In the news

■ Steve Holt, the mayor of Florence, Ala., said a property owner gave the city permission to paint over a mural depicting President Donald Trump holding a handgun and schoolchildren in pools of blood painted on a wall beside an abandoned lot in the city’s downtown.

■ Thomas Gamelin, 38, shown on security video taking a television, electronic items and tobacco products when he looted a Houston Walmart store that was closed when Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017, was convicted of burglary and sentenced to 20 years in prison, prosecutors said.

■ Bennie Hart has won permission from a federal judge to proceed with a lawsuit challenging a decision by Kentucky motor vehicle officials to deny his request for a personalized license plate saying “IM GOD,” even though he had the same plate when he lived in Ohio.

■ Heinz- Christian Strache, Austria’s vice chancellor, said “we don’t want parallel societies,” in defending a government plan to bar Muslim girls in elementary schools and kindergartens from wearing headscarves, adding to existing restrictions on wearing veils in public buildings.

■ Larry Hornsby, 54, was identified through security video and arrested after police said he entered the mosque used by Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City and threatened to “blow up this building” before leaving.

■ Torono Welch, whose SUV was among several vehicles damaged when an out-of-control Philadelphia trash truck crashed into a row of parked cars at around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, said it “sounded like a train came off the track or something out here.”

■ Teddy Sonnier and his son, Brance, of New Iberia, La., will get $75,000 to settle their suit against a sheriff’s deputy who was caught on a body camera chuckling and saying “Dog, you’re about the die, you understand me? You’re about to die,” before he shot and killed their dog.

■ Khaled El- Masri, a 54-year- old German citizen, got a formal apology from the Macedonian government which mistook him for a terrorist leader in 2003 and delivered him to CIA agents who took him to Afghanistan for four months as part of the agency’s secret rendition program.