VIRGINIA was moving forward last night with its first execution of a woman in nearly a century amid appeals from the European Union.

A woman convicted of two hired killings is scheduled to die by injection tomorrow and become the first woman put to death in Virginia in nearly a century, after the US Supreme Court refused to block her execution.

POWERFUL Hurricane Earl wheeled toward the East Coast, driving the first tourists yesterday from North Carolina vacation islands and threatening damaging winds and waves up the Atlantic seaboard over Labour Day weekend.