The Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, based in California, already displays pictures of first-term aborted foetuses on billboards on the sides of trucks, as well as pictures of what it claims are aborted limbs on its website home page. Now it wants to take its message to the skies.

"They suck," said Jackson. "I'm so tired of it ... they start out the most popular person in the world, make a lot of money. It's a conspiracy. Jews do it on purpose."

Gerald Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh, said he would no longer work with the cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk, following allegations that eggs were taken from a junior scientist in violation of rules meant to prevent coercion.

By the end of last week it looked as though the fortnight of struggle between minority French youth and the police might actually have yielded some progress. Condemning the rioters is easy. They shot at the police, killed an innocent man, trashed businesses, rammed a car into a retirement home, and torched countless cars (given that 400 cars are burned on an average New Year's Eve in France, this was not quite as remarkable as some made out).

The senate voted 49-42 on Thursday to effectively reverse a 2004 supreme court decision that extended the writ of habeas corpus to prisoners in the US military camp in Cuba. The debate took less than an hour and the measure was tacked on to a bill on the military budget.

Yamahile Ortiz, 18, said her sister, Yariizca, stood in for her because: "I had a final today." Judge Patrick Clifford in Connecticut called the action "a fraud on the court", and asked: "Do you think this is funny? I don't know why you think it's funny."

The New York Times journalist Judith Miller, whose reporting on weapons of mass destruction, and alleged dissembling before a grand jury, raised questions about the credibility of both her work and her newspaper, has "retired".

The Kansas board of education has narrowly voted to change the state's curriculum to question the validity of evolution, recommending that schools explore the "considerable scientific and public controversy" over the origins of life.

Nobody knows how long Deborah "Bodie" Fisher, 85, had been trapped in her home with the corpse of her younger sister, Delia "Sis" Holloway, 82, upstairs, and 2ft of flood water downstairs when help finally floated by on September 2.

Delivering the keynote speech at the Online News Association last week the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, spoke about the need to "upgrade the ethical standards of journalism". The first clause of a journalist's contract with the reader, he insisted, is "my first responsibility is to the truth".

About 4,000 people were expected to attend the funeral in Detroit, the city where she lived for the last 48 years of her life. The line for the 2,000 available public seats at the Greater Grace Temple, where the funeral took place, stretched over two blocks, with some waiting overnight in a 40°F (4°C) chill.