Billy Ray Harris had a hunch Sarah Darling would return for her valuable ring, so decided to take care of it rather than pawn it

Striker joins on loan until May

A US military judge ruled tonight that Pte Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of stealing secret documents and giving them to WikiLeaks, suffered illegal pre-trial punishment and should have 112 days shaved from whatever sentence he might eventually receive.

It’s hard to argue that the late Truman Capote’s most famous work, In Cold Blood, his non-fiction novel about the vicious 1959 murders of a farming family in Kansas by two drifters, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, was not comprehensive. Yet, was it?

Richard Chell, dying of motor neurone disease, thinks that not believing in life after death is like only having "half a meal", it leaves the human appetite dissatisfied. Richard Dawkins, dying of life in general (like all of us), thinks that appetite doesn't have anything to do with it: "The existence of hunger doesn't mean there's food," he countered last night in Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life.

I still get a kick out of the look on people's faces when I tell them about my book Follow The Money.

A spate of tornadoes tore through parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa yesterday, churning through Wichita and other areas while causing property damage but no immediate reports of deaths or widespread injuries.

A Kansas man has revealed that hours after buying three tickets in last week's Mega Millions lottery frenzy that swept America, he was hit by lightning, proving the adage about how hopelessly small the chances are of winning.

America was a nation plunged into disappointment yesterday as all but three citizens realised their raids on the penny jar to buy tickets in a lottery with a jackpot of $656m (£409m) had come to nought.

The American soldier accused of massacring Afghan villagers is to be charged with 17 counts of murder, it emerged last night.

In one of the closest fought Republican primaries to date, the polls can't split the main candidates

Rick Santorum has overwhelmingly won the Kansas Republican presidential caucuses, hoping to blunt front-runner Mitt Romney's momentum in the grinding campaign for the nomination to oppose US President Barack Obama in the November election.

Rick Santorum overwhelmingly won the Kansas presidential caucuses, hoping to blunt front-runner Mitt Romney's momentum in the grinding campaign for the nomination to oppose President Barack Obama in the November election.

Super Tuesday could certainly have gone worse for Mitt Romney, front-runner in the race to become the Republicans' presidential candidate. The former Massachusetts Governor did, after all, scoop six of the 10 available states, albeit winning by just a single percentage point in that all-important bellwether, Ohio.