Britney and Justin started there – and so did Ryan Gosling. Glittering careers begin in the Disney tween machine. So how does the House of Mouse keep cranking out the pre-teen talent?

Throughout his writing career, Evans has survived life-changing dramas as catastrophic as those faced by his characters. While completing his bestseller, The Horse Whisperer he learnt he was suffering from skin cancer; his latest book was delayed when he and his family became critically ill after consuming a basketful of poisonous mushrooms.

Butch Cassidy, the Wild West bandit and leader of the Wild Bunch gang, did not die in a shootout 1908 in Bolivia as popularly believed but survived and lived the rest of his days in Washington state, according to a book collector and a writer.

An oil pipeline running under the Yellowstone River has ruptured and leaked hundreds of barrels of oil into the waterway and caused a 25-mile plume, fouling the riverbank.

A Federal judge has approved a $3.4 billion (£2.1 billion) payout to American Indians in a case that represents the largest legal settlement ever agreed by the US government.

She was heiress to one of America's greatest "robber baron" fortunes of the 19th century. She spent most of the 20th century as a recluse, the owner of lavish estates in Connecticut and California where she did not set foot in 50 years, and died early in the 21st century in an unassuming room in a Manhattan hospital where she had lived under a false name, shrouded in mystery and solitude. Whether Huguette Clark was happy or sad in her strange existence may never be known. But with her has vanished one of the very last remaining links with the New York of the Gilded Age, populated by Fricks and Guggenheims, Astors, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts – and the Clarks.

Permits for wolf hunts are selling briskly in the US state of Idaho, after most wolves in the Northern Rockies were officially struck from the endangered species list in an unprecedented removal of protection by Congress.

The cowboy may be alive and well on our cinema screens, but in the American West they're part of a dying way of life, one that's paid tribute to in a new documentary by the film-makers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash.

The attorney general in Montana has started an inquiry into the charity run by Three Cups of Tea co-author Greg Mortenson after reports suggested Mr Mortenson benefited from money donated to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The world's oldest man has celebrated his 114th birthday with a traditional Japanese meal.

Walter Breuning, the world's oldest man and second-oldest person, has died at 114.

A US store is offering would-be satellite television customers a free gun.

US pressure groups are up in arms over the racy British TV import, Skins. But why the moral panic? Teenagers are no more likely to be brainwashed by it than they are by shows about teenage mothers, or films about romantic vampires, argues Harriet Walker

One errant cow has been euthanised already, but wildlife officials continued to insist yesterday that a controversial experiment to allow American buffalo to stray for the first time in decades out of Yellowstone National Park and onto public lands in Montana is still on track.