Two people, including a police officer, have been killed in a shooting on the Virginia Tech university campus, scene of America's worst gun massacre four years ago.

Ruth Stone, who has died aged 96, was an award-winning poet whose life spanned the 20th and 21st centuries. During her lifetime she was compared by her contemporaries to Sappho, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin and Anna Akhmatova. She bequeaths a literary legacy to be reckoned with for the remainder of this century.

The capital of the free world has experienced many a man-made shock in recent years: a major terrorist attack, serial sniper murders, an anthrax scare, not to mention a brush with national debt default. Yesterday, though, Washington DC received a rare and jarring shock at the hand of Mother Nature: a 5.8-magnitude earthquake that rattled structures, emptied the Capitol and other office buildings, and crashed mobile phone networks.

Some time last Friday night, someone created a Wikipedia page for David T Beers. Overdue, you might think.

A teenager who was buried in 6ft of sand while digging a trench on a California beach said he was certain he would die before rescuers pulled him to safety.

Virginia Tech was locked down today when three children attending a summer camp said they saw a man holding what looked like a gun on the campus where a 2007 massacre left 33 people dead.

A baseball fan died after he fell from a stand while trying to catch a ball for his son.

Police closed several roads around the Pentagon in Virginia yesterday after arresting a man whom they found with suspicious materials in his backpack.

For 20 years, and some 635 episodes, James Arness starred as Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, still the longest run of any star in American prime-time television drama. In the era when westerns ruled the airwaves, Gunsmoke was the most popular of them all. It débuted in 1955, and from 1957-61 was the top-rated show in the country – and, retitled Gun Law, was popular in the UK as well. As the genre declined Gunsmoke thrived, finally ending in 1975, having outlasted all its competition and setting longevity records that still stand.

BBC Films, the Corporation's film-making arm, is to make a movie inspired by Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Cillian Murphy. It will transfer the story's setting from the 1930s American Deep South to contemporary England's industrial northeast.

Bradley Manning, the American soldier accused of handing government secrets to the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing organisation, has been found mentally fit to stand trial, the US Army said yesterday.

President Barack Obama planned today to tour parts of Alabama that were devastated by an outbreak of tornados that killed nearly 300 people in the U.S. South, as survivors tried to recover what was left of their belongings.