Eleven of the nearly four dozen people injured when a car careened into a crowd watching a Oklahoma State University homecoming parade at the weekend were children, police said, in addition to a toddler who died of his injuries.

HE has been called an idiot, an incompetent and worse. The vilification of federal disaster chief Michael Brown, emerging as chief scapegoat for whatever went wrong in the US Government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, has ratcheted into the stratosphere.

THE White House was under fire again yesterday with reports US President George W Bush chose unqualified political supporters instead of disaster experts to head the agency leading the Katrina relief effort.

A small plane crashed into a house bordering a golf course in suburban Austin, Texas, and burst into flames, killing the six people aboard. Three people inside the luxury two-story home escaped unharmed.