Katrina Hurricane

Stung by criticism that he and his administration had neglected the hurricane-tattered Gulf Coast, President Bush on Thursday made his first visit to the region in six months, proclaiming, "This is a hopeful day." Bush, standing in a muddy lot near new homes in Long Beach, Miss., said: "Part of the reason I've come down is to tell people here in the Gulf Coast that we still think about them in Washington.... Times are changing for the better, and people's lives are improving. And there is hope."

With a $77-billion claim, the city of New Orleans led tens of thousands of homeowners and businesses seeking compensation from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for losses suffered when levees protecting the city ruptured under the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina. Kathleen Gibbs, a spokeswoman in the corps' New Orleans district office, said that by Monday at least 34,500 claims had arrived by mail.

Businesses in the parishes that bore the brunt of hurricanes Katrina and Rita have made a slight rebound, but a significant number went under and many are "hanging by a thread," according a report issued Thursday. "It shows that the effects of the hurricanes were every bit as devastating to small businesses as we have anecdotally heard," said Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

Fats Domino broke into soft song as he stepped slowly through his gutted house in the city's flood-ravaged 9th Ward on Friday. Sometimes the Hall of Fame piano man murmured a line of his familiar lyrics. At other moments, he just seemed to be thinking out loud, with a tune. "Why such bad luck fall on me?" the 79-year-old sang, looking out a rear window into the neighborhood where he was born in 1928. In between melodies, he said repeatedly that it was time to come home. "I'm ready," he said.

When Tyra Newell got a call asking her to lead a training program for principals in New Orleans as part of an effort to overhaul the city's troubled public schools, the 31-year-old native had been away from the city for 14 years, most recently in Chicago, where she was the public school system's budget director. The opportunity to return, she said, "was like a dream come true. I knew this was a tangible way to give back to the city that had given so much to me."

Eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, the healthcare system in New Orleans remains in such disarray that patients with heart disease and cancer are getting inadequate care, local medical authorities told Congress on Tuesday. By one estimate, they said, the number of deaths may have increased by more than 40% from pre-Katrina figures.

State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. will reexamine more than 35,000 policyholder claims filed after Hurricane Katrina and "make millions of dollars available" for additional payments, Mississippi Insurance Commissioner George Dale said Monday. Dale said the agreement between his office and State Farm covered homeowners, renters and commercial claims in the state's three coastal counties. The agreement with the Bloomington, Ill.

Today, the Lower 9th Ward is a dreary landscape of deserted brick and wood-frame structures, concrete slabs where homes once stood, unshaded streets and sidewalks buckled by uprooted live oaks and weeks of standing water. At night, a graveyard silence is broken only by the skittering of rats. It is about as inhospitable a place as exists in post-Katrina New Orleans. And yet sisters Tanya Harris and Tracy Flores are moving back. To them, the "Lower 9" is still beautiful.

Google Inc.'s replacement of post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery on its map portal with images of the region before the storm does a "great injustice" to the storm's victims, a congressional subcommittee said. The House Committee on Science and Technology's subcommittee on investigations and oversight Friday asked Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt to explain why his company was using the outdated imagery. The subcommittee cited an Associated Press report on the images.

Brian Watkins initially thought that Hurricane Katrina had done him a favor. It forced him to flee to southwestern Louisiana, where he planned to make a fresh start and kick his heroin and methadone habit. But then Hurricane Rita tore through that corner of the state, and Watkins was chased back to New Orleans. "At first I thought I could just go out and socialize," said Watkins, 23, who had been on probation for a narcotics offense before the storms. "But everybody was drugging.