Nation in brief: Judge rules corps liable for flooding

New Orleans – A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Army Corps of Engineers’ failure to properly maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding in Hurricane Katrina.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval sided with five residents and one business who argued the Army Corps’ shoddy oversight of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet led to the flooding of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward and neighboring St. Bernard Parish. He said, however, the corps couldn’t be held liable for the flooding of eastern New Orleans, where one of the plaintiffs lived.

Duval awarded the plaintiffs $720,000, or about $170,000 each, but the decision could eventually make the government vulnerable to a much larger payout. The ruling should give more than 100,000 other individuals, businesses and government entities a better shot at claiming billions of dollars in damages.

Officer uses Taser on 10-year-old girl

Little Rock, Ark. – A police officer in a small Arkansas town used a stun gun on an unruly 10-year-old girl after, he said, her mother gave him permission to do so. Now the town’s mayor is calling for an investigation into whether the Taser use was appropriate.

According to a report by Officer Dustin Bradshaw, police were called to the Ozark home Nov. 11 because of a domestic disturbance. When he arrived, the girl was curled up on the floor, screaming.

Bradshaw’s report said the girl screamed, kicked and resisted any time her mother tried to get her in the shower before bed.

“Her mother told me to tase her if I needed to,” Bradshaw wrote.

The child was “violently kicking and verbally combative” when Bradshaw tried to take her into custody, and she kicked him in the groin. So he delivered “a very brief drive stun to her back,” the report said.

The names of the girl and her mother were redacted in the report.

Ozark Mayor Vernon McDaniel said Wednesday that the girl wasn’t injured and is now at the Western Arkansas Youth Shelter in Cecil. But McDaniel said he wants Arkansas State Police to investigate the incident.