Fears of the Ebola virus have deepened with word that a second US nurse caught the disease from a patient and flew across the Midwest aboard an airliner the day before she was diagnosed.

The first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States died today, a little more than a week after his illness exposed gaps in the nation’s defences against the disease and set off a scramble to track down anyone exposed to him.

The head of the UN’s ebola mission has said aid workers are battling against time to stop the ebola virus from mutating and possibly become airborne.

About 80 people are now being monitored for symptoms of Ebola in Texas, health officials said, after a man was diagnosed with the disease in Dallas.

A patient in a hospital in Dallas, Texas, has been confirmed to have the deadly ebola virus, a local news outlet reported last night.

JUST about all the people of the United States who were old enough, remember where they were when they heard that John F. Kennedy was shot.

Two more bodies have been recovered in the wake of the Texas fertiliser plant explosion, bring the death toll from the blast to 14.

Long-hidden items and documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy were revealed for the first time after spending nearly two decades locked inside a court safe.

A bus carrying elderly evacuees from Hurricane Rita caught fire early today on gridlocked Interstate 45 in Texas, killing or injuring an unknown number of passengers.

A condemned prisoner was spared less than an hour before he was to be taken to the Texas death chamber for killing a man who was shot 10 times in the head.