USA: Maya Donnelly awoke to what sounded like thunder in the early hours of the morning, but dismissed it as a typical monsoon storm and went back to sleep.

A tornado has swept through a Mexican border city, killing at least 13 people, authorities said.

A powerful cyclone has slammed into north-eastern Australia, destroying homes, upending trees, cutting power lines and causing flash floods, while a second storm severed communications to a northern island where heavy damage was expected.

A judge has decided that a mother-of-six who has learning disabilities can be sterilised in a UK case which he says raises “ethical, legal and medical issues” of the “utmost gravity”.

WHEN Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant in 1864, he could not have foreseen that the gesture would spark an environmental renaissance across America, resulting in 59 stunning National Parks today.

A white supremacist — who is trying to make the tiny North Dakota town of Leith an all-white enclave — found out on live TV he is part black.

A giant wildfire raging out of control in the US has grown to nearly 200 square miles and spread into Yosemite National Park, as California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for the city of San Francisco 150 miles away because of the threat to the city’s utilities.

A London High Court judge has warned parents who fear that children might be taken into care by English or Welsh local authorities against travelling to Ireland in an attempt to seek “sanctuary”.

A 21-year-old woman with Down's Syndrome should not be sterilised, a British High Court judge ruled today.

A mother has launched a worldwide appeal to help find her five-year-old daughter who was snatched by her father in Egypt.

A four-year-old girl had an incredibly lucky escape when she spotted that a dumper truck driving in an adjacent lane was about to topple over on to her father’s van.

A lawyer for Kevin Costner told a court his fame was the only reason fellow Hollywood actor Stephen Baldwin and another person were suing him over their investments in an oil clean-up device tried out after BP’s spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

A Kenyan runner who disappeared over the weekend as two snowstorms hit the Alaskan city where he lives has been found alive with severe frostbite on both feet and severe hypothermia.

TY COBB, part pioneer and part embarrassing stain on the long history of baseball, could teach Andy Gray and Richard Keys a thing or two about seething intolerance.

Nolan’s clever and complex psychological thriller, which he also wrote, takes us into the world of dreams and the subconscious where Dom Cobb (DiCaprio, in another outstanding performance), a most unusual thief, operates to extract secrets.

POLICE searched yesterday for a newlywed suspected of killing his wife, his sister-in-law and three young children in one of Cleveland’s most horrific shootings in years.

A charter bus carrying a US college baseball team from Ohio plunged off a motorway ramp today and slammed into the pavement below, killing six people and injuring 29, authorities said.

At least six people were killed when a US charter bus carrying a college baseball team from Ohio plunged off an Atlanta slip road early today.

Police in America tonight defended the actions of an officer who allegedly knocked a distinguished British historian to the ground after he crossed the road in the wrong place.

Jessica Simpson has hit back at reports she sacked her best friend and assistant CaCee Cobb because she was too close to estranged husband Nick Lachey.

Nick Lachey's publicists are furiously denying a magazine report suggesting the pop hunk is dating his ex-wife Jessica Simpson's best friend and assistant.

THE owners of a nursing home were charged with homicide because they did not evacuate 34 elderly patients who died after Hurricane Katrina struck, the first major criminal case related to the storm’s still rising death toll.

It seems Jessica Simpson has been at the centre of a naughty scam, with 23-year-old nobody Courtney Handel having just been arrested for posing as Simpson’s personal assistant, CaCee Cobb.

Hurricane Ivan, with winds of more than 140 mph, was barrelling across the Caribbean toward more holiday isles tonight after devastating Grenada.

Shavonda Charleston will spend the rest of her life in prison for smothering her four children.