Days after a winter storm dropped ice and record-breaking snow, cleanup efforts were underway Thursday in several major Southern cities such as New Orleans, where crews were removing snow the same way they remove trash, drink cups and plastic beads after Mardi Gras.

Temperatures were gradually rising across the U.S. South, bringing hopes that remaining snow and ice would melt away.

“We have to be honest with ourselves — we’re from Louisiana, we know crawfish, we know football, but we don’t really know snow and ice and that’s okay,” said Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development spokesperson Daniel Gitlin. “It’s going to go away and we’re better off letting Mother Nature do what she needs to do right now.”

Up to 200 miles of interstate was expected to remain closed until Friday due to treacherous patches of black ice, Gitlin said. Louisiana has nearly run out of its salt supply after treating roads, he added.

In the Big Easy, a private waste management firm has been contracted to repurpose equipment that’s typically used to clean up Mardi Gras beads and cups to clear snow from the streets.

IV Waste President Sidney Torres said his company has deployed a 4,000-gallon “flusher” truck to spray water on the ground to soften the ice for removal in the historic and festive French Quarter. The truck normally sprays lemon-scented fragrance “to get rid of that funky liquor, urine, puke smell from the night before,” Torres said.

Tenn. school shooter’s hateful writings found

The investigation into why a Nashville high school student fatally shot a classmate before killing himself has centered on his online writings, which authorities describe as concerning warning signs. Dozens of pages posted on social media accounts that anti-hate analysts believe belonged to the gunman include racist ideologies and plans for the shooting.

Solomon Henderson, a Black 17-year-old student at Antioch High School, shot and killed Josselin Corea Escalante, who was 16 and Hispanic, in the school’s cafeteria on Wednesday, then turned the gun on himself.

The shooting has left Tennessee’s capital city once again grappling with the fallout of a tragic school shooting. Nearly two years prior, a shooter opened fire at a private elementary school in Nashville and killed six people, including three children.

Anti-hate analysts quickly identified dozens of pages believed to have come from Henderson, filled with calls for violence and racist comments, including neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies, expressions of shame that he was Black and praise for specific people who carried out well-known shootings.

Contraception pill seen as abortion drug

A new study suggests that a pill used for emergency contraception could be repurposed at a higher dose as an abortion drug, providing a possible alternative to mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in the most common type of abortion in the United States.

Mifepristone has been under attack by abortion opponents, with several states seeking in federal court to restrict its use.

Now used in two-thirds of U.S. abortions, mifepristone blocks a hormone needed to sustain a pregnancy. It’s typically used with misoprostol, which causes contractions and bleeding.

In the study, 133 women who were up to nine weeks’ pregnant took a 60 milligram dose of ulipristal acetate, the active ingredient in the prescription contraceptive Ella, followed by misoprostol 24 hours later.

For 97% of them, that drug combo was effective at inducing an abortion, an effectiveness equal to the mifepristone-misoprostol combination. Four women needed a procedure or an additional medication to complete the abortion.

U.S. contractors will help with Gaza returns

American security contractors have been enlisted to help handle the return of displaced Palestinians to the Gaza Strip’s devastated north, the next step in the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, according to four officials familiar with the matter.

The contractors are poised to help secure a key zone that splits Gaza in two and is known as the Netzarim corridor, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The contractors are intended to screen vehicles ferrying Palestinians from the enclave’s south for weapons, the officials said.

In the early days of the war, the Israeli military ordered a mass evacuation of northern Gaza, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee south. For months, Israeli soldiers have patrolled the Netzarim corridor in part to prevent Palestinians from heading back north.

But under the terms of a 42-day ceasefire now in its fifth day, Israeli troops are set to partially withdraw over the weekend and allow Palestinians to head north. The truce, which went into effect Sunday, was mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States.

Army: Scrap office to reduce civilian harms

The U.S. Army plans to ask the acting defense secretary, Robert Salesses, to eliminate a Pentagon office that was created to reduce harm to civilians in conflict areas.

A memo dated Monday asks offices within the service to prepare a request for senior Army leaders to review no later than Feb. 21. It would call for the defense secretary to relieve the Army of its responsibility for the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence and then ask Congress to abolish it.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the memo, which was signed by Lt. Gen. Laura A. Potter, director of the Army staff, and described earlier by The Washington Post.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III formally established the civilian protection office about a year and a half ago, following work by his predecessors under the first Trump administration, Mark T. Esper and James N. Mattis, to study how the military could reduce the harms to civilians in war. Mattis began that effort in response to a 2017 Times report on the many civilians who had been killed by U.S. airstrikes in Iraq.

Sept. 11 prosecutor seeks pause in case

The prosecutor in the Sept. 11 case asked the military judge Thursday to suspend the proceedings to give the Trump administration time to get Cabinet secretaries in place and familiar with a plea deal for the man accused of planning the attack to avoid a death-penalty trial.

A Pentagon official reached the agreement with the defendant, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two other men July 31. Lloyd J. Austin III, then the secretary of defense, moved to withdraw from the deals two days later.

The question of whether the pleas are valid is now before a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which hears arguments Tuesday.

In court at Guantánamo Bay on Thursday, the prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., announced that he would submit a pleading to pause the proceedings in the case until April. He noted that the new administration does not yet have a confirmed defense secretary, attorney general or solicitor general in place.

U.K. teen gets 50 years for dance class killings

A teenager who stabbed three young girls to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in England was sentenced Thursday to more than 50 years in prison for what a judge called “the most extreme, shocking and exceptionally serious crime.”

Judge Julian Goose said 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana “wanted to carry out mass murder of innocent, happy young girls.”

Goose said that he couldn’t impose a sentence of life without parole, because Rudakubana was under 18 when he committed the crime. But the judge said he must serve 52 years, minus the six months he’s been in custody, before being considered for parole, and “it is likely he will never be released.”

Rudakubana was 17 when he attacked the children in the seaside town of Southport in July.

Italian court upholds Knox slander conviction

Italy’s highest court on Thursday confirmed a slander conviction against U.S. defendant Amanda Knox for accusing an innocent man of murdering her British flatmate 17 years ago in a sensational case that polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Knox had appealed the conviction based on a European Court of Human Rights ruling that said her rights had been violated by police failure to provide a lawyer and adequate translator during a long night of questioning just days after 21-year-old Meredith Kercher’s murder in the university town of Perugia.

The ruling seemingly ends a 17-year legal saga that saw Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend convicted and acquitted in flip-flop verdicts in Kercher’s brutal murder, before being exonerated by the highest Cassation Court in 2015.

Seattle-area officer sentenced for killing

A suburban Seattle police officer was sentenced Thursday to over 16 years in prison for the 2019 shooting death of a homeless man he was trying to arrest for disorderly conduct, marking the first conviction under a Washington state law that made it easier to prosecute officers for on-duty killings.

A jury found Auburn police Officer Jeffrey Nelson guilty June 27 of second-degree murder and first-degree assault in the death of Jesse Sarey. King County Judge Nicole Gaines Phelps sentenced Nelson to concurrent sentences of 16.6 years for the murder conviction and 6.5 years for assault.

Before sentencing Nelson, Phelps chastised the 46-year-old officer for his violent behavior in uniform and noted the precedent-setting nature of the case.

— News service reports