Southern United States

Pope John Paul II is expected to make an eight-day tour of the western and southern United States in 1987, officials of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco said. "We're in the pre-planning stage," said Father Miles Riley, director of communications for the archdiocese. "The U.S. Catholic Conference (composed of the nation's bishops and based in Washington, D.C.) is working closely with the Vatican. . . .

Gov. Steve Beshear deployed every last one of his Army National Guard troops Saturday, with his state still reeling after a deadly ice storm last week. More than 700,000 homes and businesses, most of them in Kentucky, remained without electricity from the Ozarks through Appalachia, though with temperatures creeping into the 40s, a swarm of utility workers were able to make headway.

A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of urine. Crack vials littered a restroom. Blood stained the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers. The Louisiana Superdome, once a mighty testament to architecture and ingenuity, became the biggest storm shelter in New Orleans the day before Katrina's arrival Monday. About 16,000 people eventually settled in. By Wednesday, it had degenerated into horror.

Anton Gunn is a Democratic candidate for the statehouse. He is also a black man running in a majority-white district -- a swath of Old South countryside and new suburban sprawl that hasn't elected a Democrat in 24 years. Two years ago, Gunn ran for the same office and lost. But he believes that 2008 is his year. He has learned a lot since then as state political director for Barack Obama's primary campaign in South Carolina.

Genarlow Wilson -- the young man imprisoned for committing a consensual sex act who became, for many, an example of an inequitable criminal justice system -- was released from prison Friday after his conviction was overturned by Georgia's Supreme Court. In 2005, Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation for having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17. He was sentenced to 10 years without parole, the mandatory minimum under Georgia law at the time.

In what demographers are calling a "full scale reversal" of the Great Migration in the early part of the 20th century, blacks are leaving California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey and retracing steps to a place their families once fled -- the South. This population shift of hundreds of thousands of blacks is nowhere near the millions who left the South from 1910 to 1970.

It was almost romantic when Doreen McDonald and Lee Rainwater sat down to take psychological tests together. Some things they knew. He knew he was smitten the first time he saw her, at a church-sponsored lecture on "Love, Sex and Relationships." She knew she loved talking to him so much that once they stood in a parking lot for a full hour, unable to end the conversation, while cars came and went around them.

VARNADO, La.--The two deputies drove quietly down Main Street, crossed the railroad tracks and headed home for a late dinner. It was not yet midnight on June 2, 1965. Alongside came a dark pickup with a Confederate flag decal on the front bumper, a driver, maybe one man with a firearm at the passenger window, maybe two men with firearms in the back of the truck. Oneal Moore was killed instantly, the back of his head blown out by a bullet from a high-powered hunting rifle.

Once it was feared and reviled as the "weed" that was swallowing the South. Now, Southerners are learning to live with and love--and even to laugh at--the kudzu plant. Kudzu, a prolific, fast-growing leafy vine, was originally introduced to this region from Japan. It was widely planted during the 1930s in an effort to control soil erosion but the effort went awry when kudzu, which can grow as fast as a foot a day, proved impossible to stop.

In 1989, Mississippi authorities reopened the case of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader slain more than two decades earlier. Their success in prosecuting Byron De La Beckwith for the crime prompted other law enforcement officials to begin an earnest reevaluation of unsolved cases from the civil rights era. The effort has reaped convictions in half a dozen cases. Most recently, Bobby Frank Cherry was found guilty last month in the Sept.

On the eve of October's peak seafood harvesting season, migrant fishermen are sweeping debris from gutted bay-side homes instead of scooping shrimp and oysters from the Gulf of Mexico's lucrative floor. The $100-million fishing industry in Galveston Bay is nearly paralyzed. Hurricane Ike's effect is being felt among gulf seafood harvesters, distributors and restaurants.

When the gas gauge on Jada Burns' Kia wagon was on empty Tuesday afternoon, she lucked out, catching her neighborhood Chevron station at a time when its pumps were open. But the clerk, Mamadou Diallo, said he expected to be sold out by rush hour. With drivers already forming a line, it was about 20 minutes before Burns could fill up. "This is the first time I've had to actually wait," said Burns, 33, who earlier had passed by a station where the line was much longer. "This is crazy, isn't it?"

Some places are defined by a single event. Roswell, N.M., will always be known for space aliens, Dallas for assassination. And this little town in the Piney Woods of eastern Mississippi will forever be the site of one of the most brutal crimes of the civil rights era.

The modest Japanese sedan made its way down the gravel drive between the cow pasture and the dirt basketball court, kicking up a cloud of dust before coming to rest beside Roy Saulsberry Jr.'s ancient gas pumps. A passenger stepped out, clutching an old antifreeze jug. Outside Roy's Grocery & Package store, the regulars were hemming and hawing on a wooden bench, under the spell of the afternoon's slow rhythm.

Another round of severe weather raked the storm-weary South with rain, hail and high winds Friday, damaging homes and injuring at least five people in Tennessee and Kentucky. A mother and two children were hurt when strong thunderstorms moved through southern Kentucky in the early morning, knocking over their trailer near Bowling Green. Tara Duvall, a spokeswoman for Warren County Emergency Management, said all three were hospitalized.

C. Barton Crattie, a Georgia land surveyor, did not expect to start a border war when he penned a newspaper article about a flawed 1818 survey that placed his state a mile below the Tennessee River. The mistake in calculating Georgia's northern corner, he figured, was just an odd historical footnote, an interesting digression for those who fret that the drought-stricken state will soon run out of water. "Unfortunately for . . .

For years, rap record buyers have seemed as concerned with an artist's hometown as with the quality of the music. If rappers didn't claim a New York or L.A. ZIP Code in their rhymes, odds were that most listeners would simply dismiss them. But that's changing rapidly. Jermaine Dupri in Atlanta, Master P in New Orleans and Suave House Records in Houston have shown that you can establish power bases in rap outside the traditional boundaries.

Rarely do experts extol the virtues of public education in the South. So it was notable when a report released Thursday said the Southeast led the nation in state-funded early childhood education. The Southern Education Foundation, a charity based in Atlanta, said the Southeast provided public prekindergarten to the largest percentage of 3- and 4-year-olds in the country: 19%, compared with 12% in the Northeast, 9% in the Midwest and 5.6% in the West.

They knew they couldn't set this little country community right in a day -- the storms had been too brutal for that. But at least, they figured, they could clean it up. All along the two-lane road through town, men in hunting jackets moved around quickly in heavy machinery, plowing and piling debris. Farmers in ball caps amputated horizontal cedars, poplars and pines with buzzing chain saws. Church ladies in fresh makeup and work gloves tidied the yards in front of roofless homes.

Steven Huntsman didn't want to go downstairs with his girlfriend and 15-month-old son. After all, he reasoned, it was just a storm. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. Then everything shook. The windows broke. His face was peppered with broken glass. He locked himself into a second-story closet and listened as the once-stationary objects that constituted his world -- cars, trees, houses, barns -- began hovering and slamming into one another.