ATLANTA (AP) — A weekend storm system sweeping across the Southeast brought tornado warnings to Mississippi and Louisiana, and then took aim at parts of Georgia and Florida, as people in the Northeast were finally getting a reprieve from weeks of bitterly cold temperatures.
Some of the fiercest weather in the South was reported near Lake Charles, Louisiana, where high winds from a thunderstorm overturned a horse trailer and a Mardi Gras float, damaged an airport jet bridge and flung the metal awning from a house into power lines. The damage was documented by National Weather Service employees who surveyed the area.
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Storm clouds bring rain to the Bay Area, in San Francisco, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (Brontë Wittpenn/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
Visitors take in city views at Hyde and Lombard streets as rain begins to soak the Bay Area, in San Francisco, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (Brontë Wittpenn/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
Ice covers a navigational beacon at the end of the South Pier along Lake Michigan, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, in St. Joseph, Mich. (Don Campbell/The Herald-Palladium via AP)
Coast Guard Seaman Leyla Siglam monitors ice breaking from the Coast Guard Cutter Hawser during an ice-clearing operation at Wallabout Bay in the East River in New York, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)
Ice is in front of the Statue of Liberty as seen from the Coast Guard Cutter Hawser icebreaker tug boat in Upper New York Harbor in New York, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)
Power poles were snapped and toppled near the Louisiana towns of Jena, Cheneyville and Donaldsonville, the weather service reported.
No deaths or serious injuries were reported, but the damage reports came as the storm system continued into parts of south Georgia and the Florida Panhandle, which were under tornado watches on Sunday.
The storms led to some power outages across southern states, but nowhere near the massive number of outages caused by ice storms late last month in northern Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee. By Sunday evening, a few thousand customers were still without electricity in Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky and Virginia, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide.
Meanwhile, the Northeast was beginning to thaw after a weekslong stretch of uncommonly cold weather.
Boston was running nearly 7 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 14 Celsius) below average for February last week, and the city was on pace for its coldest winter in more than a decade. Boston remained cold on Sunday, but this week’s forecast called for temperatures climbing into the high 30s and low 40s, which is closer to the seasonal average.
On the West Coast, much of California braced for a powerful winter storm that was expected to bring drenching thunderstorms, damaging winds and heavy snow in mountain areas. Jacob Spender, a weather service meteorologist in Sacramento, urged people to take precautions in the coming days.
“So if they are traveling, packing winter safety kits. Anything to be prepared. This is a bigger system, and a major system,” Spender said.
Rain that began Sunday in the San Francisco Bay Area was forecast to intensify throughout the day and overnight, bringing the risk of flooding. Forecasters said the Sierra Nevada, including ski resorts around Lake Tahoe, could see up to seven feet (two meters) of snow before the storm moves through late Wednesday.
To the south, Los Angeles area residents in some neighborhoods scarred by last year's devastating wildfires were under an evacuation warning through Tuesday because of the potential for mud and debris flows. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said she's ordered emergency crews and city departments to prepare to respond to any problems.
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Associated Press journalists Christopher Weber in Los Angeles; Julie Walker in New York City; Patrick Whittle in Portland, Maine; and Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed.
Storm clouds bring rain to the Bay Area, in San Francisco, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (Brontë Wittpenn/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
Visitors take in city views at Hyde and Lombard streets as rain begins to soak the Bay Area, in San Francisco, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (Brontë Wittpenn/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
Ice covers a navigational beacon at the end of the South Pier along Lake Michigan, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, in St. Joseph, Mich. (Don Campbell/The Herald-Palladium via AP)
Coast Guard Seaman Leyla Siglam monitors ice breaking from the Coast Guard Cutter Hawser during an ice-clearing operation at Wallabout Bay in the East River in New York, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)
Ice is in front of the Statue of Liberty as seen from the Coast Guard Cutter Hawser icebreaker tug boat in Upper New York Harbor in New York, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Outdated intelligence likely led to the United States carrying out a deadly missile strike on an elementary school in Iran that killed over 165 people, many of them children, in the opening hours of the conflict, according to a U.S. official and a second person briefed on findings of a preliminary U.S military investigation into the incident.
The bombing of the school and its casualties involving children has become a focal point of the war, and if ultimately confirmed to be at the hands of the U.S., would also stand among the highest civilian casualty events caused by the American military operations in the last two decades.
President Donald Trump initially blamed Iran for the attack, later said he wasn’t certain who was to blame, and then said he would accept the results of the Pentagon’s investigation. The issue took on added urgency on Wednesday after the New York Times first reported that a preliminary investigation found that the U.S. was responsible.
U.S. Central Command relied on target coordinates for the strike using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the person familiar with the preliminary finding.
The agency did not respond to a request for comment.
The preliminary finding prompted immediate calls for more information from the Pentagon. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “the investigation is still ongoing.”
Both the U.S. official and the person familiar with the matter spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Dozens of Democratic senators demanded answers from the Trump administration on Wednesday as a growing body of evidence suggested that the U.S. was likely responsible for a strike at an elementary school in Iran that killed over 165 people, many of them children.
The letter from more than 45 senators pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on whether the U.S. was culpable for the strike and what previous analysis of the building had been done. The senators also raised concerns about the Pentagon hollowing-out a congressionally mandated office set up specifically to reduce civilian casualties.
“Under this administration, budgetary and personnel cuts at the Department have robbed military commands of crucial resources to prevent and respond to civilian casualties,” the senators wrote. Those include cuts at U.S. Central Command, whose forces are leading the military campaign against Iran, and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which was signed into law in 2022 as part of a Pentagon ambition to reduce death tolls from strikes.
The revelation could threaten to erode public support in the U.S. effort against Iran at a time when Trump, who as a candidate railed against American involvement in “stupid” overseas wars, faces persistent questions about the purpose and of the conflict and what would bring it to an end.
One former Pentagon official said the Feb. 28 strike that hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, which is located near a neighboring base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, came as a natural result of changes made by the Trump administration to reduce staff to mitigate civilian harm and Hegseth’s emphasis on lethality over legality.
There are several indications that the strike on the school may have been avoidable.
It happened Saturday morning, the start of the Iranian school week, when the building was full of young children. Satellite analysis by the AP shows that the school, as well as other targets struck the same day, had characteristics visible from the air that could have identified them as civilian sites before they were struck.
The AP reported last week that satellite images, expert analysis, a U.S. official and public information released by the U.S. military all suggested it was likely a U.S. strike. That evidence grew stronger on Monday, as new footage emerged showing what experts identified as a U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missile slamming into the military compound as smoke was already rising from the area where the school was located.
Publicly available satellite imagery shows the school building was part of the military compound until about 2017, when a new wall was added to separate the two. A watchtower on the property was also removed. Around the same time, the imagery shows the walls surrounding the building were painted with murals in vibrant colors, primarily blue and pink, so bright they're visible from space
The school was clearly labeled as such in online maps and has an easily-accessible website full of information about students, teachers and administrators.
International law governing warfare bars strikes on structures, vehicles and people that are not military objectives and combatants. Civilian homes, schools, medical facilities and cultural sites are generally off limits for military strikes. The proximity of a school to a valid military target does not change its status as a civilian site, said Elise Baker, a senior staff lawyer at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based nonprofit think tank.
If the U.S. is found responsible, said Sen. Tim Kaine during a briefing with journalists on Wednesday: “It’s either we’ve changed our traditional targeting rules or we made a mistake.”
“If we’ve changed our traditional targeting rules and we no longer provide the same level of protection for civilians, that would be tragic,” Kaine said.
Some Republicans, too, are sounding alarms.
Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told reporters that an investigation needs to “get to the bottom of it,” and then “admit if you know whose fault it is.”
If the U.S. was behind it, Cramer said, the military must “do everything you can to eliminate those mistakes going forward.”
He added: “But you also can’t undo it.”
Congress directed the Pentagon to create the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence in late 2022 as part of the wide-ranging annual defense authorization bill, which passed both chambers with broad bipartisan support. The bill said the center was to “institutionalize and advance knowledge, practices, and tools for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm.”
The measure put into law an initiative that had already been started by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin earlier that year. The 36-step action plan was “ambitious and necessary,” Austin said at the time.
In April 2023, that office had a full-time director hired by the Army and an initial core staff of 30 civilians, according to a 2024 Pentagon report that said that the workforce was expected to grow.
Wes Bryant began working there in 2024 as the Branch Chief of Civil Harm Assessments. One of the things the office was discussing was updating the “no strike list,” he said, a series of civilian targets in other countries that the Pentagon keeps. When he was working at the Pentagon, it was well known that the list was out-of-date, he said. But under Hegseth, the office's size was slashed and the work on updating the no-strike lists stopped, he said.
“They have no budget. They're just sitting there trying to maintain any semblance of the mission,” he said.
Capt. Tim Hawkins, the spokesman for U.S. Central Command, denied reports that the military command only had a single person assigned to the mission but would not offer any further details, citing the ongoing investigation.
Frankel reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Konstantin Toropin and Joey Cappelletti in Washington contributed to this report.
The arm of a deceased person is seen protruding from the rubble as rescue workers and residents search in the aftermath a strike on a girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News Agency via AP)
Rescue workers and residents search through the rubble in the aftermath of a strike on a girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News Agency via AP)
Rescue workers and residents search through the rubble in the aftermath of a strike on a girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News Agency via AP)
Rescue workers and residents search through the rubble in the aftermath of a strike on a girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News Agency via AP)
Rescue workers and residents search through the rubble in the aftermath of a strike on a girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News Agency via AP)
