Newspapers critical of Bush administration

European and US newspapers have stepped up criticism of the Bush Administration for its slow response to the disaster.

If the President and Congress pass "a few emergency measures and then fall back on their plans to enact more tax cuts, America will have to confront the fact that it is stuck with leaders who neither know, nor care, how to lead", said the New York Times.

The Boston Globe said it was time for the US to renew the "war on poverty", noting that images of the disaster showed that the poor in New Orleans "were long overlooked".

Liberation in Paris said Bush was presiding over an Administration in which both poverty and the anger of the dispossessed were increasing. The Daily Telegraph in London described New Orleans as "an American Pompeii caused by idiocy".