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.

Officials say there is no danger from a nuclear power plant in Nebraska which closed this week after becoming surrounded by flood waters.

Collecting together Bruce Springsteen's first seven albums in a handy slipcase box, The Collection 1973-84 reveals how his career development went in emotional waves, with the wordy urgency of his debut supplanted by the growing ebullience of his R&B street-opera style on The Wild,the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, which then crested on Born to Run, before his three-year recording exile incubated the flintier, more thoughtful cast of Darkness on the Edge of Town, whose burgeoning interest in social duty and blue-collar honour bore abundant fruit on The River before hardening into a more bitter medicine on the solo Nebraska.

Starring: Lucas Cruikshank

A British woman who had recently married an American psychologist was stabbed to death by her stepson in a frenzied attack at their home.

Originally released in 2004, One Jug Of Wine, Two Vessels was a six-track collaborative effort between Conor Oberst's Bright Eyes and their Omaha, Nebraska label-mates Neva Dinova.

More than a decade ago, Oscar-nominated actress Debra Winger quit Hollywood. Now she's back. She tellsGaynor Flynn what she was up to...

The central United States is home to Tornado Alley and its awesome weather patterns. The stormchasers Eric Nguyen and Mike Hollingshead spent days driving thousands of miles in pursuit of these majestic and destructive events. Here are their photo diaries

Nebraska's Lullaby for the Working Class's unusual country-influenced music comes complete with religious imagery, Tolstoy, and the loneliness of their home state. Nick Hasted met the band, and found they're part of a great American musical lineage.

Burton Group, the retailer which announced plans to demerge its Debenhams department stores operation last week, has launched a competition to decide the new name of its multiples businesses which include Burton Menswear, Dorothy Perkins, Top Shop and Principles.

ONE AFTERNOON when I was seven, on the bus back from the Buenos Aires English High School, a boy whose name I never knew called out to me from the back seat: 'Hey, Jew, so your father likes money?' I remember being so bewildered by the question that I didn't know what to answer. I didn't think my father was particularly fond of money, but there was an implied insult in the boy's tone that I couldn't understand. Above all, I was surprised at being called 'Jew'. My grandmother went to the synagogue, but my parents were not religious, and I had never thought of myself in terms of a word I believed was reserved for my grandmother's generation.

OMAHA, Nebraska, the birthplace of Johnny Carson, has another distinction: it gives its name to a particularly exciting form of poker derived from Texas Hold 'em. In Omaha, players are dealt a hand of four cards face down, as opposed to only two cards in Hold 'em. With four cards in the hole, no fewer than six starting hands are possible (ab ac ad bc bd cd). The other important difference between Hold 'em and Omaha is that at Omaha, after the five community cards are dealt face-up, players must use two cards in the hand in the showdown.

THE ELEVEN STORIES which make up this collection are so disparate in tone and time and subject that one despairs of locating any kind of unity. They stretch from the era of late 19th-century pioneers to the present, encompassing the trials of insurance salesmen, the worries of a farmer's wife, the fatigue of a contract killer. What on earth do they have in common? Broadly speaking, America is what, and the flat, wide plains of Nebraska in particular, celebrated in the closing title story as 'places of ownership and a hard kind of happiness', where people have spent lifetimes protecting themselves against something, usually fate, or just the weather.

Elizabeth Egloff's The Swan at the Traverse is a desperate plea for romantic love from the snow-covered wastes of modern Nebraska. Egloff couches her message in the idiom of the contemporary adult fairy-tale, a device which in this instance creaks more and more loudly as the play's activity increases.