The Louisiana swamp-pop scene is one of the most distinctive local tributaries into the great river of US popular music.

Cargo was slowly moving along the bloated Mississippi River after a costly daylong standstill, while officials kept an eye on the lower Delta where thousands of acres of farmland could be swamped by water that is inching closer to the top of a levee.

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.

Over the next few days, water spewing through a Mississippi River floodgate will crawl through the swamps of Louisiana's Cajun country, chasing people and animals to higher ground while leaving much of the land under 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 meters) of brown muck.

The flood is expected to crest next Thursday at Vicksburg, where the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers meet, at a level easily higher than in the Great Flood of 1927

Floodgates are opened near to New Orleans to divert record high Mississippi River flow.

Residents of Memphis have begun to abandoning low-lying homes as the dangerously surging Mississippi River threatens to crest in coming days just shy of a 48.7ft record set by a devastating flood in 1937.

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

Oil giant BP faced the anger of protesters inside and outside its annual general meeting today, which came just days before the first anniversary of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

As Clare Clark's third novel so lushly illustrates, Louisiana has never been the safest place to live. In the early 18th century, when the novel is set, the colony's French pioneers had to endure, floods, hurricanes and famine.

An American millionaire who killed his wife in a ferocious and sustained knife attack outside their luxury home was jailed for at least 16 years today.

A retired American millionaire convicted of murdering his British wife in a frenzied knife attack had gunned down an unarmed man in the United States in 1994, a court heard today.

The city's population has plummeted and is whiter, according to long-awaited figures

Eunice G Sanborn was a Texas woman who was cited as the world's oldest person. She died on 31 January at her home in Jacksonville, Texas at the age of 114. Sanborn was born in July 1896 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and moved to Texas in 1937. She outlived three husbands and a daughter, who died in 1996.