When Dorothy got home to Kansas it always seemed to me she'd been sold a pup; Oz was far more exciting than the hardscrabble toil of her family homestead. Life for settlers in the "oblong states" of the West was tough, mean and short. Reading Willa Cather, I'd assumed she knew about frontier life on the Great Plains because, although her family was originally Welsh, she'd been born on a farm in Virginia in 1873. But the Cathers were an upwardly mobile family; Willa's father had switched from farming to real estate and insurance, and Willa went to the University of Nebraska. After she began to get articles published she switched her major and became a writer.

Woodrow West and Ian Gaynair reveal they were offered a bribe before the 6-1 defeat in Portland on Tuesday

It turns out Pharrell isn't the only one who's up all night for good fun

Eliot Spitzer, nicknamed “the Sheriff of Wall Street” because of his aggressive stance towards the financial industry before he resigned as New York Governor five years ago in a prostitution scandal, is ready to return to politics.

Kovacaine Mist was as effective as standard anaesthetics in four out of five patients

Supporters and opponents of Egypt’s president held competing rallies in Cairo as a prelude to nationwide protests planned for Sunday demanding Mohamed Morsi’s removal.

The father of the former National Security Agency Contractor Edward Snowden, who is believed to be hiding in the transit area of a Russian airport, has expressed his confidence that his son would return to the US under certain conditions.

Back in 2000, on Blink 182's smash hit, 'All the Small Things', Travis Barker sang the immortal words "Work sucks, I know" . Now a study has backed him up: more than half of American employees are unhappy at work, says consultancy Gallup.

Such has been the embarrassment for the United States that its Secretary of State, John Kerry, on Monday resorted to sarcasm against Beijing and Moscow. “I wonder if while he was in either of those countries he raised the question of internet freedom since that seems to be what he champions,” Mr Kerry said.

The consulting and accounting giant Deloitte received a sharp slap on the wrists from officials in New York state yesterday, with one of its arms agreeing to pay a $10m fine and accepting a one-year ban from providing consulting work to financial institutions overseen by state regulators after its work for Standard Chartered on money-laundering issues was found wanting.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he will not leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London even if sex charges against him are dropped, as he fears moves are already under way to extradite him to the US.

The Tianhe-2 can perform 33,860 trillion calculations a second

A solar-powered plane bidding to fly across the U.S. has landed at Dulles International Airport near the nation's capital, with one leg to New York left.

Hundreds of Afghans blocked a major motorway south of Kabul carrying freshly dug-up bodies they claimed were victims of torture by US special forces and demanding the Americans be arrested, officials said.