Rainbow and lightning bolts!

    When a rainbow formed in the sky people stopped and stared at the natural wonder.

But then lightning sparked across the evening panorama as two of nature's most spectacular phenomenon created an unusual alliance.

See more incredible storms and lightning pictures here

The clash of weather was seen above the affluent city of Fort Smith, in the Southern state Arkansas.

One onlooker said: "It was awe inspiring. The lightning made a huge rumbling sound and when you looked up there was also this incredible rainbow forming on the horizon."

The intracloud lightning, known as an anvil crawler, is the most common form of lightning, with the electrical charge contained within a single cumulonimbus cloud.

Lightning often occurs during heavy storms while rainbows are generally formed after the rain has stopped, making an appearance of both simultaneously relatively rare.

The actual electric charge in a flash of lightning comes from particles from the sun sent out in the solar wind which gather in the outer atmospheric layers before creating a strike.

Scientists are still divided by what actually causes lightning, with one theory suggesting falling droplets of ice and rain become electrically polarised as they fall through the natural electric field in the Earth's atmosphere.

This would explain why lightning often accompanies storms and heavy rain. The same droplets also cause the rainbow, when light from the sun is refracted by the water to cause a spectrum.

Source: Daily Mail

Plame sues Rove and Cheney

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA officer whose identity was leaked to reporters sued Vice President Dick Cheney, his former top aide and presidential adviser Karl Rove on Thursday, accusing them and other White House officials of conspiring to destroy her career.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, accused Cheney, Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of revealing Plame's CIA identity in seeking revenge against Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq.

ON DEADLINE: Read the complaint

Several news organizations wrote about Plame after syndicated columnist Robert Novak named her in a column on July 14, 2003. Novak's column appeared eight days after Wilson alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.

The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in early 2002 to determine whether there was any truth to reports that Saddam Hussein's government had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports, but the allegation nevertheless wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame.

"This lawsuit concerns the intentional and malicious exposure by senior officials of the federal government of ... (Plame), whose job it was to gather intelligence to make the nation safer and who risked her life for her country," the Wilsons' lawyers said in the lawsuit.

Libby is the only administration official charged in connection with the leak investigation. He faces trial in January on perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges, accused of lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about when he learned Plame's identity and what he subsequently told reporters.

Source: USA today