Protests have erupted across New York and in US cities from Georgia to California after a white police officer was cleared over the chokehold death of an unarmed black man.

LONG gone was the awkward curly-haired teenager with braces, fiercely protected from the media during her White House childhood. Gone too, the determinedly private young woman who spent much of her twenties in denial of her status as a public figure.

ON SEPTEMBER 22, 2001, I looked down on the smouldering ruins of the former World Trade Center from the top floor of an adjacent building.

Kate Hudson was furious after learning her two-and-a half year old son Ryder was injured by an older child while playing in a New York City park on Monday.

As night fell, the city moved past the nightmarish scenes of people on fire jumping from buildings and braced itself for more pain: picking through the rubble for the dead and the injured.