At least 50 people are dead and thousands evacuated after Tropical Storm Ketsana slammed the Philippines, causing the worst flooding the country has seen in 42 years. The government has declared a state of calamity. A government spokesman said 35 people were killed in a landslide and flash-flooding in one province and said 27 people are missing. At least one town is completely underwater. About 16.7 inches of rain fell on the city of Manila in just 12 hours Saturday. Residents were seen perching on roofs as the flooding swept away houses.

The White House plans to tell Iran this week that it must open up all of its nuclear sites for inspection and hand over notebooks and computers about its suspected plan to build nuclear weapons within the next three months, The New York Times reports. Fresh on the heels of the revelation that Iran was concealing a nascent uranium-enrichment plant, the Obama administration senses it has unprecedented leverage in its negotiations this week in Geneva. Even Iran's ally Russia has rebuked the country following last week's bombshell. On Thursday, the United States will join talks with Iran for the first time in 30 years as a full participant, and the meeting may be a turning point in the West's quest to gain access to off-limits nuclear facilities. On Saturday, Iran's nuclear chief said the U.N. was free to search its formerly hidden site, but the White House is expected to demand interviews with scientists and access to all nuclear sites.

Although General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has submitted a request for an undisclosed number of additional troops for the country, Reuters reports that the Pentagon will sit on the request until President Obama has a chance to analyze strategy and make an informed decision. Several White House strategy meetings are planned for next week. McChrystal has said that his operation is at risk of failing if more troops are not provided. Over 100,000 troops, including 63,000 Americans, are currently in Afghanistan and officials have estimated that McChrystal could ask for about 30,000 more. Obama, who has already sent 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan this year, has made it clear that he wants to complete a thorough assessment before approving any more increases. He has been criticized by Republicans for taking too long to decide. A recent Gallup poll said 50 percent of Americans would oppose a decision to send more troops and 41 percent would support it.

It's enough to make you paranoid: The friendly vendor who hands you coffee every morning just the way you like it and sports a "God Bless America" sign on his cart could be plotting to kill as many of your neighbors as possible in a massive terror attack. The New York Times offers up an early portrait of Najibullah Zazi, the 24-year-old Afghan immigrant who prosecutors accused this week of training with al Qaeda in Pakistan and conspiring to launch a bombing attack in America using beauty supplies. According to the Times, Zazi was raised in Queens, where he was known growing up for his love of Islam and basketball. He struggled in high school and dropped out to help his father make money, eventually working as a vendor-cart operator in Lower Manhattan. “He was a dumb kid, believe me," one older relative told the Times. “He was well-spoken,” one customer told the Times. “He always said good morning to everyone. He used to memorize what everyone needed in the morning.”

Iran has invited the U.N.'s nuclear agency to inspect its underground and still-unfinished uranium-enrichment site and downplayed the facility’s secrecy on Saturday. Speaking on Iranian television, the country’s vice president, Ali Akbar Salehi, said he was “astonished” there was controversy over the site, because he said his country complied with U.N. rules by informing the agency six months before a uranium-enrichment facility becomes operational. "This new facility, God willing, will become operational soon and will blind the eyes of the enemies," a close aide to Iran’s supreme leader told the Fars news agency. Salehi said the site was a “precautionary measure” to guard the country from attack. Hillary Clinton said Saturday that she welcomed Iran's offer, while President Obama said he remained open to "serious, meaningful dialogue" to resolve the issue at talks in Geneva on Thursday. The newly revealed facility is reportedly located in the mountains near the holy city of Qom, and is heavily guarded.

Yaz, the top-selling birth control pill in the country, is marketed as a quality-of-life treatment that will reduce acne and premenstrual depression, but researchers are raising concerns that Bayer is downplaying the contraceptive’s serious side effects. Bayer, the drug’s parent company, is fielding over 70 lawsuits that say Yaz puts women at a higher risk for blood clots, strokes, and other health problems than older birth-control pills, The New York Times reports. The FDA asked Bayer to correct misleading TV ads that exaggerated the pills’ efficacy in combating premenstrual syndrome, and to correct sub-par manufacturing practices in a German plant where they make hormones. Bayer sponsored a study that showed its pills do not put women at a higher risk for cardiovascular problems, but other studies have disputed that finding.

Muammar Qaddafi has been busy during his first trip to America. In addition to 94-minute speeches and campouts on Donald Trump’s lawn, Qaddafi met with Lisa Gibson, a Colorado attorney whose brother was one of the 270 people killed in the Pan Am bombing in Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Gibson’s brother was a Berlin-stationed U.S. soldier on his way home for Christmas. In August, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, a Libyan man convicted of the bombing, was released from prison after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, to the delight of throngs of Libyan fans. In New York on Wednesday, Qaddafi, Gibson, and another victim’s relative spent 10 minutes together at the Libyan Mission to the United States. "He generally said he was sorry for the loss, but we didn't go into any details about the bombing…He was very friendly and cordial to us…Honestly, I think he was touched by us being there,” Gibson said. Some of Qaddafi’s other efforts to improve Libya’s international relationships include getting rid of the weapons of his country’s mass destruction programs and paying the families of Lockerbie victims.

Watch out CEOs, the G-20 is in session. The gathering of the world's most powerful leaders reached an agreement Friday to tighten regulation on financial institutions and restrict executive pay in order to discourage the risky short-term profits that fueled the latest crisis. “We have achieved a level of tangible, global economic cooperation that we’ve never seen before,” President Obama told The New York Times shortly after the summit meeting. “Our financial system will be far different and more secure than the one that failed so dramatically last year.” While there is little to enforce the various agreements back in the leaders' home countries, one interesting feature is that countries will submit their economic policies to the group of nations for feedback. Because the United States is expected by the G-20 to reduce its trade and budget deficit—both daunting tasks—and increase its savings rate, the country used to going its own way may find itself the target of criticism.

A struggling school janitor shot his two young children, wife, and family beagle before turning his weapon on himself, Maryland police say. “It is possible that financial difficulties were part of the motive,” a police spokesman said, though the janitor, Charles Dalton, left no suicide note. The bodies of both children, Charles, 14, and Emmaline, 7, were found in their beds. Dalton also shot the beagle in a crate inside the house’s front door. Dalton was a cabinet installer who ran his own business and also worked the night shift as a janitor for Montgomery County schools. Neighbors said his home had been on the market for at least a year, and the family was quiet and church-going. There have been at least four other family murder-suicides in the last two and half years in Maryland.

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney's husband died while descending the sixth-highest mountain in the world, located between Nepal and Tibet, the New York Post reports. Clifton Maloney, 71 years old, a former investment banker and an experienced climber, reportedly said he was "the happiest man in the world" shortly before dying of unknown causes after going to sleep in his tent. Maloney was a Navy veteran and multimillionaire who founded an investment firm and was a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and her husband married in 1976 and have two children.

Can Twitter make this announcement under its 140-character limit? After $100 million in venture-capital funding was provided by investors to social-networking site Twitter, the company’s value may have reached an astounding $1 billion, according to a source familiar with the deal. In addition to giving investors a 10 percent stake in the company, the infusion means that people around the world will continue to have the opportunity to announce each time their dog does something cute. How Twitter, which has been rapidly growing since it began in 2006, will use the new capital to generate revenue has not been announced, but this month, co-founder Biz Stone announced plans to add business services such as an “analytics dashboard” and possibly advertising to the site. Included among Twitter’s 25 million users are celebrities like Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, and Oprah Winfrey.

The funeral of murdered Yale student Annie Le was held Saturday at 1:30 p.m. in Holy Trinity Church in Eldorado Hills, California, and burial services took place in a cemetery outside Sacramento. Her mother read a touching poem she wrote in Vietnamese to her daughter. "You left life at too young an age, at the beginning of many great things. All the dreams and hopes of your future gone with you to your resting place," she read. Family spokesman Rev. Dennis Smith stated: "The family requests that their privacy continue to be respected during this time of loss and grief,” reports the Hartford Courant. In spite of Smith’s request, Fox News broadcast a live stream of the service from its Web site. Le’s fiancé held a memorial service for her in his family’s Long Island synagogue earlier this week. The body of the 24-year-old graduate student was found in the research building where she worked, the same day she was scheduled to be married. Yale lab tech Raymond Clark III has been charged in connection with her death.

Unexpected circumstances forced President Obama into making the major intelligence disclosure Friday morning that the U.S. has known for years about Iran’s secret nuclear facility, Politico reports. The president did not want to announce his suspicions about the facility before beginning talks with Iran next week, administration officials say, but his hand was forced when Iran admitted in a letter to a U.N. watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, that it was building the site. The New York Times reports that the IAEA notified the president of the letter on Tuesday, when the White House quickly began meeting with G-20 leaders about how to handle the information. Obama made the announcement flanked by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, but many key officials on Iran were still in New York, unable to arrive for the hastily organized press conference, Politico reports. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the nuclear facility had never been secret, and called Obama’s decision to chastise Iran a “mistake.”

President Obama's tough view on Iran after the revelation that the country concealed a nuclear facility is "exactly the right thing" to do, according to former President Bill Clinton. The 42nd president added in an interview with CNN that news of the nuclear facility could help put pressure on Iran to cut a deal and end its standoff with the international community. However, he warned that Iranian President Ahmadinejad was not trustworthy. "You can't believe what Ahmadinejad said," he said. Clinton backed a cautious approach regarding troop levels in Afghanistan, where generals are requesting more resources, saying that the disputed Afghan election may need to play out before the president can figure out what strategy to pursue. In the same interview, Clinton said he has changed his perspective on gay marriage and now believes it should be left to individual states. "I believe historically, for two hundred and something years, marriage has been a question left to the states and the religious institutions," Clinton said.

The White House acknowledged on Friday that the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay may not shut down in January as President Obama promised, sources tell the Associated Press. Backlogs in reviewing detainee files and resolving legal and logistical problems in relocating the prisoners have made it unlikely the prison can shut down on schedule. The prison, which is a target of anti-U.S. criticism around the world, holds 225 detainees. Obama officials began reviewing files of each detainee to determine who can be tried and whether to do so in military or civilian courts. They have also tried to determine which prisoners can be released to other nations, and which should be held indefinitely due to the danger they pose. Information on the prisoners was scattered througout multiple agencies, slowing down the process, officials complained. Top Republicans and some Democrats in Congress have demanded the prison stay open for now for safety reasons, and have refused Obama the funds to close it.

America’s new Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien proved he’s putting his whole self into his new role on Friday when he hit his head filming a stunt for the show. O’Brien went to the hospital, but is relatively fine, if the statement he released following the incident is any indication of his mental well-being: "Last thing I remember, I was enjoying the play with Mrs. Lincoln, and the next thing I knew I was in bed being served cookies and juice," O'Brien said. The only time O’Brien's predecessor Jay Leno missed a show was due to a high fever toward the end of his 17-year reign as the host of Tonight. A Jeremy Piven rerun replaced Friday’s scheduled show with Teri Hatcher and Seth MacFarlane and NBC has yet to announce whether Conan will be back next week.

The Daily Beast’s Clive Irving has written an open letter to FAA President Randy Babbit, challenging him to address international safety concerns over the pitot tubes (speed-measuring instruments) that experts believe caused the June crash of Air France Flight 447, which killed 278 people. ”Who will step up to the plate and take a leading role in looking at the safety of thousands of people around the world, including many Americans, who are flying on A330s and A340s at this moment?” Irving writes. The tubes are used on Airbus A330s and 3340s around the world and Airbus said that an A330 takes flight once a minute. Airbus planes have experienced safety issues with the North Carolina-manufactured pitots since 2002 and the tubes have caused malfunctions during flights in Asia and Brazil.

It’s “extremely unlikely” that TARP funds will ever be repaid in full, according to the program’s inspector general, Neil Barofsky, and that may not even be the worst news he delivered on Friday. In an interview with the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, Barofsky says, “We may be in a far more dangerous place today than we were a year ago.” He says, “If you see what has happened since then, banks that were too big to fail are bigger than ever. … With government encouragement, some of the largest banks became larger and are more interconnected than ever.”

Madonna may have had kind words for Michael Jackson at the Video Music Awards, but Jacko apparently didn’t think too much of her. In a new book, The Michael Jackson Tapes, Jackson told author Rabbi Shmuley Boteach that Madonna was “in love with” and jealous of him. “We had nothing in common,” Jacko said. “She is not sexy at all.” In the book, Jackson also said he admired Hitler’s oratory skills, said Princess Di “was my type for sure,” and claimed Cindy Crawford flirted with him. Asked if he thinks he could have changed Hitler, Jackson said, “You have to help them, give them therapy, teach them that somewhere, something in their life went wrong.”

After airing only two episodes, The CW has axed Ashton Kutcher's much-hyped drama The Beautiful Life, marking the fall season's first casualty. Production on the seventh episode was abruptly shut down Friday, reports The Live Feed. The show, which was similar in setting to popular reality show America's Next Top Model, received buzz for the medical problems of its star Mischa Barton. Wednesday's episode reached only 1 million viewers and received abysmal ratings in its adult demo. The CW will air re-runs of its revamp of Melrose Place in the show's place.