The head of America’s National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People said today a newspaper’s controversial dead chimp cartoon was an invitation to assassinate US President Barack Obama and urged readers to boycott the tabloid.

David Bowie has donated $10,000 to a legal defence fund for six black teenagers charged in an alleged attack on a white classmate in the tiny central Louisiana town of Jena.

It is time for the African-American community “to face the fact that Aids has become a black disease” and find ways to defeat it, said the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People at the international Aids summit in Toronto, Canada, yesterday.