1 | Brazil What Happened to Flight 447? On June 2, search teams combing the Atlantic Ocean discovered bobbing wreckage from the Air France jet that vanished between Brazil and West Africa two days earlier. But the mystery of why the Airbus A330 went down may endure--a lead investigator suggested that the doomed aircraft's voice and data recorders may never be plucked from the mountainous ocean floor, more than a mile below. Meteorologists suspect the wide-body jet encountered a band of towering thunderstorms packing 100-m.p.h. (160 km/h) winds as it flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, but the precise cause of the catastrophe remained unknown. All 228 people aboard the airliner are presumed dead, making this the deadliest crash in Air France's history and the world's worst civil-aviation disaster since 2001.
2 | Afghanistan Bringing Back Body Counts Reversing decades of military policy, the U.S. Army has begun regularly releasing statistics on the number of enemy combatants killed in Afghanistan--a figure nearing 2,000 over the past 14 months. The practice of disclosing enemy death tolls was abandoned after the Vietnam War, when they were reportedly inflated to project the illusion of victory. U.S. military officials say releasing casualty tallies will help counter insurgent propaganda.
3 | Israel Obama, Unsettled President Obama's hopes of delivering important Israeli concessions to Arab leaders during his landmark Middle East trip dimmed after Israel demurred on his call for a halt to the expansion of Jewish settlements into Palestinian territories. Despite repeated U.S. calls for a freeze on new construction, settlers justify expansion as a way to accommodate the "natural growth" of their communities, shipping in trailer homes, building illegal houses and bulldozing new roads to connect them.
NATURAL GROWTH Settlers say their adult children need new homes, but 37% of settlements' population increase comes from new arrivals
4 | Los Angeles Stalking the Wii In a bid to combat Nintendo's Wii--the best-selling game console since 2006--Microsoft and Sony announced motion-based controls of their own at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Sony's wireless wand emits light tracked by a camera, while Microsoft's Project Natal eliminates the controller entirely, using a 3-D system to detect a player's body movements. Don't rest your thumbs yet: Sony's device won't be available until 2010; Microsoft has yet to set a release date.
5 | Rome 'Spicy' Affair Stays Hot Allegations by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's wife in early May that he had an improper relationship with an underage model have embroiled the popular leader in scandal on the eve of elections for the European Parliament. Berlusconi has vigorously denied any "spicy" activities with Noemi Letizia, now 18. Meanwhile, authorities have banned publication of photos allegedly showing seminaked women cavorting at his Sardinian villa.
6 | London Bad News Blears Communities Secretary Hazel Blears became the fourth member of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Cabinet to resign in a scandal over British lawmakers' lavish expenses that has implicated more than 200 of Parliament's 646 members. The crisis has prompted calls for the embattled Prime Minister's removal and reports of a likely government shake-up.