Red Holloway, a tenor saxophone player who had a tone as big as the side of a house, made his name in jazz, but more quietly – or musically, more loudly – worked for John Mayall and a variety of rhythm'n'blues stars. "I enjoyed playing with Mayall," Holloway said. "He's a very good self-taught entertainer and I admire that. It takes an awful lot of nerve and perseverance to become successful like he did... We had a good working relationship."

Bang

Rush Limbaugh, for two decades the undisputed king of conservative talk radio in the US, is suddenly faced with a potent pretender to his crown.

Unless you're the White House spokesman, opining daily on matters of war and peace, a press secretary normally doesn't become a public figure in a button-downed place like Washington, drenched in political correctness. The exception was Tony Blankley. For seven momentous years in the 1990s he was spokesman for Newt Gingrich, as the Georgia Congressman led the "Republican Revolution" that in 1994 gave the party control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. The turbulent and swaggering Speaker-to-be and his somewhat rotund, heavy-smoking aide with a British accent, a gift for soundbites and an unashamed taste for the good things of life, were made for each other.

This labour of vinyl devotion rescues for posterity the best productions of Lee Anthony's True Soul label from Little Rock, Arkansas, a DIY enterprise specialising in Seventies psychedelic funk.

Tornadoes can occur in many parts of the world, but are most frequently found the United States east of the Rocky Mountains during the spring and summer months. In an average year, 800 tornadoes are reported in the US, resulting in 80 deaths and over 1,500 injuries.

A US Army engineer inspects sandbags on the banks of the Mississippi river in Natchez yesterday, where cargo was slowly moving along the flooded river after a costly daylong standstill.

Over the next few days, water spewing through a Mississippi River floodgate will crawl through the swamps of Louisiana's Cajun country, chasing people to higher ground while leaving much of the land under 10 to 20 feet of water.

Army engineers will open a key spillway along the bulging Mississippi River as early as today, deluging thousands of homes and farms in Louisiana's Cajun country in order to avert a potentially bigger disaster in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

The bulging Mississippi River has rolled into the fertile Mississippi Delta, threatening to destroy cotton, rice and corn fields.

Engineers have blown up a Mississippi River levee in Missouri as rising waters continue to threaten towns in several US states.

With some genetic sleuthing, scientists have identified a likely culprit in the spread of leprosy in the southern United States: the armadillo.

Rescue crews resumed work yesterday after violent storms carved out damage three miles wide in Arkansas, leaving at least two residents of a small town dead. Three other people were killed when floodwaters swept vehicles off the road.

The US National Weather Service says first light has revealed the track of a deadly tornado that flattened trees and power lines, tore the roofs from homes and left a debris-strewn path through a small central Arkansas town.