  A celebrated result of Thomassen states that not only can every planar graph
be colored properly with five colors, but no matter how arbitrary palettes of
five colors are assigned to vertices, one can choose a color from the
corresponding palette for each vertex so that the resulting coloring is proper.
This result is referred to as 5-choosability of planar graphs. Albertson asked
whether Thomassen's theorem can be extended by precoloring some vertices which
are at a large enough distance apart in a graph. Here, among others, we answer
the question in the case when the graph does not contain short cycles
separating precolored vertices and when there is a "wide" Steiner tree
containing all the precolored vertices.
