New Orleans La

THERE was talk, after Hurricane Katrina, about fresh starts for the people who had been mired in trouble here before the storm. Such talk wasn't enough to keep Mandell Duplessis away from home. He was a seventh-grade dropout who had been dealing drugs since he was a teenager. Floodwaters destroyed his apartment and sent him packing for Atlanta. But Duplessis, 24, could not resist the lure of the only hometown he had ever known.

The idea was simple: To avoid the kind of catastrophe that followed Hurricane Katrina, people rebuilding houses in New Orleans' flood plain should raise them 3 feet. In federal guidelines and in a comprehensive plan for the city's recovery, property owners are encouraged -- financially and rhetorically -- to rebuild higher.

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.

With the boom of cannons, the Navy commissioned the U.S. transport ship New Orleans, the first time since at least World War II a Navy ship has been built and commissioned in its namesake city. "May God bless and guide this warship and all who sail on her," the secretary of the Navy, Donald C. Winter, said before hundreds of sailors in crisp, white uniforms ran onto the ship to set the traditional first watch and to salute the crowd below. The $1.

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."

When Sabulal Vijayan saw the advertisement in a newspaper in his native state of Kerala in southwestern India, he thought he had found the solution to his family's financial problems. The ad offered laborers job opportunities in the U.S. Gulf Coast region after Hurricane Katrina under a guest worker program.

Garelle Smith, a resident of one of New Orleans' toughest neighborhoods, was already a sort of poster boy for the city's troubled criminal justice system before prosecutors declined to charge him this week in the Aug. 4 slaying of Mandell Duplessis. When Smith was arrested in January, an editorial in the Times-Picayune newspaper noted that he had been a suspect in two previous slayings but never went to trial. The paper called Smith "the beneficiary of a gummed up criminal justice system."

Mayor C. Ray Nagin said he wanted the National Guard and state police to stay in New Orleans through the end of the summer to help fight crime. Nagin wants Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to keep the 60 state troopers and 300 National Guard troops in the city past the June 30 deadline to help the depleted Police Department patrol the streets of the hurricane- and crime-devastated city.