A MAN arrested at a homeless shelter and charged with two killings has confessed to those and 21 others.

Officials ended their door-to-door sweep for corpses, finding far fewer bodies than once feared and school children returned to classes as New Orleans revved up efforts to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

Engineers pumped much of the remaining floodwater out of New Orleans as tens of thousands of residents continued returning to dry neighbourhoods to check on houses and reopen businesses.

Hurricane Rita poured more water into New Orleans for a second day today and inundated fishing villages along Louisiana’s coast, where dozens of people were rescued from homes swamped by up to 6 feet of water.

Hurricane Rita ploughed into the Gulf of Mexico coast early today, lashing Texas and Louisiana with driving rain, flooding low-lying regions, knocking power out to nearly a million customers and sparking fires across the region.

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.

One week after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region, miles-long lines of vehicles crawled into suburban New Orleans today as residents were allowed to return to salvage what was left of their homes. New Orleans’ mayor warned that 10,000 people may have died.

THE Bush administration was yesterday fighting to save face after its botched rescue plans left New Orleans at the mercy of Hurricane Katrina.

APPREHENSIVE coastal residents from Florida’s Panhandle to Louisiana started boarding up windows, packing and hitting the road as powerful Hurricane Ivan headed for the Gulf Coast after ploughing across Cuba.