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NEW ORLEANS -- Monday night, inside the giant eggshell known as the Superdome, a fun time was had by all. OK, a bit more fun by Louisiana State fans, whose team won the national championship by beating Ohio State, 38-24. This was college football's showcase, the BCS title game. It was No. 1 Ohio State versus No. 2 LSU, one of the ultimate big deals in sports. There were flags and bands, exuberant fans dressed in reds and grays and purples and golds. Lots of attractive sights and sounds.

Idrank my first cocktail in New Orleans in my youth, downing fuzzy navels on Bourbon Street with my cousin Caroline Brady. Back then, I was content with cheap booze and plastic cups. Times have changed. Recently, while visiting Caroline and her family, I found a city with a renewed appreciation for serious cocktails.

NEW ORLEANS -- In a city chock full of 150-year-old houses with wooden porches and scrolling wrought iron, New Orleans would seem perfect fodder for "This Old House." But when producers of the television show surveyed the city's post-Hurricane Katrina landscape, they found old houses were only part of the story. They couldn't ignore the pastel-colored homes being built for displaced musicians, or the construction projects spearheaded by actor Brad Pitt.

After protesters skirmished with police inside and outside New Orleans City Hall on Thursday, the City Council voted unanimously to approve a federal plan to demolish a vast swath of public housing. The fate of the 4,500 public housing units has become a flash point as this city struggles to piece itself back together after Hurricane Katrina damaged more than 134,000 homes, many of them in poor, mostly black neighborhoods.

Protesters wielding bullhorns and shouting "housing is a human right!" stopped demolition at a large public housing complex in New Orleans. More than 30 protesters blocked an excavator from entering the fenced-off area of the B.W. Cooper complex. It was the first of what likely will be many standoffs between protesters and demolition crews that are tearing down hundreds of buildings so they can be replaced with mixed-income housing.

The police superintendent of New Orleans defended his decision to fire an officer who was videotaped beating a man in the French Quarter, even though the ex-officer was cleared of criminal charges. The fired officer, Robert Evangelist, wants to return to his old job with back pay. But Supt. Warren Riley said during a hearing in Evangelist's appeal that the officer was fired because he violated department policy. A ruling in the case is expected in a few months.

Protesters angry about the pending demolition of more than 4,000 public housing units stormed a City Council meeting Thursday in a confrontation that ended with a prominent civil rights lawyer being hauled off in handcuffs. Thursday's fracas was a taste of what's likely to come as former residents of the aging, neglected buildings and their advocates seek to stop demolitions that could begin as soon as Dec. 15 in a city that faces an acute housing shortage. The U.S.

IN Hollywood, causes tend to divide into the popular and the deeply personal. You usually can recognize the difference because the former come from the pages of next month's glossy magazines and the latter right from the heart. For all the time he spends on the tabloids' covers, for example, Brad Pitt actually is pretty much a homebody, and his activism grows out of the years he's spent exploring and understanding the role domestic architecture plays in individual lives.

A former New Orleans City Council member who prosecutors said reneged on a plea bargain to cooperate in a corruption probe was sentenced to a little over three years in federal prison for taking a $15,000 bribe. Oliver Thomas, once considered a shining light on the city's political scene and a potential future mayor, pleaded guilty Aug. 13.

Reversing a decision that some found bureaucratically absurd, the Federal Emergency Management Agency granted $99,766 to a New Orleans aquarium that saved taxpayers a bundle by catching replacements for the fish it lost to Hurricane Katrina. FEMA had said that the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas needed to buy the fish from commercial vendors, a method the agency said would cost $616,849 but would comply with disaster aid laws.