Rains have cooled Colorado's deadly wildfires, but more than a dozen blazes elsewhere in the West have continued chewing through bone-dry pine and brush as firefighters keep a nervous eye for fireworks and other hazards.

Critical firefighting aircraft have been grounded during one of the busiest and most destructive wildfire seasons to hit the US west after a military cargo plane crashed battling a South Dakota inferno.

Ten Americans who tried to take a busload of undocumented Haitian children out of the country knew what they were doing was wrong and could be prosecuted in the US, Haiti’s prime minister said.

Ten Americans were detained by Haitian police as they tried to bus 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic, allegedly without proper documents.

Thousands of followers lined the path to a hilltop overlooking one of Hinduism's holiest sites where the body of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles' guru celebrated for bringing meditation to the West, will be cremated today.

All ten people on board a single engine skydiving plane that crashed in America have been killed, officials said today.

A 76-year-old woman has been found alive in the Oregon mountains nearly two weeks after she disappeared while on a hunting trip with her husband.

Idaho Senator Larry Craig resigned today following his arrest for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer in an airport lavatory.

IDAHO Senator Larry Craig is considering resigning, Republican officials said yesterday, after days of public and private pressure stemming from his arrest in June in a police undercover operation at an airport toilet.

Crews searching for any sign of six miners trapped for more than three weeks are “hoping a miracle could happen”, a US federal official told lawmakers.

International wildfire crews could be called to help fight blazes in the bone-dry American West as officials boosted the US wildfire alert to its highest level.

US painkiller Vioxx contributed to an Idaho postal worker’s heart attack, a jury in Atlantic City has ruled, reversing the verdict in the man’s first trial and hitting Merck with a total of $47.5m (€36m) in damages.

A US man pleaded with police officers to kill him after his wife’s severed head was tossed from his pick-up truck as he drove into an oncoming car, killing two people, prosecutors said.

A man transporting his wife’s severed head in a pickup truck crashed into an oncoming car, killing a woman and her 4-year-old daughter, police in the United States said tonight.

MERCK won a major victory in the battle over its Vioxx painkiller yesterday when a New Jersey state jury found that the drug maker properly warned consumers about the risks of the medication.

A member of a US punk gang scalped a teenage girl apparently as punishment for her disrespectful behaviour toward women, police said.

TAKING the witness stand three months after he was injured in a grenade attack in Kuwait, US Army Captain Terence Bacon said he remembered hearing screaming and seeing blood.

A US grand jury in Philadelphia has indicted a man who allegedly struck the Liberty Bell with a sledgehammer.

A US judge has overturned a law banning strippers doing the "full monty" because it infringes their freedom of expression.