the better of you." In fact, she's anticipating some nerves of her own sharing the table with legendary curmudgeon Simon Cowell. "He is the only man in the music industry who turned down the Spice Girls and said, 'We would never work,'" she said. "But I have so much respect for him."

The man who opened fire on women in a Pittsburgh gym bought gun accessories from the same web company that sold arms used in two other mass shootings. George Sodini bought a Glock Magloader and Glock Factory Magazine from TGSCOM Inc. The company also sold guns to Seung-Hui Cho, who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, and Steven Kazmierczak, who murdered five students at Northern Illinois University in 2008."This tragedy underscores the need for people to protect themselves and not rely only on police," said the company's president, Eric Thompson, who confirmed the purchases. "There is evil all around and we must be able to handle it."

The sudden death of as-seen-on-TV salesman Billy Mays just got more dramatic. An autopsy report concludes that cocaine use contributed to the heart disease that killed Mays in his sleep in June, officials said Friday. A medical examiner tweaked Mays’ earlier cause of death of heart disease, concluding that "cocaine use caused or contributed to the development of his heart disease, and thereby contributed to his death." Cocaine use can raise blood pressure in the arteries, thicken the left wall of the ventricle, and quicken the development of atherosclerosis in coronary arteries, the medical examiner continued. Mays used the drug in the days before his death, but was not under the influence when he died, the report said.

For the past eight years, Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda has had close ties with Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban’s most dangerous and powerful leader who was reportedly killed earlier this week by a U.S. predator drone. It was Meshud who took in fleeing al Qaeda leaders after the 9/11 attacks, and it was al Qaeda that helped build the Taliban up as a military force, their expertise contributing to the “suicide-bomber-on-demand” operation that Pakistani officials think is connected to 90 percent of suicide and terrorist attacks over the past two years, including the attack that killed Benazir Bhutto. Mehsud’s death may signal the end of that mutually beneficial relationship, as none of his top commanders are prepared or willing to offer comparable protection or funds to al Qaeda. Some of the commanders, such as Maulvi Nasir, have a history of turning on al Qaeda. Nasir killed 250 al Qaeda members and banished several hundred more from his territory in 2007. The Pakistani army may be looking to take advantage of this new vulnerability. Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the Pakistani Army spokesman, said, "If you can knock out the problem's center of gravity, Mehsud, then you may not have to go against the other tribal forces that may fall into line.”

Wonder if they'll still serve those mini pretzels: Congress announced plans Friday to spend $550 million on eight new jets—including two 737s and two Gulfsteam V planes—which will help to accommodate the growing travel demands of congressional officials. While the new fleet will replace "seven aging and more expensive business jets," as the House Appropriations Committee said, the purchases are somewhat ironic: just last year, Congress harshly criticized the use of private jets to fly company members in the weeks after the government bail-out of the banks. Congressional travel has increased ten-fold since 1995, and the new jets will be equipped with cooking galleries and worktables designed to be "an office in the sky."

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the sister of President John F. Kennedy and the founder of the Special Olympics, is in critical condition in a Massachusetts hospital. The 88-year-old is "surrounded by her family at Cape Cod Hospital," the Associated Press reports. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the husband of Shriver's daughter Maria Shriver, is also at her side. Shriver has nineteen grandchildren and is the only woman to have appeared on a U.S. coin during her lifetime. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 for her efforts with the disabled.

Good news: Job losses slowed in July and the unemployment rate dropped for the first time since April 2008, the Labor Department reported Friday. President Obama touted the gains in a press conference Friday, saying the numbers prove his administration "rescued our economy from catastrophe." But the Washington Post had a gloomier take, saying much of the drop in unemployment was the result of people removing themselves from the labor market altogether, or giving up on trying to find work. The jobless rate fell to 9.4 percent in July, from 9.5 percent in June. Payrolls fell by 247,000 in July—following a loss of 443,000 in June. And the news significantly beat analysts’ expectations. They had predicted, on average, that losses would raise to 9.6 percent (some even predicted the number would reach double digits) and that payrolls would drop by 325,000.

Jenny and Mark Sanford just returned from a two-week European vacation, but apparently the family getaway didn't erase memories of Sanford's earlier jaunts to Argentina. The first lady of South Carolina announced Friday that she and her four children are vacating the governor’s mansion, Politico reports. “I have decided to move back to our home in Charleston with our sons for the upcoming school year,” Sanford said. “From there, we will work to continue the process of healing our family.” Sanford stressed, as she has in the past, that she and the governor are not getting a divorce and asked that the media “allow us to go on with our lives in peace.” She played a crucial role in minimizing political damage for her husband after his affair with an Argentinean woman became public. She helped quiet state legislature rivals who called for Sanford’s resignation.