At least five people have been killed in Oklahoma and a disaster emergency has been declared in Kansas after a severe storm system moving through the Midwest spawned a number of strong tornadoes.
Oklahoma Dept. of Emergency Management information officer Keli Cain confirmed there were five deaths in the Woodward area of north-west Oklahoma.
Two of the dead are children, according to NBC News affiliate in Oklahoma, KFOR.
In Kansas, governor Sam Brownback issued a declaration of disaster emergency to help speed relief to areas affected by the storms. "We are continuing to assess all the damages across the state," said Brownback, "and signing this declaration clears the way for making state aid available to those counties that need help with clean-up and recovery."
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Dozens of tornadoes were reported Saturday as baseball-size hail shattered windows and tore the siding off homes in northeast Nebraska and one twister damaged a hospital in Creston, Iowa. Several homes were wrecked in Kansas.
NBC News reported there were 112 recorded tornadoes in Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana and Oklahoma.
Forecasters had warned of "life-threatening" storms in the nation's midsection. No serious injuries from Saturday were immediately reported.
A tornado was reported on the ground near Wichita, Kan., late Saturday and power in the city was going out, NBC station KSN reported. Homes were reported damaged on the city's south side, but details were not immediately available.
Slideshow: Tornadoes rake Midwest
KSN also reported that one building at airplane-maker Spirit Aerosystem collapsed in the storm. At the Wichita airport, winds gusting to 84 mph blew open hangars and overturned luggage carts, The Weather Channel reported. McConnell Air Force Base, which relocated aircraft to other bases before the storms moved in, reported hangar and housing damage, KSN said.
The National Weather Service office in Wichita temporarily turned over operations to the Topeka office Saturday as storms threatened to destroy its building.
Racegoers should wrap up warmly and bring an umbrella today as thousands flock to Aintree for the 165th John Smith's Grand National.
A northerly breeze will keep the air icy cold as 40 runners and riders compete in the world's most famous steeplechase.
Racing enthusiasts should also prepare for rain, forecasters warned.
"It will be pretty chilly at the Grand National today, reaching about 9C. There will be showers this afternoon with hail mixed in," Paul Mott, forecaster at MeteoGroup, the weather division of the Press Association, said.
The rest of the country will not fare much better as the South West faces heavy showers.
Mr Mott said: "There will probably be some thunder and hail mixed in and there will be heavy showers in the North East too. There could be some snow on the Pennines first thing in the morning, leaving a slight covering on the hills, but that should melt by 8am.
"Last night there was light snow over Aberdeenshire and the Highlands leaving maybe a centimetre or two on the ground.
"Tonight will be cold and dry, reaching -4C in rural parts of Scotland. It will be zero degrees in the south east and quite a sharp frost will be enough to kill off any flowering plants."
Mr Mott said Sunday night would be even colder.
"It will be about -4 to -5C in rural parts of south east England, which is very cold for this time of year."
The Arizona state Senate on Tuesday voted to ban most abortions performed after 20 weeks of pregnancy, according to news reports.
The bill was passed by a mostly party-line 20-to-10 vote in the Republican-dominated Senate, Capitol Media Services reported.
Only one Republican joined the body's nine Democrats to oppose the measure, which now goes to Arizona's House of Representatives for consideration.
The bill marks the latest salvo in the long-running national battle over late-term abortions.
Six states in the past two years have enacted late-term abortion bans based on controversial medical research suggesting a fetus feels pain starting at 20 weeks of gestation.
The U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortions nationwide in 1973 but allowed states to ban the procedure, unless it risked the woman's health, after the time when the fetus could potentially survive outside the womb. (Reporting by Tim Gaynor; Editing by Steve Gorman)
Is there anyone having a better year than Adele? First, she topped the Sunday Times Rich List of England's youngest stars -- after making more $31.8 million in the last year -- and now, her global smash album 21 is poised to take back the top spot on the U.S. chart.
If you've been counting, that's 24 nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200. While it's too early to tell how many copies the album will sell by the end of the week, Billboard is reporting that anywhere in the range of 110,000 to 130,000 is possible.
Adele's good news comes just days after Madonna's MDNA album sales plummeted, resulting in the biggest sales drop for a No. 1 album in Billboard history.
Perhaps even more impressive than spending 24 nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200, is that if Adele's 21 does return to the head of the charts, it will become one of only eight albums to spend six months leading the list. Prince and the Revolution's 1984 Purple Rain soundtrack was the last album to lead the charts for 24 weeks.
The West Side Story soundtrack, which was released in 1962, holds the record for the most nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1, with 54 weeks. Holding down the No. 2 spot is Michael Jackson's iconic Thriller album, which spent 37 weeks out front.
21 has now sold 8.64 million copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan.
The bikini photos just keep on coming! Hayden Panettiere is the latest actress to show off her bikini body this week, following in the footsteps of Beyonce, Brooklyn Decker and Lea Michele.
According to Bauer-Griffin Online, Panettiere sported a coral bikini while vacationing in Hawaii with her boyfriend, New York Jets player Scotty McKnight. The pair was spotted kissing and later hit the tennis court for a workout, with Panettiere wearing just a small black bikini.
The cozy couple is headed toward their one-year anniversary -- they began dating in June 2011 -- and we saw Panettiere in the stands with McKnight at a Jets game last season while he was injured. From the look of their PDA, it seems like we might be seeing Panettiere at many more NFL games this fall.
Check out photos from Panettiere's beach day below. For more, head over to Bauer-Griffin Online.com.
The U.S. Coast Guard is searching for four crew members from a 38-foot sailing vessel that ran aground during a yacht race near San Francisco.
At least one person from the "Low Speed Chase" vessel died, and three have been rescued, Petty Officer 2nd Class Levi Read said. He said a total of eight people were on board.
Read said the boat ran aground during a race around the Farallon Islands on Saturday afternoon.
The three rescued crew members were retrieved from the Farallon Islands, according to the Yacht Racing Association of San Francisco Bay. The association said the accident happened during the 2012 Full Crew Farallones Race.
Late last month, the Coast Guard rescued racers taking part in an around-the-world contest when a giant wave damaged their yacht off the coast of San Francisco. The Geraldton Western Australia was on the sixth leg of an eight-leg, 11-month race when it was struck on March 31.
A convicted sex offender who was just released from prison didn't show much goodwill for the Goodwill Thrift Store in Sherman, Texas.
Authorities say Adam Mabery smashed through the glass at the store early Monday morning -- naked -- and put on a red dress and heels and proceeded to dance around the thrift store, dripping blood on the merchandise. The footage -- shown at RightThisMinute -- shows the gender-bending perp causing more than $30,000 in damage in the process.
"It just makes you wonder what the heck somebody can do," Bill Williams, Goodwill's operations director, told KVUE-TV. "Just for one person to tear up what he tore up... It kind of looked like a war zone in here."
Mabery recently moved to Sherman from Houston after being released from prison.
According to local police, Mabury broke through the glass window of a nearby motel, then cut himself on the head and arm before running amok in the second-hand store.
The front desk clerk at the Executive Inn where Mabery was staying called Sherman police after he broke out, according to hotel manager Jai Demla told KXII-TV.
Sherman Police Sergeant Bruce Dawsey doesn't know if the accused was having a mental breakdown.
"Not sure what his mental state was at the time -- if he was intoxicated on alcohol or some other substance," Dawsey told KXII-TV.
Mabery's bloody ballet caused a lot of damage, according to Goodwill spokeswoman Lisa Gann.
"We had eight barrels of donations that hadn't been processed yet, and every one of those had to be thrown out," she told KVUE-TV, adding that the charity had to spend $8,000 on a HazMat crew to clean up the blood, which also required the store to be closed for a few days. The glass counters, carpeting and front door must all be replaced.
Canada and the United States are finding themselves at odds with Latin American countries on two thorny issues — the war on drugs and the exclusion of Cuba — at a summit of hemispheric leaders in Colombia.
The event's host, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, delivered a frank speech Saturday to the assembled heads of state and government in which he said it would be "unacceptable" to hold another Summit of the Americas without Cuba. The communist country was suspended from the Organization of American States, the main organizing body for the summits, in 1962.
Canada and the United States are the only two countries in the organization that have not lobbied to invite to Cuba to the events.
"The isolation, the embargo, the indifference, the looking the other way don't work," Santos said in the coastal resort city of Cartagena. "It's an anachronism that keeps us anchored in a Cold War era that was overcome decades ago."
Three Latin American leaders are threatening not to sign Sunday's summit declaration unless Canada and the United States agree to allow Cuba to attend the next one, the CBC's Terry Milewski reported from the summit.
Divided over drugs
The Colombian president also said that the war on drugs isn't working and that he would like to see a debate on decriminalizing them.
Violence related to the drug trade has pushed murder rates in Central America and the Caribbean to the highest in the world.
But Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office has said he won't entertain any policy changes that would lift the prohibition of illicit drugs, while U.S. President Barack Obama repeated at the summit on Saturday that the White House believes "legalization is not the answer."
Saturday's focus on Cuba and drug enforcement policy clashed with Harper's agenda at the summit, which was to sell Canada as an attractive destination to do business.
The prime minister went looking for investment dollars from across the region during a speech Saturday to assembled leaders, where he boasted of Canada's economic stability and strong resource industry.
Harper also told a forum of CEOs his government's budget promises to speed up the regulatory process to develop major natural resource projects is a key reason they should invest.
"We cannot allow valid concerns about environmental protection to be used as an excuse to trap worthwhile projects in reviews without end," Harper said. "What matters is that the relevant facts are fully considered. That need not take years."
A prostitution scandal involving U.S. security personnel in Colombia and an unprecedented regional push to end the isolation of Cuba threatened on Saturday to eclipse President Barack Obama's charm offensive to Latin America.
In a major embarrassment for Washington at the Summit of the Americas attended by more than 30 heads of state, 11 U.S. Secret Service agents were sent home and five military servicemen grounded over "misconduct" allegations in a hotel.
Prostitutes were taken to the hotel, according to a Colombian police source.
The widening controversy was overshadowing a host of weightier topics at the two-day summit that began on Saturday.
"I had a breakfast meeting to discuss trade and drugs, but the only thing the other delegates wanted to talk about was the story of the agents and the hookers," chuckled one Latin American diplomat in the historic city of Cartagena.
Locals were upset about the bad publicity for their city, and the scandal was raising eyebrows around the region.
"Obama's guards expelled in Colombia over prostitution - shame the gringos think that Latin America is a brothel and they act like it too," commented left-leaning Venezuelan political commentator Nicmer Evans via Twitter.
Obama's rapprochement with the region - already undermined by the titillating headlines from Cartagena - also faces a rare display of unity among both leftist and conservative-run nations in Latin America in allowing communist-run Cuba at the next summit.
Argentina's foreign minister said the final summit declaration was stalled over the issue of Cuba, with 32 nations supporting its inclusion in the next Summit of the Americas, but the United States vetoing that.
"We have decided not to participate in future 'Summits of the Americas' without the presence of Cuba," said the leftist ALBA block of nations, founded by Venezuela's theatrically anti-U.S. president, Hugo Chavez.
