Senator speaks out ahead of Supreme Court considering changes to Defence of Marriage Act

Out of America: A lack of juicy stories from the White House has left Americans to get their fill of sleaze via a fictionalised TV version

Still simmering tensions between the FBI and the CIA over the September 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermath have been reignited by a row over a forthcoming book by a former FBI agent that is strongly critical of the main US foreign intelligence agency.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he believes he'll have to make a decision on whether to have a heart transplant given his medical history.

Nigeria has has dropped charges against Dick Cheney, the former US vice-president, over bribery allegations involving the energy giant Halliburton after an out-of-court settlement was agreed.

The disgraceful episode that was the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has become even more so with the news that officials from both Halliburton and BP had been told beforehand that the cement to be used to seal the bottom of the well – and thus prevent such an explosion from occurring – was unstable.

Kris Kristofferson has had a roller-coaster career, from military service and an Oxford scholarship to cleaning floors in a Nashville recording studio and making it big as a country singer and movie actor. At 74, his beard now totally white, he stands centre-stage, guitar in hand and harmonica at his lips. You can still see the Hollywood-grade cheekbones that earned him legions of female admirers.

My parents were ... warm, loving, down-to-earth and principled. My father was what they called a "bundle strangler" – or a dispatch hand – with the 'Daily Record' in Glasgow; my mother was a housewife.

The former US vice-president Dick Cheney has undergone surgery to install a small pump to help his heart work, as the 69-year-old enters a new phase of what he called "increasing congestive heart failure". "The operation went very well, and I am now recuperating," Mr Cheney said in a statement released by his office. The surgery took place last week at Inova Fairfax Heart and Vascular Institute in northern Virginia.