Rick Santorum won the Louisiana Republican presidential primary this weekend, beating front-runner Mitt Romney in the race to challenge President Barack Obama.

After a round of fundraising in New York, Mitt Romney was yesterday pouring money into television advertising in Illinois, whose primary on Tuesday he cannot afford to lose as he struggles to fend off Rick Santorum, his main conservative rival for the Republican presidential nomination.

Newt Gingrich was yesterday resisting growing demands to drop out of the Republican presidential race and allow his surging fellow conservative Rick Santorum an unimpeded shot at wresting the nomination from the faltering frontrunner, Mitt Romney.

Rick Santorum scored an upset double primary triumph in the deep south last night, guaranteeing that the Republican presidential race will drag on for weeks if not months yet. His victories in Alabama and Mississippi deliver a fresh jolt to the limping front runner Mitt Romney, and raise pressure on Newt Gingrich, his rival for the conservative vote, to drop out and thus set up a one-on-one Santorum-Romney battle for the Republican nomination to face president Obama in the autumn.

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.

Juliannne Moore is cast as Alaska's presidential hopeful in a recreation of 2008 election race

The race for the Republican nomination could be on the cusp of a shake-up with aides to Newt Gingrich whispering for the first time that he needs to win in two southern states voting next week or face leaving the field.

Out of America: The US loves movies about bizarre creatures wreaking havoc. Now it's got them for real

Heavy rains from Tropical Storm Lee were falling in southern Louisiana and pelting the US Gulf Coast yesterday as the storm's centre trudged slowly towards land, where businesses were already beginning to suffer on what would normally be a bustling holiday weekend. With floods from the storms of last weekend's Hurricane Irene still evident in New England, Lee could bring up to 20 inches of rain to some areas.

David "Honeyboy" Edwards was, almost certainly, the last surviving link with the "Golden Age" of the Delta blues. A friend and associate of many of the genre's seminal figures, including the great Robert Johnson, he was a performer of versatility, integrity and power who continued to hold audiences in his thrall into his tenth decade.

The American author Richard Wright is most famous for this one book. It was his first novel, and on its publication in 1940, it became one of the fastest-selling novels in American literary history: a remarkable feat for a 32-two-year old, largely self-educated, man from Mississippi. It would be fair to say that it changed his life forever. He went on to write many other books, both fiction and non-fiction, but at the time of his death, at the young age of 52 in 1960, many of the obituary notices made reference to Wright as the author of just this one book, 'Native Son'.