Crews lifted the wreckage of a helicopter from the murky Hudson River today as police using sonar located the submerged small plane that had collided with it.

Divers recovered a piece of a submerged helicopter and a fourth body today as investigators searched New York's Hudson River for wreckage from the helicopter and a small plane that collided in midair, killing nine people.

A Kurdish chemistry teacher gave a harrowing account at Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial today of the death of 40 fellow villagers, including his mother and two daughters, in an alleged chemical attack in 1988.

Saddam Hussein’s trial on charges of genocide against the Kurds resumed in Baghdad today, four days after an American forensic expert testified that an examination of hundreds of Kurdish remains found in mass graves showed they were gunned down and buried where they fell almost two decades ago.

Kurdish victims found in three mass graves included more than 230 women and children along with dozens of adult men, who were lined up and gunned down by troops and buried where they fell, an American forensic expert testified today in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein.

New Orleans is better prepared for the upcoming hurricane season because of stronger flood walls and better evacuation plans after Huricane Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin said today.

Officials ended their door-to-door sweep for corpses, finding far fewer bodies than once feared and school children returned to classes as New Orleans revved up efforts to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

US PRESIDENT George W Bush headed to the US Gulf Coast yesterday to confront a region where the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina were receding but anger and frustration still overflowed.

Forensic workers and body-sniffing dogs searched New Orleans in earnest for corpses as crews cleared away mounds of rubbish and debris left behind by residents fleeing Hurricane Katrina.

Alarming predictions of as many as 10,000 dead in New Orleans may have been greatly exaggerated, with authorities saying that the first street-by-street sweep of the swamped city revealed far fewer corpses than feared.

Using the unmistakable threat of force, police and soldiers went house to house to try to coax the last 10,000 or so survivors of Hurricane Katrina to leave storm-shattered New Orleans because of the risk of disease from the putrid, sewage-laden floodwaters.

The floodwaters that caused so much misery and death in New Orleans were being pumped back into Lake Pontchartrain and authorities braced for what the receding deluge would reveal.

The floodwaters that caused so much misery and death in New Orleans were being pumped back into Lake Pontchartrain today as rescue crews from as far away as California trolled the evacuated city for stragglers and authorities braced for what the receding deluge would reveal.

Siemens AG's Siemens Building Technologies AG unit has won a $200m (€174m) order to provide building technology for five years to the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Iraq will need an estimated US$1.6bn to restore its oil industry, acting oil minister Thamer Ghadhban said.