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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) –
Michael Jackson was buried with one of his iconic white gloves, sunglasses and dressed with pearl beads and a large gold belt, his sister, La Toya, said in a television interview to air on Friday.

"He was dressed in all white pearl beads going across, draped across (and) a beautiful big gold belt ... like a belt that you win being a boxer," La Toya Jackson told journalist Barbara Walters in a "20/20" interview to air on ABC on Friday night.

Jackson, 50, died on June 25 of a prescription drug overdose and was buried eight days ago in a Los Angeles suburb.

Aside from full make-up, Michael Jackson also was buried with one of his iconic white gloves, La Toya Jackson said.

She described him as a man with a great heart.

"He wasn't God, but he was certainly God-like," she told Walters. "He was the closest thing to a god that I knew."

La Toya Jackson dismissed questions about the parentage of her brother's three children, Prince Michael, 12, Paris, 11, and Prince Michael II, 7, also known as Blanket.

"It doesn't really matter, those are Michael's kids," she said in the interview. "He raised those kids. They were in his arms when they were born."

Media reports have suggested that Jackson's dermatologist, Dr Arnold Klein, was the sperm donor for Jackson's two oldest children with ex-wife Debbie Rowe. The biological parents of Blanket have never been revealed.

In other developments, the private company with an ownership stake in Michael Jackson's famed central California estate, Neverland Ranch, this week withdrew official applications made in August to trademark various names for the property.

The applications were filed in the event that the Neverland owners and Jackson's estate decided to transform it into a tourist attraction with a museum. A spokesman for the company, Colony Capital, declined to comment.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Jill Serjeant).

PORT ARTHUR, Texas – First too much water, now not enough.
The Texas Gulf Coast's recovery from Hurricane Ike — which submerged the marshes in seawater, scouring away beaches, ruining thousands of acres of vegetation and wiping out much of the wildlife — is being stymied by the state's worst drought in 50 years.
The drought has deprived the land of the cleansing rains needed to purge salty residue left from the tidal surge Ike dragged in when it slammed into the Texas coast on Sept. 13, 2008. The toxic soil and contaminated ponds have kept plants from regrowing and animals from nesting, driving off some species altogether.
"We're very far behind in our rainfall, and that's made a bad problem even worse," said Jim Sutherlin, manager of the 25,000-acre Murphree Wildlife Refuge near Port Arthur. "We've not had nearly the rains we need to reverse the damage to the landscape."
Lance Wood, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said Texas has endured a dry year with rainfall totals among the lowest since the state began keeping track more than 100 years ago. Precipitation levels have been down 13 to 19 inches along the coast between Beaumont and Galveston.
"It's one of the worst droughts we have on record," Wood said.
Coastal marshes provide a vital natural buffer between the ocean and populated areas, cutting down the storm surge, absorbing toxic water and reducing inland flooding.
While the delicate lands wait for replenishing rain, workers are racing to burn debris, replant grasses and trees in the fertile soil beneath it, and restore habitats before the next monster hurricane forms in the Gulf of Mexico.
"If we're going to live on the coasts, we have a responsibility to put on our boots, put our shoulder to the shovel and put all this stuff back together," Sutherlin said. "If enough people are concerned about what happens to this land, we can stay here. But if we don't do that job, then we all better move away and live somewhere else."
The state received $7 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to restore the coastal habitats after Ike; about $500,000 is earmarked to restore and fortify the dunes at the McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge.
Dean Bossert, manger of the 43,000-acre refuge, said the surge's relentless waves bulldozed the sand backward, dumping it into freshwater ponds and smothering vegetation. Another hurricane this year would have an even more devastating impact because of the damage from Ike, he said.
"Ike destroyed what beach ridge we had left," Bossert said. "Now we have absolutely nothing to stop the saltwater from flooding into the marsh."
Due west, at the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, the immediate concern after the storm was not the beach, but the massive debris field.
The 34,000-acre refuge covers the south end of a peninsula that juts into Galveston Bay. When the surge receded, it left swamped boats, the remnants of obliterated houses and piles of refrigerators on the wetlands.
Only the most salt-resistant plants survived, and refuge manager Tim Cooper said the area's population of frogs, toads and salamanders was decimated.
"Places that were alive with the sounds of frogs at night are now totally silent," Cooper said. "I don't know the exact numbers, but that storm definitely had a sweeping effect."
Ike also wiped out oysteries in Galveston Bay by smothering them with silt, said Bill Balboa, a biologist and the state Parks and Wildlife Department's ecosystem leader for the bay.
The state Parks and Wildlife Commission recently voted to shut down oyster harvesting on the east side of the bay for two years to allow about 8,000 acres of damaged reefs to recover.

But Balboa said the marine ecosystem will ultimately benefit from the storm because native grasses uprooted from the coastal marshes were sprinkled onto the bay, providing nutrient-rich food for fish.

The signs of Ike's power are more starkly visible at LaBelle Ranch, nestled between the Murphree and McFaddin refuges.

Buzzards hover over skeletal gum trees with thick piles of snarled grass at their bases. The debris had wrapped around the gum trees like aprons, choked the root systems and killed them.

Cattlemen who used the LaBelle land for pasture have moved herds elsewhere until the grass grows back and fences can be rebuilt.

Jimmy Broussard, a co-owner of LaBelle, fears some ranchers may have left for good.

"Some of them said they just couldn't come back here and take that risk again," Broussard said. "Ike just highlighted the risk that this area has to them."

The ranchers had been responsible for much of the land maintenance, Broussard said. Without them, the mounds of debris have remained and given root to invasive tallow trees and weeds.

Terrie Looney, a coastal and marine resource agent with the Texas Sea Grant conservancy group, said salinity levels remain unhealthy in ponds across the region. Ranchers have little choice but to relocate herds that need fresh water, she said.

"There's no grass, there's salty water — where do you put them?" Looney said. "Sometimes, you've got to do what you've got to do."

LAS VEGAS – A Las Vegas prosecutor said Friday that O.J. Simpson was fairly convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping, responding to the football legend's appeal in a sports memorabilia case.
Clark County District Attorney David Roger filed a brief with the state's high court challenging Simpson's appeal of his conviction on 12 charges related to a confrontation with dealers of sport mementos in a Las Vegas casino hotel room.
Simpson was convicted in October and sentenced in December to nine to 33 years in state prison. He is housed at a medium-security prison in Lovelock, about 90 miles east of Reno.
The NFL Hall of Famer who had been acquitted in the 1994 slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, in Los Angeles, has maintained he was trying to retrieve personal items that had been stolen from him and didn't know guns were involved when led the armed escapade with golfing buddies.
The 62-year-old's lawyers want him exonerated of all charges and have cited judicial misconduct, insufficient evidence, a lack of racial diversity on the jury and errors in sentencing and jury instructions in arguing that he should be set free.
Roger outlined eight reasons to uphold the conviction in a 46-page brief, arguing among other things that the court didn't remove two black women from the jury pool because of their race. The jury didn't include any black members.
Neither Roger nor Simpson attorney Yale Galanter immediately responded to messages seeking comment from The Associated Press late Friday.
In the document, Roger said the women were removed, in part, because prosecutors believed they wouldn't convict Simpson despite the state's evidence because of their religious convictions.
One of the women was a pastor in her church, and prosecutors worried that she might be forgiving by nature and able to influence other jurors.
"Prosecutors feared that a minister, whom many believe possesses a higher moral authority, could influence and sway jurors who might otherwise be inclined to convict and punish," the brief said. "Indeed, the state's apprehension ... had nothing to do with her racial background and everything to do with her ministerial position."
Another woman was removed from the jury pool because she made several Biblical references while being questioned by prosecutors and said her beliefs would make it hard to judge someone else's conduct. She said she would not send anybody to jail, Roger said in the brief.
In the brief, Roger also argues that Simpson's belief that he was retrieving his own property is not a defense against robbery and the court was not obligated to give instructions that would have misstated the law.
He also said Judge Jackie Glass properly stopped Simpson's lawyers from cross-examining a witness about things that didn't relate to the charges Simpson faced.
Roger also said in his filing that his attempt to show memorabilia dealer Alfred Beardsley's bias toward Simpson did not constitute prosecutorial misconduct. Beardsley was one of the peddlers whom Simpson confronted on Sept. 13, 2007, for selling mementoes of his career.
The district attorney's brief did not respond to the appeal of Clarence "C.J." Stewart, a 55-year-old friend of Simpson's who was convicted with him and is serving a 7 1/2- to 27-year sentence. Stewart's lawyers have argued that he should have been tried separately from Simpson.
Simpson and Stewart were tried together. Four other men who were with them took plea deals and received probation after testifying for the prosecution.

FRIDAY, Sept. 11 (HealthDay News) -- The U.S. Food and Drug
Administration has approved a new test for women with pelvic tumors that
are known to need surgery. The test, called OVA1, will help doctors decide
if the tumor probably is ovarian cancer and how to proceed surgically.

OVA1 will identify some women who have negative results from ovarian
cancer tests, but whose surgical cases would benefit from a gynecological
oncologist's involvement, the agency said in a news release. Gynecological
oncologists -- doctors who specialize in women's cancer -- have been found
to help improve survival when they perform ovarian cancer surgery, the FDA
said.

The new blood test -- approved for women aged 18 and older who have
pelvic masses that require surgery -- is not meant to screen for ovarian
cancer or replace diagnostics used to detect ovarian cancer, the FDA
stressed.

OVA1 is produced by California-based Vermillion Inc., in conjunction
with scientists at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

More information

The FDA has more about this approval.