Patrick Mercer arrived in Parliament on the back of a decorated army record including an award for gallantry.

A satellite designed to track severe weather in the US, has failed on the eve of the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season.

An internet celebrity known as “Kai the hatchet-wielding hitcher” has been charged with murder, after he allegedly bludgeoned a 73-year-old man to death.

The huge German airship exploded above a New Jersey airfield on May 6 1937 – with newsreel footage of its burning wreckage forming one of the 20th Century’s most iconic images

The Grammy-winning singer Lauryn Hill has been sentenced to three months in prison for failing to pay taxes on earnings of around $1m.

A convicted American killer living in Cuba has become the first woman to be named on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list.

Zach Braff’s long awaited follow up to his acclaimed film Garden State has taken its inspiration from Veronica Mars - well its crowd funding model, at least.

German police are searching for thieves who may or may not be overweight and chocolate-mouthed after five tons of Nutella were stolen in the latest global food heist.

In her way, Barbara Piasecka Johnson epitomised the American dream. She came to New York in 1968, an immigrant from Poland with a degree in art history and barely $100 in her pocket. She left some 18 years later as one of the richest women in the world, her fortune sealed by victory in one of the largest – and surely the most unpleasant – probate battles in US history.

The formation of the group is expected to be announced in the next few weeks and is thought to have a goal of raising $50m to campaign for political reform on immigration and education issues.

Police found an emaciated four-year-old boy in a flat with the body of his mother, who appeared to have been dead for about five days.

William Faulkner wrote several works about the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Steinbeck mined the possibilities of his native California in the “Dustbowl” years of the Depression. But we have to look back to James Joyce and his love-hate relationship with Dublin to find an equivalent of Philip’s Roth attitude to his birthplace, Newark.

Online gambling group 888 has set up a joint venture with the $12 billion (£8 billion) Avenue Capital investment group to launch online gambling in the United States.

Thousands of false identities used in elaborate scam