Reconstruction

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.

Congress should force the State and Defense departments to cooperate in planning and overseeing any future wartime reconstruction to prevent the kind of problems that befouled rebuilding efforts in Iraq, according to an investigative report to be issued today.

This is what all of Iraq was supposed to look like four years after Saddam Hussein's fall: a construction boom of apartment blocks and commercial buildings, universities full of students, an airport with direct flights to Europe and the Middle East and visitors pouring in. Outgoing U.S.

Iraq's government has left about $12.5 billion in rebuilding funds from its 2006 budget unspent because it lacks the tools and expertise to allocate the money, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, David Satterfield, said Tuesday. Satterfield argued that a recent request to Congress for an additional $4 billion in U.S. funding would help address the problem.

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.

Shops along the Solomon Islands' battered coastline reopened as aid began trickling to the region's outer atolls, a week after an offshore earthquake sent walls of water slamming into the coast. Vendors returned to their stalls along the main street in the town of Gizo for the first time since the magnitude 8.1 quake shook the Solomons' Western Province on April 2, killing at least 35 people and leaving 7,000 homeless.

A severe lack of maintenance appears to be threatening the future usefulness of some of the facilities renovated in Iraq, says a new report from the U.S. inspector general monitoring reconstruction. Inspectors reviewed eight facilities across the country -- including police stations, a military base, a hospital and a recruiting center -- to determine whether the buildings were operating at full capacity.