World stunned as U.S. struggles with Katrina

World stunned as U.S. struggles with Katrina: "'A modern metropolis sinking in water and into anarchy -- it is a really cruel spectacle for a champion of security like Bush,' France's left-leaning Liberation newspaper said.

'(Al Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden, nice and dry in his hideaway, must be killing himself laughing.'

A female employee at a multinational firm in South Korea said it may have been no accident the U.S. was hit.

'Maybe it was punishment for what it did to Iraq, which has a man-made disaster, not a natural disaster,' said the woman, who did not want to be named as she has an American manager.

'A lot of the people I work with think this way. We spoke about it just the other day,' she said.

Commentators noted the victims of the hurricane were overwhelmingly African Americans, too poor to flee the region as the hurricane loomed unlike some of their white neighbours.

New Orleans ranks fifth in the United States in terms of African American population and 67 percent of the city's residents are black.

'In one of the poorest states in the country, where black people earn half as much as white people, this has taken on a racial dimension,' said a report in Britain's Guardian daily."