WASHINGTON — President Obama will nominate Florida emergency manager W. Craig Fugate to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency, asking one of the nation's most experienced hurricane hands to direct the much-criticized U.S. disaster-response arm, the White House announced yesterday.

If confirmed by the Senate, Fugate, 49, would head a 4,400-worker bureaucracy that was widely blamed for the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

KENNEDY NOW AN HONORARY KNIGHT

LONDON — He won't be allowed to call himself Sir Ted, but U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy has been awarded an honorary knighthood by Britain.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the honor yesterday in Washington in an address to a joint session of Congress. Kennedy, who has brain cancer, did not attend.

Brown said Kennedy, 77, had helped bring peace to Northern Ireland, expand healthcare for Americans and improve access to education for children around the world.

Brown referred to the senator as "Sir Edward Kennedy," although unlike British knights he is not entitled to use the honorific "Sir" before his name.

SUDAN OFFICIALS EXPEL AID GROUPS

NAIROBI, Kenya — Reacting swiftly to the International Criminal Court's decision to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the government of Sudan yesterday expelled at least 10 foreign groups that provide aid to more than a million displaced people in the western Darfur region.

The expulsions were part of the Sudanese government's dismissive response to charges that al-Bashir used the instruments of state to direct the mass murder of tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians in Darfur in the past six years.

EARTH HAS CLOSE CALL WITH ASTEROID

PASADENA, Calif. — An asteroid about the size of one that blasted Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth.

The asteroid was 48,800 miles from Earth when it zip- ped past early Monday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported. That's twice as high as the orbits of some man-made satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the moon.

The space rock measured between 69 feet and 154 feet in diameter, making it about the same size as the asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles of forest.