Three people are reported to be missing after a hot-air balloon caught fire and crashed in the US.

Police are investigating after the son of a senior US politician reportedly stabbed his father and then shot himself.

Three people were killed and 25 injured after a pile-up involving 95 vehicles on a foggy US highway.

Two people, including a police officer, have been killed in a shooting on the US’s Virginia Tech university campus, scene of America’s worst gun massacre four years ago.

FEDERAL agents in Missouri are questioning a man after a suspicious device was found in his carry-on bag at Kansas City International Airport.

A massive manhunt involving more than 100 police and helicopters with thermal imaging was under way today for a gunman who killed eight people in Virginia.

Families of Virginia Tech shooting victims reacted with fury after it emerged that the gunman's missing mental health records were found at the home of a former campus clinic chief more than two years after the incident.

Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho might have made a practice run two days before the massacre, even chaining the doors to the building where he killed 32 people, police said today.

Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui went on eBay less than a month before the massacre to buy ammunition clips for one of the two handguns he used in the rampage.

The Virginia Tech gunman sent photographs, videos and writings to US broadcaster NBC in New York before he died in the massacre that left 33 people dead, authorities said.

Virginia Tech students still on edge after the deadliest shooting in US history got another scare this morning as police in commando gear with weapons drawn swarmed the building which houses the president’s office.

The gunman in the Virginia Tech massacre was a sullen loner known as “the question mark kid”, who alarmed professors and classmates with his twisted, violence-drenched creative writing.

A South Korean national was behind the massacre of at least 30 people locked inside a Virginia Tech campus building in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern US history, the university said today.

THERE is certainly something biblical, if not apocalyptic, about the current global extremes of fire and ice.

A Pakistani man who killed two CIA employees in a 1993 shooting rampage outside the agency’s US headquarters has been executed as the government warned of global retaliation against Americans.

PROSECUTORS are investigating whether to file charges against a witness accused of intentionally misleading investigators by falsely claiming he saw a sniper open fire with an assault rifle and flee in a cream-coloured van.

BALLISTIC evidence conclusively links the death of a woman shot in the head in a suburban parking lot with eight other killings by the Washington-area sniper, authorities said yesterday.

Police investigations into the identity of the mystery sniper were stepped up today after a woman was shot and killed outside a shopping centre near Washington DC.

A businessman shot while a police officer stood just 50 metres away was the 10th victim of a sniper who has been stalking the Washington area, police confirmed today.

THE latest three attacks linked to the elusive Washington area sniper were carried out near major highways that would have allowed the killer to come and go quickly.

Police were today trying to determine whether a man shot dead while pumping petrol in Virginia was the latest victim of the sniper who has terrorised the Washington area for a week.