Executors of Michael Jackson's estate have asked the Discovery Channel to cancel plans for a programme claiming to re-enact the late singer's autopsy.
John Branca and John McClain said the show was "in shockingly bad taste".
In a letter, the pair accused the company of being motivated by "blind desire" to exploit the singer's death.
The show - entitled Michael Jackson's Autopsy: What Really Killed Michael Jackson - is scheduled to be broadcast in Europe in January.
"Your decision to even schedule this programme is in shockingly bad taste and insensitive to Michael's family," the co-executors wrote.
"On behalf of Michael's family, fans, common sense and decency, we urge you to reconsider and cancel this programme," they added.
An advertisement used to promote the show reportedly depicts a body covered by a sheet with one hand wearing the singer's trademark sequined glove visible.
"Discovery obviously views this as clever advertising and creative 'branding' for its programme," Branca and McClain continued.
"In fact, the ad is debased, sick and insensitive."
Dr Conrad Murray has pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter
Discovery Communications declined to comment on the letter, the Reuters news agency reported.
Meanwhile, lawyers for the doctor facing trial for involuntary manslaughter over Jackson's death may suggest the singer killed himself, a prosecutor has claimed.
In a court session to discuss evidence in the case against Dr Conrad Murray, Deputy District Attorney David Walgren said he believed defence lawyers were looking into the theory.
"They don't want to say it but that's the direction in which they are going," he said on Wednesday.
Outside the Los Angeles courtroom, defence lawyer J Michael Flanagan declined to comment and said lawyers were still investigating the case.
A preliminary hearing is scheduled to begin on 4 January where it will be decided if there is sufficient evidence to hold Dr Murray for trial.
Dr Murray has repeatedly denied causing Jackson's death.
Liam Mulholland, from Northern Ireland Water: "We could have done better, we should have done better"
Ministers in Northern Ireland are to hold an emergency meeting to discuss how to help the 36,000 who have been without running water for days.
Eighty villages and towns have been affected as pipes burst in the thaw.
As the first of 160,000 litres of bottled water arrive from Scotland, the Stormont Executive will discuss what further measures can be taken.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has said he feels "absolutely let down" by NI Water's response.
The state-owned company, which is the sole provider of water and sewerage services in Northern Ireland, said an unprecedented number of leaks caused by the thaw following the long period of freezing weather had been putting "big pressure" on its systems.
Mr McGuinness said people had not been given enough information as to when water would be restored.
"My focus is on how NI Water can do things better over the course of the next number of days," he said.
The thaw followed the worst snow in Northern Ireland in 25 years and record cold temperatures.
As temperatures rose, burst pipes drained reservoirs, forcing NI Water to turn off the tap to the 80 locations.
Some people have been without water for 11 days.
BBC Northern Ireland's political editor Mark Devenport said there was recognition that NI Water's engineers were struggling to deal with an unprecedented number of call-outs, but there was also general condemnation of the company's inability to communicate better with its increasingly angry consumers.
The Stormont Executive has accepted help from Scotland and sent civil service staff to help out at NI Water's call centre.
Ministers will want to discuss at Stormont what further measures can be taken to resolve an emergency which has raised fresh questions about historic under-investment in Northern Ireland's outdated water network, our editor adds.
“Start Quote
"We're doing everything we can. It will continue, I suspect for another few days. We want to keep that as short as is physically possible and I do want to apologise to customers and I appreciate their patience with us."”
End QuoteLiam MulhollandNorthern Ireland Water
'Crisis wasn't made by politicians'
Minister for Employment and Learning Danny Kennedy is attending the meeting.
"I believe that this crisis wasn't made by politicians," he said.
"I think it does prove to me that there was inaction and ineptitude on behalf of senior executives in NI Water who failed to recognise and prepare properly between the period of the big freeze and the big thaw so they bear heavily responsibility.
"Now if they are able to transform radically the situation then it may well be that they will save their skins but I think the public are looking for answers and there must be an immediate response from not only the Executive but also NI Water itself."
The interim chairman of NI Water, Padraic White, admitted its response had been unsatisfactory.
"The organisation has to improve its performance, has to improve its communication and, I believe, will improve its communication over the next two days or so," he said.
"I empathise as interim chairman with those people who haven't had water for the last two or three days - that's an awful situation to be in."
Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson said that while the Westminster government had a lot of pressures on its budget, it was also ready to help.
He said Northern Ireland's infrastructure had suffered over the years and that changes were now needed.
"What will be looked at here is the difference in the way that water is paid for in the rest of the UK and the way it is paid for in Northern Ireland, where it is just an element of the rates," he said.
"I think what is clear is that the events of the last week or so will bring this to a head. It is a major issue that has to be resolved."
'Local responsibility'
Mr Paterson said the wider infrastructure problems were for the Stormont government to address.
"This is a local responsibility now," he said.
"NI Water is an organisation responsible to local ministers and it is up to them to decide in response to their voters how they organise and how they fund water supply in Northern Ireland."
NI Water is now operating water "black outs" where householders' supplies are interrupted for a period of six to eight hours, then turned back on again.
NI Water's head of customer services Liam Mulholland said it is a "slowly improving situation".
"We'd like to see that improve much more quickly," he said.
"We're doing everything we can. It will continue, I suspect for another few days.
"We want to keep that as short as is physically possible and I do want to apologise to customers and I appreciate their patience with us."
Mr Mulholland said some people are still not aware that they have been affected.
"I'm fearful that, as many businesses return to work on Thursday, we're going to find a lot of people arriving into circumstances that no-one wants to be in, with burst pipes, broken ceilings, businesses that are going to be affected in already difficult times," he warned.
The company said it is also aware of bogus information being given to customers at their door steps concerning water supply times.
NI Water said planned times for when supplies will be switched off, for a period of time, and then restored are indicated on the major incident page on its website.
Free showers
The company said all NI Water staff should have ID cards with a photo of that person, their name, a unique serial number and logo.
Local councils are working to supply water and offer free showers to people without a mains supply and information is being provided on the NI Water website.
The Scottish government is providing 160,000 litres of bottled water, the first shipments have already arrived.
The alleged $20m fraud came to light earlier this month
Police in India have arrested a Citibank employee accused of defrauding clients out of millions of dollars.
Shivraj Puri, 32, who is expected to appear in court later, told an Indian newspaper he was innocent.
The alleged fraud was discovered earlier this month in a branch of the global bank in Gurgaon, a wealthy suburb of Delhi.
The bank has said duped investors were promised quick, high returns from a bogus financial scheme.
It is alleged that Mr Puri funnelled the money into accounts controlled by three relatives.
'Truth will out'
Mr Puri reportedly handed himself in on Thursday, a day after police said he was wanted for questioning.
The accused told the Times of India newspaper after his arrest: "I have already given full details to the police. I have full faith in the judiciary. Truth will come out."
The alleged fraud came to light earlier this month when a client mentioned the scheme to a senior bank manager.
Citibank has not publicly put a figure on the sums involved, but investigators have said at least $20m (£13m) was stolen.
According to a police complaint filed by Citibank, and seen by the BBC, funds were transferred suspiciously at the bank's branch in the Delhi suburb from October 2009.
Skype said the service outage lasted for about 24 hours
Server overloads and a bug in Skype for Windows caused the two-day outage for the net phone firm.
Details of what caused the service to be unusable for millions of users prior to Christmas have been posted on the firm's blog.
The two events combined to create a cascade of problems that managed to knock out much of the network underpinning the phone service.
Skype is assessing how its network is built to stop the problem recurring.
Traffic cascade
Writing on the Skype blog, Lars Rabbe, chief information officer at the company, said the problems started on 22 December, when some of its servers that handle instant messaging started getting overloaded.
This meant that the responses they sent to Windows machines running Skype were slightly delayed. Unfortunately, a bug in one version of Skype for Windows meant this delay caused the program to crash.
About 50% of all Skype users ran the buggy 5.0.0.152 version of the software, said Mr Rabbe.
“Start Quote
We know that we fell short in both fulfilling your expectations and communicating with you during this incident”
End QuoteLars RabbeSkype
This caused problems for Skype because of the way the network supporting it is organised. Some of the data travelling round Skype's network are passed through all those machines logged on to the service.
Those participating machines act as what Skype calls "supernodes" and carry out some of the administrative tasks of the global network and help to ensure calls get through.
With a huge number of these machines offline because of the crash, the rest of the network quickly became overloaded.
Mr Rabbe wrote that the disappearance of the supernodes meant the remaining ones were swamped by traffic.
"The initial crashes happened just before our usual daily peak-hour and very shortly after the initial crash," wrote Mr Rabbe, "which resulted in traffic to the supernodes that was about 100 times what would normally be expected at that time of day."
Traffic levels were so high that they blew through the safe operating specifications supernodes usually use. As a result, more supernodes shut down.
Compensation offer
The "confluence of events", said Mr Rabbe, led to Skype being offline for about 24 hours as engineers put in place hundreds of dedicated supernodes and gradually brought the service back to life.
To ensure the outage does not happen again, Mr Rabbe said Skype would look at its update policy, to see if it should automatically move users to newer versions of its software.
A version of Skype for Windows that is free of the bug already exists, but is not automatically given to users.
It said it would also look at its network to improve capacity and get on with an investment programme that would boost this resilience.
Mr Rabbe apologised again on behalf of the company and added: "We know that we fell short in both fulfilling your expectations and communicating with you during this incident."
Skype has offered compensation to customers in the form of vouchers for pre-pay users and a free week of service for subscribers.
Fourteen Afghan civilians, including women and children, have died as their minibus hit a roadside bomb in southern Helmand province, Afghan officials say.
Four others were injured when the vehicle was hit by a Taliban-planted bomb, Dawood Ahmady, a spokesman for Helmand's governor, told the BBC.
The blast happened in the Nahr-e Saraj district, said Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf).
The Taliban have used such bombs to kill hundreds of soldiers and police.
The BBC's Bilal Sarwary in Kabul says the device went off in an area not far from an Afghan National Army base.
Violence is at its worst in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion of 2001.
Rochefort is famous for strong beers 
