From AP:

With a major levee break finally plugged, engineers struggled to pump out the flooded city Tuesday as authorities braced for the horrors the receding water would reveal. "It's going to be awful and it's going to wake the nation up again," the mayor said.

Mayor Ray Nagin said it would take three weeks to remove the water and another few weeks to clear the debris. It could also take up to eight weeks to get the electricity back on.

Repairs have been completed on the 17th Street canal levee breach in New Orleans and water is being pumped out of the canal and back into Lake Pontchartrain.

From Reuters:

New Orleans was slowly turning back the floodwaters on Tuesday as engineers closed a major break in levees swamped by Hurricane Katrina -- a disaster the mayor says may have killed 10,000 in his city.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it plugged a big gap in the levees on Monday and was pumping water out of the city, a task it expects will take up to 80 days.

The Corps was also working to plug another major breach in the levees built to keep out the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, which nearly surround the city, spokesman John Hall said.

"We are proceeding very gently," Hall said of the pumping operation. Engineers want to ensure the water being pumped out does not further damage the levee system and create a new breach.

From WWL:

New Orleans is getting tough with people who are still refusing to leave the hurricane-ravaged city.

Mayor Ray Nagin says water will no longer be handed out to people who refuse to leave.

Despite evacuations, rescues and relief efforts, Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley says some people still don't want to leave their homes while others are hanging back to take part in looting and other criminal activity.

State police are using force to get some to move. A SWAT team, armed with rifles, confronted two brothers at their home in the Uptown section of New Orleans, leaving one sobbing.

One officer says the team tried to make sure that the two men understood that food and water is becoming scarce and that disease could begin spreading.

Now the hard task of finding, identifying and counting the dead begins. Pretty much every house in the city is going to have to be searched for bodies. So far the count stands at 59 (10 from the Superdome), and it will just keep rising. Mississipi's death toll currently stands at 161.