Worshipers crowded the aisles and spilled out the doorway of a small storefront church in the Bronx, where a small congregation of about 50 swelled on Sunday with those from nearby churches who stopped to offer condolences.

There was weeping and singing for hours over the loss of the church’s leader, his wife and four others, all killed when their church van overturned several times on the New York Thruway near Woodbury, N.Y., on Saturday.

Some arrived at Joy Fellowship Church still uncertain of what had happened. John G. Williams, the church’s financial adviser, did not know who had been lost as he approached the tan brick building on East Gun Hill Road.

He took off his hat, spread his arms and asked, “What happened? I’m totally at a loss. This is unreal.”

Fourteen congregant had crowded into a 1997 Ford minivan on Saturday and headed toward Schenectady, N.Y., to celebrate the second anniversary of a church founded by a nephew of Simon White’s, the bishop at Joy Fellowship.

A little more than 40 miles north of New York City, near the Woodbury Common outlet stores, the rear tire on the driver’s side of the minivan blew out. The vehicle swerved off the pavement and rolled several times before coming to rest upside down on the grassy center meridian.

Six passengers in the van died, including Mr. White, 55; his wife, Zelda, 52; and Mr. White’s older sister, Elaine Reid, 65. Emergency workers transported the other eight, including the van’s driver, to three area hospitals. Several remained in critical condition on Sunday.

Inside the church, the 50 folding metal chairs were filled; more people stood. Color photographs of Mr. and Mrs. White and Titus McGhie, 66, a pastor who also died in the crash, were hung behind the simple wooden lectern that serves as a pulpit. A neighboring Seventh-day Adventist church parked a motor home outside and provided food for mourners.

Many members at Joy Fellowship grew up in Jamaica or have strong ties there. Mr. White was the fifth of 15 children in Jonestown, Jamaica, where he served in the military and as a police officer, friends said.

Several in attendance spoke of the influence Mr. White had on their lives.

Glenford Edwards, 55, said he had served in the Jamaican military with Mr. White. Their paths crossed years later in New York, when Mr. White found Mr. Edwards hanging out with drug dealers on a street corner in the Bronx.

“He got out of his car and said, ‘Come here! This doesn’t fit you,’ ” Mr. Edwards said.

Mr. White encouraged him to get baptized and later walked him into a job interview at a Home Depot. Mr. Edwards said he got the job.

Ewan Peart, 55, said when he was a young man, Mr. White inspired him to join the Jamaican police.

“I saw him pull up one day in a Ford Falcon, which is what Jamaican police officers drove,” Mr. Peart said. “He had a .38 Smith & Wesson and a shotgun, and he had this sense of authority. He said, ‘Listen, man, you can do this.’ ”

Mr. Peart said Mr. White had moved to New York more than 20 years ago and had become a minister. A father of eight, he had married Zelda after his first wife died.

Mr. Williams described the Whites as “true soul mates.”

“I found them to be rather inseparable,” he said. “Zelda was extremely supportive of her husband.”

Mr. McGhie, a minister at the church, who also grew up in Jamaica, had preached on a local religious radio station, Mr. Williams said. He had recently retired and was struggling with his health.

Evelyn Ferguson, a mother of seven who also died in the crash, moved to New York from Jamaica four years ago to help take care of her grandchildren, said June Thompson, her stepdaughter. One of her grandchildren, Tyler Davidson, 11, said Ms. Ferguson loved doing crossword puzzles and watching Oprah Winfrey’s talk show.

“She was a very sweet old lady,” he said. “She always stood up for what she believed.”

Another who died, Avril Murray, 65, had recently retired from a hospital job to spend time with her children and grandchildren. She had performed missionary work in Jamaica, where two of her children live. She traveled there as recently as last year to deliver clothing she had collected from Bronx businesses, said Mr. Peart’s wife, Donna.

The church group was on its way to Schenectady for a banquet celebrating the second anniversary of the 1st Light Christian Assemblies, which was founded by Ms. Reid’s son, Robert A. Reid.

Mr. Reid wept and was embraced by dozens of congregants during the service at Joy Fellowship on Sunday. He wiped away tears as he spoke of his mother.

“She was always giving,” he said. “She was always kind and always tried to take care of every little thing.”

Delores Tulloch, a member at Joy Fellowship, said she was taken aback that such a tragedy had happened on what should have been a festive day.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I know God has a plan,” she said.

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Looking ahead at this week's events focused on philanthropy and social innovation along with the political heavyweights that are set to gather, I can only think of one way to describe it -- philanthropy in overdrive.

Here's a sneak preview of what's to come:

Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting 2010: World leaders, CEOs and socially-conscious celebrities are gathering once again for the annual CGI meeting. First convened by President Clinton in 2005, the meeting works to develop solutions to some of the world's most challenging problems. There are several items on the agenda this year, including among others: empowering women, fighting poverty, enhancing access to new technologies, rebuilding Haiti. President Barack Obama and the First Lady Michelle Obama will join President Clinton at the closing session on Thursday. To learn more, visit the CGI website.

Mashable & 92Y "Social Good Summit" (in partnership with the United Nations Foundation): One of the few public events during U.N. Week, the Summit will focus on solutions with speakers explaining how digital media and innovative ideas can combine to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Featured speakers include, among others: Geena Davis, Elizabeth Gore, Edward Norton and Judy McGrath. Visit the Summit's website for more information.

United Nations Summit: With only five years left until the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the eight international development goals that all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on world leaders to attend a summit in New York on 20-22 September to accelerate progress towards the MDGs. President Obama, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are among the leaders who will put forth rival plans to get the Millennium Developments Goals (MDGs) back on track. Visit the MGD website for more info.

Check back throughout the week for exclusive updates from these events.

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President Barack Obama heads to Pennsylvania on Monday to raise money for Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak, who is locked in a tight race for a seat considered a must-win for the president's party.

Democrats know that Sestak's chances of winning depend heavily on the party's ability to ramp up voter turnout in cities like Philadelphia. With six weeks until the midterm elections, Obama is trying to fire up the party's base, urging the first-time voters that helped him win the White House in 2008 to head back to the polls in November.

"I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods, and your workplaces, to your churches, and barbershops, and beauty shops," Obama told a Congressional Black Caucus dinner Saturday night. "Tell them we have more work to do. Tell them we can't wait to organize. Tell them that the time for action is now."

The relationship between the White House and Sestak has been a rocky one. Obama backed longtime Republican-turned-Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter in the primary contest that Sestak won earlier this year. The White House had tried to get Sestak to drop his challenge to Specter by offering him an unpaid presidential advisory position, an offer Sestak rejected.

Obama carried Pennsylvania during his White House run, but two years later, voters are angry at the sluggish economic recovery and could take their frustrations out on Democrats in November's balloting. Democrats see the Pennsylvania Senate seat as one that could not only determine which party holds the Senate majority, but also which way the key swing state might lean in 2012.

Several polls suggest Republican Pat Toomey, a former congressman and ex-head of the conservative Club for Growth, has a lead over Sestak. Republicans need to capture 10 Senate seats to win a majority. As many as a dozen held by Democrats appear competitive — the Pennsylvania race included — as well as at least five currently in the hands of the GOP.

Obama's trip to Pennsylvania is the latest in a string of appearances by Democratic heavyweights: Vice President Joe Biden headlined a Sestak fundraiser in Philadelphia last week, and former President Bill Clinton has made two appearances for Sestak in as many months.

National parties and outside groups are also pouring money into the race.

Estimates from the campaigns suggest that these groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, have already spent $6 million to $7 million on TV ads since July. The airwaves are blanketed with ads blaming Toomey for the economic meltdown or accusing Sestak of recklessly raising taxes and the national debt.

Before his fundraisers for Sestak, Obama will participate in a CNBC town-hall discussion of jobs at Washington's Newseum. Tuesday evening, he'll headline a fundraiser in Philadelphia for the Democratic National Committee. Tickets for that event start at $10,000.

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One of the new stars of the Tea Party movement, an entertainer recently mistaken in Delaware for an actual politician, is Christine O'Donnell. Start here with O'Donnell, just because you have to:

Even Karl Rove thinks she is too far off the grid. This from a guy who thought Dick Cheney was fine.

Delaware is a state that has about one-third the population of Brooklyn. O'Donnell, running for the U.S. Senate, won her primary race with just over 30,000 votes. Even the Mets occasionally draw more people than that. No matter, she was suddenly a new drum majorette for the Tea Party.

Oh, sure. O'Donnell is a younger, peppier, more pleasant version of Sarah Palin, whom she channels in clothing, mannerisms, peppy rhetoric. So she and her 30,000 votes were supposed to be another example of the tidal wave of Tea Party fervor that is supposed to be sweeping America, even though her real campaign slogan should go something like this:

There are a lot of whack jobs in Congress, from both parties, and I aim to be one of them!

Or perhaps not.

Because on "Real Time" the other night, Bill Maher ran a clip from his old "Politically Incorrect" show in which O'Donnell voluntarily copped to the following:

"I dabbled into witchcraft - I never joined a coven. But I did, I did! I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around with people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me to do.

"One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it."

At this point, you wanted somebody to jump in and ask what she thought the altar was, the counter at White Castle?

The younger version of O'Donnell sure didn't stop there. She can talk the way Michael Phelps can swim. Apparently the only way to shut her up is to have video like this hit the Internet. As soon as it did, O'Donnell canceled both "Face the Nation" and "Fox News Sunday."

O'Donnell also volunteered this in the 1999 clip:

"I mean, there's a little blood and stuff like that. We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar."

Now last week, Rush Limbaugh lost his mind after he heard Rove criticizing O'Donnell, as if Rove had committed an act of high treason by thinking that O'Donnell was some low-common-denominator candidate, especially at a time when we're supposed to need every good Republican we can find to take back the country from the infidels.

The tax liens against O'Donnell in the past weren't supposed to matter, maybe because she's playing to an audience where anybody who doesn't pay taxes is viewed as a living saint. And her weird ideas about masturbation, and how condoms don't really prevent AIDS, weren't supposed to matter. Neither was the suggestion that she has confused campaign contributions with a cost-of-living stipend.

No, sir. O'Donnell was another spunky underdog running against big government and looked like an "All About Eve" version of Palin and anybody who attacked her had to be bad, bad, bad.

You wonder how all those who have fallen madly in love with her would feel if somebody in politics they truly hate, like Nancy Pelosi, admitted she was the one who once dabbled in witchcraft. Or if they'd simply decide that Pelosi being a witch was old news and move on.

You want to worry about this country and how it seems to be getting dumber by the minute? Worry that the problems with it are so profound, and have made people so desperate and crazy, that there are actually 30,000 people in Delaware who think that Christine O'Donnell and her beliefs - whatever they are - are some kind of solution.

Or that in New York a loudmouth like Carl Paladino, another big Tea Party guy with ideas about immigration and illegals that make Arizona's look enlightened, is suddenly a candidate for governor.

You actually want to see Paladino on a whistle-stop tour with that Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, at his side. You may have seen Brewer make a television appearance not long ago and wait 15 seconds for her next thought. Boxers get counted out after 10.

Paladino would have been delighted and jumped right in. Already you can tell he thinks having any kind of unspoken thought is a felony.

Paladino is supposed to be another part of the tidal wave of those set to take back the country, starting in November. And no worries if he stumbles along the way, the way poor Christine O'Donnell did this weekend. He can just say the devil made him do it.

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President Barack Obama urged Republicans on Wednesday to help renew Bush-era tax cuts quickly for the middle class but not wealthier Americans -- a flashpoint issue going into November's congressional election.

"We simply don't have time any more to play games," Obama said at the White House.

With trillions of dollars in tax cuts due to expire on December 31, Obama again accused opposition Republicans of holding the middle class "hostage" and coddling millionaires with their demand that tax relief be extended for all Americans.

"Once again, leaders across the aisle are saying no. They want to hold these middle-class tax cuts hostage until they get an additional tax cut for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans," Obama said.

"We simply can't afford that," he said, rejecting the Republican argument it is not the right time to raise taxes on anyone, given concerns the economy is not rebounding fast enough from the worst recession since the 1930s.

Obama, speaking after a Cabinet meeting, was flanked by members of his economic team, including Vice President Joe Biden, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and top economic advisers Larry Summers and Austan Goolsbee.

Republicans were swift to respond to Obama.

"Tax hikes aren't going to grow the economy, just as no amount of spin can change the fact that the Washington spending spree hasn't led to a hiring spree, despite the promises of Democrats," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement.


'PREPARED TO DISCUSS ALTERNATIVES'

Republicans demand, with the support of some Democrats, that tax cuts for families earning more than $250,000 a year be renewed alongside those for the less wealthy.

Thirty-one House Democrats, many of them fiscal conservatives, urged their leadership in a letter to consider legislation to extend all tax cuts.

"In recent weeks, we have heard from a diverse spectrum of economists, small business owners, and families who have voiced concerns that raising any taxes right now could negatively impact economic growth," they wrote.

Some opinion polls show voters like the idea of continuing the tax cuts for the middle class but not for the wealthy.

House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters earlier that he was "always, as you know, prepared to discuss alternatives so we can move forward."

But he quickly reaffirmed his support for Obama's position to renew tax cuts only for families earning less than $250,000 a year. Extending the cuts for wealthier Americans, he warned, risked driving up the budget deficit.

A Hoyer spokeswoman said later, "He's willing to listen to what other people have to say, but he's not willing to change his opposition" to extending tax cuts for wealthier Americans.

Former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, reversing a long-standing aversion to higher taxes, said rates must rise to reduce the record budget deficit.

"I am in favor for the first time in my memory of raising taxes," Greenspan told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Greenspan warned of "very grave problems ahead" if the budget deficit, swollen to around $1 trillion by massive amounts of stimulus spending, was not tackled soon.

As Fed chairman, Greenspan backed the tax cuts passed during the Bush administration that are now set to expire at the end of this year unless Congress renews them.

Investors and companies are concerned about a possible rise in the tax rate for dividends and capital gains if Democrats and Republicans cannot reach a compromise.

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Justice Stephen Breyer expressed frustration with popular perceptions of the Supreme Court as a partisan battlefield, making an unusual public statement after a term full of 5-4 splits on politically sensitive issues.

Americans "think we're a group of junior league politicians," he said during a recent interview here. "They think we decide things on the basis of politics. Or, if not politics, on the basis of what we think is good for people, rather than the Constitution. And I think that's wrong."

In its most recent term, the court divided repeatedly along ideological lines, with a bare majority voting to strike down a local handgun ban and restrictions on corporate and union spending in elections.

ustice Breyer, during a conversation in the chambers he keeps at the federal courthouse here, sought to tamp down criticism from some on the left that conservatives led by Chief Justice John Roberts are on an ideological mission to roll back individual rights, while showing "tea-party groups" and others on the right why liberal-leaning justices like him believe they are keeping faith with the framers.

Even when the justices disagree, "all nine of us think we're following the same Constitution that was there in 1790," he said.

Justice Breyer has just published his first book aimed at a general audience. "Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View" takes readers through historical cases that helped establish the court's place in the American system. "I want to show through example what it is to be a member of the court," he said.

His concern about public confidence in the high court deepened earlier this year when security consultants persuaded the justices to close its front entrance. The marble steps and brass doors represented "dignified openness and meaningful access to equal justice under law," Justice Breyer wrote in a dissent. Relegating visitors to a cramped side door, he suggested, sent the opposite message.

One goal of the book, the author said, is to persuade Americans that he is "trying to use a coherent approach" in decisions "rather than deciding on a political basis."

In interpreting a law, judges typically "look to the words at issue, to surrounding text, to the statute's history, to legal traditions, to precedent, to the statute's purposes, and to its consequences evaluated in light of those purposes," Justice Breyer writes. "Of these I find the last two—purposes and consequences—most helpful most often."

It is an approach he contrasts with originalism, the model championed by Justice Antonin Scalia, which purports to apply constitutional text according to its meaning when adopted. Both justices have sought to popularize their competing methods in books and lectures.

In his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope," then-Sen. Barack Obama discussed the Breyer-Scalia debate, writing that "ultimately…I have to side with Justice Breyer's view of the Constitution—that it is not a static but rather a living document."

Stanford University law professor Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appellate judge appointed by President George W. Bush, said Justice Breyer's approach risked leading to a "jurisprudence of personal preference" if it strayed from what the words of the law say.

Trying to surmise "what the nation might say if it were writing a constitution today," Mr. McConnell said, "doesn't adhere to the purpose of a constitution," which is to cement certain provisions in place.

Justice Breyer long had an ally in his self-described "pragmatic" approach: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee who often sought a constitutional middle ground.

"I was very sorry when Justice O'Connor retired" in 2006, he said in the interview. "We wouldn't always agree, but we did share a general approach, and we'd tend to be, very often, on the same track."

The same can't be said of her successor, Justice Samuel Alito, a solid conservative who disdains split-the-difference adjudication.

As a result, Justice Breyer has been finding himself outvoted, such as in 2007 when the court's conservatives threw out student-integration plans adopted by local school boards.

Justice Breyer's dissent suggested deep frustration with the court's direction, saying it broke the promise of integration made in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. "The court and the nation will come to regret" the 2007 ruling, he wrote at the time.

But in the interview, Justice Breyer played down any feelings of alienation.

"Am I overemphasizing the degree to which it is polarized?" he asked himself. "It is easy to get sort of unhappy about one or two or three particular cases in a term, but there's a bigger picture."

"The 5-4 cases, depending on the year, are probably 20 to 25%" of the cases the court hears, he said.

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Sarah Palin may have a magic touch with candidates she endorses, but nearly half of American voters aren't impressed by the former Republican vice presidential candidate.

The Tea Party isn't so popular, either.

Just 21% of those asked have a favorable view of Palin, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll, which also found that 19% support the Tea Party.

The number of voters who view Palin unfavorably rose six points since August to 46%.

Meanwhile, 33% say they are undecided on Palin or don't know enough about her positions.

Still, Palin's endorsements seem to matter.

So far this primary season, Palin has backed 43 candidates and 25 of them have won, 11 have lost, with the rest not having had a primary race.

Most recently, she helped lift Republicans Christine O'Donnell and Kelly Ayotte to Senate primary wins in Delaware and New Hampshire, respectively.

However, two in three voters say Palin is just looking for attention with her endorsements, according to the poll.

As for the Tea Party, 63% do not support its movement, though voters who are familiar with the party are more divided.

The poll finds 29% have an unfavorable view, opposed to 23% who see the party in a favorable light.

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