Update 4.47pm: A news agency run by the so-called 'Islamic State' group has claimed the man who stabbed and wounded eight people at a shopping mall in Minnesota, before being shot dead by an off-duty police officer, was a "soldier of the Islamic State".

A powerful winter storm roared across America’s upper Midwest with high winds and mounds of snow closing roads in several states and grounding more than 1,400 flights in Chicago.

A PET Burmese python measuring more than 8ft long broke out of a terrarium and strangled a two-year-old girl in her bedroom at a central Florida home, authorities said.