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 Michael Jackson was buried on Thursday, more than two months after he died of a drug overdose, marking the last stop for a superstar who spent most of his 50 years in the public gaze.

The singer, whose enormous success with such albums as "Off the Wall" and "Thriller" was overshadowed in later years by his extravagant lifestyle and child molestation allegations, died on June 25 with a mix of prescription medications in his body.

The Los Angeles coroner ruled Jackson's death a homicide. Police are investigating several doctors and have said they will seek criminal charges, but so far none has been filed.

Security was very tight at the private evening funeral at the historic Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California, near Los Angeles.

Fans and reporters were kept away from the 200 guests, including actress Elizabeth Taylor, Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, musician Quincy Jones and Jackson's ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis Presley.

The Jackson family entourage was the last to arrive, showing up more than an hour later than scheduled in a convoy of 30 limousines, some members waving to a cheering crowd of more than 400 people.

A few minutes later, a hearse drove through the cemetery accompanied by four police officers on motorcycles.

The outdoor ceremony lasted for about an hour before the pop star was interred in a crypt in the vast mock-Renaissance Grand Mausoleum, a family spokesman said.

The pallbearers were Jackson's five brothers -- Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Randy -- who performed similar honors at a public memorial service in July.

ACTORS, LAWYER AT FUNERAL

The ceremony began with Jackson's three children placing a crown on their father's coffin, the spokesman said.

Speakers included Jackson's father Joseph, whom the singer often accused of abusing him as a child, and civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Others guests included actors Corey Feldman, Chris Tucker, Macaulay Culkin and his girlfriend Mila Kunis, Thomas Mesereau, the attorney who successfully defended Jackson in his 2005 child molestation trial, and Kenny Ortega, the choreographer on Jackson's planned comeback tour.

Officials have said a cocktail of medications, including the powerful anesthetic propofol and sedative lorazepam were the primary causes of Jackson's death.

While several doctors who treated Jackson have been investigated, police have focused on his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, who was at his bedside when he suffered a heart attack in a rented Los Angeles mansion.

Murray was hired by concert promoter AEG Live in the weeks before Jackson's death to watch over him as he rehearsed for a series of comeback concerts in London, scheduled to start in July. Those concerts were to have helped the singer pay off debts and shore up his finances.

A huge wildfire burning in the mountains above Los Angeles, now the largest ever in the county, was started by arson and will be investigated as a homicide, authorities said on Thursday.

The so-called Station Fire has killed two firefighters, destroyed 64 homes and torched an area the size of Chicago in the nine days it has roared across the rugged San Gabriel Mountains overlooking Los Angeles.

"After a forensic examination at the point of origin, arson investigators have concluded that the Station Fire was the result of an act of arson," U.S. Forest Service Commander Rita Wears said.

The deaths of Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Ted Hall and firefighter Arnaldo Quinones, who were killed when their vehicle plunged 800 feet from a road, made the case a homicide, Wears said.

Authorities did not offer details about how the fire was started but an area near the city of La Canada-Flintridge, north of Los Angeles, has been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape since Wednesday.

It was not clear if any suspects had been identified.

As of Thursday evening, the Station Fire had blackened 145,000 acres, or about 226 square miles (585 sq km), making it the largest wildfire recorded in Los Angeles county. It could ultimately become one of the top 10 in state history, in terms of size.

Authorities estimated containment of the massive conflagration at 38 percent, up from 28 percent a day earlier, according to fire commander Mike Dietrich, who said his force of more than 4,700 firefighters was making "great progress."

By Wednesday night, the all-clear had been given for the last of 6,400 evacuated households to return home.

But a flare-up in one canyon early on Thursday led officials to order a small cluster of homes evacuated, and crews were concentrating their attack on the southeastern flank of the blaze to prevent flames from spreading.

One town on the fire's southeastern fringe is Pasadena, known for its annual New Year's Day Rose Bowl college football game and Tournament of Roses Parade. Fire commanders planned to brief residents in a meeting Thursday night.

Fire commanders said Mount Wilson, an observatory and telecommunications and broadcasting hub, would be spared.

The Station Fire has cost $21 million so far to fight, making it the most expensive of several California wildfires in recent weeks that already have depleted the cash-strapped state's emergency firefighting budget by more than half.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has insisted the state has plenty of resources at its disposal for such emergencies.

South Korean firm LG Electronics is poised to start marketing an air conditioner with a filter made using an enzyme from the pungent national dish kimchi that is aimed at protecting against the bird flu virus.

    Kimchi, typically made from pickled radish or cabbage packed with garlic, ginger and hot peppers, is renowned for its supposed health benefits -- as well as its powerful odor.

    "We developed the filter with the aim of protecting people against bird flu," LG spokeswoman Park Se-won said by telephone, citing four studies from domestic and overseas institutions that she said showed the filter eliminated the deadly H5N1 virus.

    Over the years, kimchi has frequently been billed, particularly in Korean culture, as a miracle food with an amazing array of health benefits. During the SARS crisis in 2003, many Koreans believed eating kimchi helped ward off the disease.

    Researchers in South Korea have been testing whether an extract from kimchi can be used as an additive to chicken feed to prevent bird flu, although there has been little scientific evidence to support the claim.

    LG, which is the world's largest manufacturer of air conditioners, intends to start marketing the air conditioners in China and Southeast Asia soon.

    She said appliances would not transmit the unmistakable kimchi smell through rooms.

    "Since the filters are made with only the enzyme extracted from kimchi, the smell doesn't follow."

    The H5N1 avian flu virus has killed 91 people since late 2003, the majority of them in Asia. Though the virus remains hard for people to catch, scientists say it is steadily mutating and could acquire the ability to pass easily between people, triggering a pandemic.

After Harry Truman repeatedly failed to persuade Congress to pass universal health insurance, some Truman administration officials came up with a less ambitious idea. They suggested covering only 8 percent of the population, and an especially sympathetic 8 percent at that: everybody 65 and older.

Truman never really pushed the plan, however. John F. Kennedy later did, yet was stymied by Congress and the American Medical Association, which equated it with Soviet-like socialism. So it fell to Lyndon Johnson. Even after he won a 23-point landslide in 1964, he had to agree to some unseemly deal-making, as Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic has noted, that handed a big payday to hospitals and doctors.

Only then, in the summer of 1965, was Medicare born.

Next week, Congress will return to session, and health care, of course, will be at the top of its agenda. Passing a bill, it's clear, will be no easier than in previous decades. President Obama's poll numbers have fallen, while untruths about death panels have made the rounds and members of Congress have been subjected to town hall harangues.

But the job facing Mr. Obama hasn't really changed: he will have to figure out how to end up more like Johnson than like Truman or, more recently, Bill Clinton. He and Congress will have to figure out how to make some progress toward fixing the country's troubled health care system.

Any bill they pass will inevitably be flawed. It will not do enough to reduce wasteful spending. It probably will not result in universal coverage. Special interests - like drug companies and, once again, hospitals - will get off too lightly.

But such is politics. Starting from scratch with a more purely liberal bill or a more conservative one, as some have urged, won't change the messy reality of democracy. "You're not going to fix health care on one bill," Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said. "Even if my most liberal colleagues had their perfect bill, it's not going to fix health care. A bill is going to have to be altered and amended later."

Indeed, from an economic standpoint, the biggest risk seems to be that health care will be left unchanged and that we'll simply pretend we are as healthy, wealthy and wise as can be.

We're not. The United States is the only rich country in the world without something resembling universal health insurance. Medical costs already take a big whack out of workers' paychecks, and Medicare's budget is growing at an unsustainable rate. Despite all this spending, we too often receive inadequate care.

Emergency room care and certain cancer treatments are among the best in the world. But management of chronic diseases isn't nearly as good. Senior citizens and children are less likely to receive vaccinations here than in some other wealthy countries, a recent analysis found. Americans face higher risks of being killed by a medical error or harmed by a medication error.

Health reform won't solve all these problems. But there is still reason to think that it can improve things. A limited, imperfect, warts-and-all bill would, as in 1965, be a lot better than no bill at all.

The main political problem with health reform is still the immediate cost of it. Covering the uninsured will require $1.2 trillion or so over 10 years, and Congress hasn't been able to agree on $1.2 trillion of spending cuts and tax increases to keep the deficit from growing.

This standard - deficit neutrality - may not be fair. George W. Bush, after all, spent trillions of dollars cutting taxes and adding a Medicare prescription drug benefit without offsetting the costs. Yet given the current size of the deficit, Mr. Obama and Congress have to do better.

So a scaled-down version of health reform will probably mean spending less money to subsidize health insurance, thus leaving some of the uninsured without coverage. Such a compromise would not be the end of the world. (Medicare, remember, initially applied to a measly 8 percent of the population.) But it would create one tricky technical problem.

Any plan to expand insurance depends on creating a broad group of people known as a risk pool. A company's work force is such a pool: it allows an insurer to balance the high cost of covering the sick with the low cost of covering the healthy.

If Congress passed a universal health insurance plan, the 45 million or so newly insured would make up their own risk pool, one that included both today's young, healthy uninsured as well as older, sicker uninsured. But if Congress stops short of universal coverage, it then has a problem.

It can't allow just people to sign up for subsidies voluntarily. That would create an incentive for the sick to buy insurance and the healthy to go without it. Average insurance costs would then soar - and the subsidies would have to soar too, undercutting the plan.

There are ways out of this problem. Congress could mandate that the young and, say, the near poor buy insurance. Together, they would create a decent risk pool.

A second big question is whether health reform will include any serious attempt to reduce medical costs and improve quality. Economically, this issue may matter more than any other. Politically, it would make the White House seem serious about reducing the budget deficit.

"Whatever new bill is going to come about has to have a far greater emphasis on cutting costs and making the delivery system far more efficient," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. "That's true substantively and politically."

Right now, we pay hospitals, doctors and drug companies to give us more care rather than better care, and we get what we pay for. I recently described how this system undermines the treatment of prostate cancer, but there are dozens of examples.

Unfortunately, none of the major proposals in the House of Representatives address the problem. The House's liberal leaders have been mostly uninterested in changing the incentives in health care. So have conservative Blue Dog Democrats, despite their fiscal discipline rhetoric.

Republicans, for their part, have signaled that their top priority is defeating a bill; they even rejected Mr. Obama's offer to include tort reform, a pet Republican issue. It looks as if any attack on fee-for-service medicine will fall to Senate Democrats.

And then there is the president.

Persuading Americans that health care needs reforming was always going to be hard. It depends on making people see the logic in a series of hypotheticals. If we don't reduce the growth in costs, we will leave our children with a crushing tax burden. If we do reduce costs, our paychecks will be fatter. If we reward quality of care instead of quantity of care, fewer people will die an early death. This isn't easy stuff.

But Mr. Obama didn't get elected because he promised to do the easy jobs better than Hillary Clinton or John McCain. He won the election by vowing to be a Reagan-like communicator who could rally Americans to deal with daunting, intractable problems - the kind of problem that bedeviled Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman.

Mr. Obama and his advisers have spent much of this week trying to come up with a post-Labor Day strategy for selling health reform. They understand very well that incremental success is a lot better than nothing, and the Democratic-controlled Congress means that their odds are better than even. But they're not there yet.

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com

But even with that battle all but won, scientists are finding a new man-made threat to the ozone layer: nitrous oxide (N2O), otherwise known as laughing gas. A study published in the Aug. 28 Science found that N2O - a by-product of agricultural fertilizer and a number of other industrial processes - is now the biggest ozone-depleting gas in the air, and could present a real threat to the ozone layer in coming decades. And worse, unlike CFCs, N2O - which also adds to global warming - is not regulated by the Montreal Protocol, meaning there is no global effort to try to reduce emissions. (See pictures of the world's most polluted places.)

"Pretty soon human-caused N2O emissions will be greater than all other ozone-depleting substances combined," says John Daniel, an atmospheric scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a co-author of the Science study. "It will be the dominant gas in the future." (See TIME's special report on the environment.)

The idea that N2O poses a threat to the ozone layer is not new, but the Science study is the first comprehensive look at the exact concentrations and consequences of the gas. The investigators found that although N2O is only one-sixtieth as dangerous to the ozone layer as CFCs on a gram-by-gram basis, the sheer amount of N2O - each year nearly 1 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent are released globally - means that it now poses a more significant threat to the atmosphere. (N2O emissions are calculated in terms of their impact on global warming, and CO2 is used as a kind of base level.) (See Q&A: "Regional Nuclear War and the Environment.")

The news isn't all bad: the fact that scientists can now turn so much of their attention to the dangers of N2O is in part because CFC levels have dropped so low, thanks to the Montreal Protocol. But N2O is likely to prove much more difficult than CFCs to phase out. While CFCs had a relatively narrow range of uses - and chemical companies like DuPont were able to come up with replacements quickly - N2O is all around us, tied intimately to our industrial way of life. The millions of tons of soil fertilizer used in U.S. agriculture alone add N2O into the atmosphere, as do livestock manure, sewage treatment and automobiles. And it's not just our doing: two-thirds of global N2O emissions come from the planet itself, as bacteria in soil and the oceans break down nitrogen. Though N2O is regulated by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 as a greenhouse gas - and one that is nearly 300 times more potent for global warming than CO2 - that treaty doesn't cover all nations, and will expire in 2012. "The question is how are we going to reduce these gases," says Daniel. "We need to bridge that gap between science and policy." (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

Such a multifaceted problem will require a multifront solution, and some good ideas might come up at the U.N. Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen in December. Reducing the quantity of fertilizer used in farming, switching to a less meat-heavy diet and lowering the number of cars on the road while boosting fuel economy will all help. The planet itself will continue churning out its own N2O, of course, but the planet did that for eons. It was our N2O production that pushed the gas past the tipping point - requiring that we now push it back. "It can be a win-win phasing out these gases, both for climate and the ozone," says Robert Portman, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA and a co-author of the study. If we fail, we won't be laughing about nitrous oxide.

Astronomers from China and the United States may cooperate on building the world's largest telescope aimed at providing deeper insight into the very early stages of the universe, Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.

The Thirty-Meter-Telescope (TMT), conceived and headed by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), is expected to be completed in 2019, the official Chinese news agency said.

"It is a big undertaking and it will define the future of astronomy and astrophysics for about 60 or 70 years, so it will automatically involve a large international community," said Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau in an interview with Xinhua.

Xinhua said the university and Caltech are talking to Chinese astronomers and scientists about cooperation on funding and technology, although no final decision has been made.

Canada and Japan have signed up to the project, which needs total financing of $1 billion, it said.

The telescope, with a mirror 30 meters in diameter, will have the sharpest view possible of the universe and will pick up images of galaxies and stars forming 13 billion light years away. It will be located on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

The man who has vowed to recall Mayor Al Pinheiro for allegedly picking on police and ignoring crime issues has yet to file the necessary paperwork to begin his campaign, but he claims he's waiting for the mayor to return from Portugal next month before the fight begins.

To save the city money on election costs, conservative activist Mark Zappa said he plans to fold his still-nascent recall campaign into the June 2010 primary election. Piggy-backing on an election like that would likely cost the city about $75,000, according to City Clerk Shawna Freels, who received estimates from the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. However, costs vary wildly - up to $400,000 for a special, isolated election just for Gilroy - depending on how many other cities are splitting the price. Zappa has said he would never force the city to spend that much money and has also indicated he may time the recall for the November 2010 general election to save Gilroy even more money.

"I am also awaiting the mayor's return from his lengthy stay away from the daily dangers of life in Gilroy. Upon his return from his villa in The Azores, (Portugal), we will resume our public campaign and will soon thereafter begin circulating petitions for his ouster," Zappa wrote in an e-mail.

The mayor has repeatedly characterized his annual trips across the Atlantic as both personal and business-related, as his wife owns a travel agency and he is planning on spending more time there someday after he retires here.

"As for Mr. Zappa and his exaggerations of the place being a Villa or my absence from the day to day of Gilroy I assure you that I am in daily contact via email and will use conference calling in some cases to attend a meeting that may be necessary to be there," Pinheiro wrote in an e-mail from the Azores.

If voters recall Pinheiro before his term ends in 2012, the city charter requires the council appoint a successor until voters can elect a permanent replacement in the next municipal election. Pinheiro has said voters - 54 percent of whom elected him in 2007 - would vindicate him in any recall.

City Clerk Shawna Freels said Tuesday she had not received any notice or petition from Zappa to review. There has never been a successful recall in Gilroy, but forcing a ballot measure requires about 3,700 signatures from the 18,500 or so registered voters here. But before Zappa can start gathering names, Freels must first review the petition under very specific state election codes. Those rules allow the mayor to pen a formal rebuttal that would appear on that petition, Freels said.

If Zappa gathers enough signatures within a 120-day window - which he has said won't be a problem - and Freels certifies them, then the council has 14 days from its next regular meeting to order an election. The election has to be held no less than 88 or more than 125 days after the order, Freels said. A denial from the council would prevent nothing, though, because an "apolitical" county election official will just call the election if there are enough signatures.

Zappa, who was involved in a successful recall more than a decade ago in Morgan Hill, did not answer many questions about his current effort.

"There is also discussion on adding one or two additional councilpersons to the recall. Stay tuned," he wrote in a recent e-mail.

However, Zappa did not say which councilmembers that could be, and he did not answer questions about who or how which other people he is working with.

Zappa enjoys tacit support from the Gilroy Police Officers Association. The entire union issued a "no confidence" vote in the mayor in July and officers on their own time have circulated a mailer critical of the council. Although a divided 56-member Gilroy Police Officers Association approved contract concessions last month with the council to save $1.1 million through furloughs and other cuts, both Zappa and the POA have fingered Pinheiro as belligerent toward police and ignorant of public safety issues.

The man who has vowed to recall Mayor Al Pinheiro for allegedly picking on police and ignoring crime issues has yet to file the necessary paperwork to begin his campaign, but he claims he's waiting for the mayor to return from Portugal next month before the fight begins.

To save the city money on election costs, conservative activist Mark Zappa said he plans to fold his still-nascent recall campaign into the June 2010 primary election. Piggy-backing on an election like that would likely cost the city about $75,000, according to City Clerk Shawna Freels, who received estimates from the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. However, costs vary wildly - up to $400,000 for a special, isolated election just for Gilroy - depending on how many other cities are splitting the price. Zappa has said he would never force the city to spend that much money and has also indicated he may time the recall for the November 2010 general election to save Gilroy even more money.

"I am also awaiting the mayor's return from his lengthy stay away from the daily dangers of life in Gilroy. Upon his return from his villa in The Azores, (Portugal), we will resume our public campaign and will soon thereafter begin circulating petitions for his ouster," Zappa wrote in an e-mail.

The mayor has repeatedly characterized his annual trips across the Atlantic as both personal and business-related, as his wife owns a travel agency and he is planning on spending more time there someday after he retires here.

"As for Mr. Zappa and his exaggerations of the place being a Villa or my absence from the day to day of Gilroy I assure you that I am in daily contact via email and will use conference calling in some cases to attend a meeting that may be necessary to be there," Pinheiro wrote in an e-mail from the Azores.

If voters recall Pinheiro before his term ends in 2012, the city charter requires the council appoint a successor until voters can elect a permanent replacement in the next municipal election. Pinheiro has said voters - 54 percent of whom elected him in 2007 - would vindicate him in any recall.

City Clerk Shawna Freels said Tuesday she had not received any notice or petition from Zappa to review. There has never been a successful recall in Gilroy, but forcing a ballot measure requires about 3,700 signatures from the 18,500 or so registered voters here. But before Zappa can start gathering names, Freels must first review the petition under very specific state election codes. Those rules allow the mayor to pen a formal rebuttal that would appear on that petition, Freels said.

If Zappa gathers enough signatures within a 120-day window - which he has said won't be a problem - and Freels certifies them, then the council has 14 days from its next regular meeting to order an election. The election has to be held no less than 88 or more than 125 days after the order, Freels said. A denial from the council would prevent nothing, though, because an "apolitical" county election official will just call the election if there are enough signatures.

Zappa, who was involved in a successful recall more than a decade ago in Morgan Hill, did not answer many questions about his current effort.

"There is also discussion on adding one or two additional councilpersons to the recall. Stay tuned," he wrote in a recent e-mail.

However, Zappa did not say which councilmembers that could be, and he did not answer questions about who or how which other people he is working with.

Zappa enjoys tacit support from the Gilroy Police Officers Association. The entire union issued a "no confidence" vote in the mayor in July and officers on their own time have circulated a mailer critical of the council. Although a divided 56-member Gilroy Police Officers Association approved contract concessions last month with the council to save $1.1 million through furloughs and other cuts, both Zappa and the POA have fingered Pinheiro as belligerent toward police and ignorant of public safety issues.