The continuing crisis

+ In April, near New Orleans, motorcyclist Charles Warren, minding his own business in the left lane of Interstate 12, was hit by a bathtub (which had fallen from a pickup truck in the right lane) and was hospitalized with severe injuries.

+ Tentatively scheduled for July (nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina forced the chaotic evacuation of New Orleans) is the resolution of two dog-ownership cases. In Pinellas County, a judge will decide, after months of relentless haggling, whether the Louisiana owners, Steven and Dorreen Couture, "abandoned" their dogs as they complied with evacuation orders, or merely left them temporarily at a shelter, which wrongly offered them for adoption. Two Florida women claimed the dogs separately, and have fought doggedly to retain them. (One is an assistant district attorney in Tampa who has been represented in part by one of the city's highest-priced lawyers.)