The gunman who shot dead two young American journalists on live TV was apparently intending to commit more violence before he took his own life, Virginia's governor said Friday.

Terry McAuliffe visited the studios of WDBJ television in Roanoke two days after Vester Flanagan killed reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, as they conducting an interview.

Two journalists for a local CBS affiliate in Virginia were shot dead Wednesday in a chilling live television broadcast, and the suspected gunman, apparently a disgruntled former station employee, has shot himself.

The suspect -- Vester Lee Flanagan, 41, also known as Bryce Williams -- was in critical condition, media cited police as saying, after initial reports that he too was dead.

Questions about why the Virgin Galactic spaceship crashed switched focus Monday to a prematurely-deployed lever on the doomed flight, as Virgin's boss suggested it may "well be" the cause.

But Branson also hit out against "hurtful" critics and "self-proclaimed experts" after a rocket scientist said that the company had ignored safety warnings ahead of the deadly crash of one of its spacecraft.

A female U.S. soldier shot and injured herself at a U.S. Army command post in Virginia on Monday, prompting a temporary lockdown of the base, officials said.

The soldier turned the gun on herself at the Combined Arms Support Command Headquarters at Fort Lee, about 130 miles (200 kilometers) south of the U.S. capital in Washington, the army said in a statement.

A U.S. Marine shot and killed two colleagues before apparently turning the gun on himself at a military base in Virginia, the U.S. Defense Department said on Friday.

Officials said the shooting happened late Thursday at the Quantico Marine base not far from Washington DC.

From a New England hamlet to a critical swing state neighboring Washington's halls of power to the storm-scarred streets of New York, Americans lined up Tuesday to cast ballots for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

Many were patient, some were jittery and still others -- those still enduring power outages and the mountainous mess and wreckage left by superstorm Sandy last week -- were perhaps understandably a bit cranky.

As Americans head to the polls on Tuesday, the tight White House race between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney has narrowed to a fight over less than 10 states.

Obama's strategy is to solidify his last line of defense in the industrial Midwest, and to try to pluck away several insurance states from Romney's target list elsewhere.

Sizzling high temperatures punished much of the eastern United States again on Saturday, one day after hurricane-like thunderstorms killed at least 11 people and cut power supply to millions.

Thermometers brushed the 100 degree Fahrenheit (37.7 Celsius) mark from the Mississippi River to the Mid-Atlantic coast as a vast area of high pressure squatted over the southern states with no signs of moving on soon.

All civilians initially listed as missing after a U.S. Navy fighter jet crashed into a Virginia apartment complex have been accounted for, officials said Saturday, though no all-clear has been given.

Virginia Beach Fire Department Captain Tim Riley told CNN that no bodies were found in the destroyed low-rise buildings and rescuers had suspended their search for victims from the ensuing inferno.

The supreme court of Virginia on Friday ruled in favor of a prominent climate scientist, blocking a two-year attempt by state officials to get access to his university emails and grant materials.

The case was brought by state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, a skeptic of global warming, against the University of Virginia where well known climate scientist Michael Mann taught from 1999 to 2005.