Southern United States

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.

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.

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. . . .

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.

The blond, pony-tailed nurse bustled her way through the relatives to the patient's bedside: "How y'all doing today?" "Y'all"? In Berkeley? But for the Southern accents and the "y'alls" heard in California hospitals, patients might not know of the migration of nurses from the South to large states like California, and New York.Like thousands of other nurses, Courtney Carruba, who had never been out of the South, is taking advantage of a national nursing shortage.

Outside the Home Depot on Ponce de Leon Avenue, no one engages in theoretical debates about whether illegal immigrants are competing for jobs with Americans. Here, the competition unfolds whenever a truck pulls into the parking lot, its driver looking for day laborers. On any given day, about half of the 30 or so men waiting to pounce on those trucks are Latinos, many of them undocumented. But the rest are African American men like Sam Gibbs.

Hurricane Ivan made landfall with staggering force early this morning, lashing southern Alabama with 135 mph winds and threatening much of the Gulf Coast with surging floodwaters. The storm's eye passed just east of this historic port town, the heart of a metropolitan area that is home to more than a quarter of a million people. Families gathered in hallways and basements as trees snapped outside, transformers exploded and debris flew through the air. "It's roaring here.

During World War II, a group of black soldiers were asked what should be done with Hitler if he were captured alive. Their response: "Paint him black and sentence him to life in Mississippi." --From "Attack on Terror: The FBI Against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi," by Don Whitehead Everybody stared hard at the stage. A tall, angry man--his glasses steamy with perspiration, his face as red as his suspenders--was giving a stem-winding White Citizens Council stump speech.

They don't look too much like catfish. They don't taste like them either -- at least to catfish connoisseurs. But Vietnamese basa and tra often fool consumers in the U.S., where they're sometimes billed as Asian catfish. Sometimes they're even labeled delta-grown. That's the Mekong Delta, not the Mississippi.

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.

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 . . .

What if "The Dukes of Hazzard" was the last Southern narrative? I don't want to hit this too hard. The Dukes are not the Snopeses, and Hazzard County is not Yoknapatawpha. If anything, "The Dukes of Hazzard" is a kind of cracker "Brigadoon." But it's amazing that this featherbrained kids' show--now made into a featherbrained feature film--managed to crystallize so much of the region's long and foreclosing literary tradition. Something has to account for the enduring appeal of "Dukes."

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.