Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four hostages at a Paris kosher supermarket, rented a small suburban house the week before the attack and filled it with an arsenal of up-to-date weaponry, police have said.

Hurricane Rita ploughed into the Gulf Coast early today, lashing Texas and Louisiana with driving rain, threatening to flood low-lying regions and knocking power out to half a million people as transformers exploded in the pre-dawn sky.