Michael Kunzelman

NEW ORLEANS -- Despite threatening skies, the Mardi Gras party carried on as thousands of costumed revelers cheered glitzy floats with make-believe monarchs in an all-out bash before Lent. In the French Quarter, as usual, Fat Tuesday played out with all its flesh and raunchiness.

NEW ORLEANS -- A Louisiana woman ran afoul of police when she gave her neighbors an unusual holiday greeting, hanging Christmas lights in the shape of a middle finger.

NEW ORLEANS — Oil giant BP has agreed to pay a criminal penalty in the billions of dollars for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a person familiar with the deal said Thursday.

NEW ORLEANS — Isaac poured unrelenting rain Thursday, flooding areas north and south of New Orleans even as the city’s fortified defenses held and forcing officials to launch speedy evacuation and rescue efforts in the face of fast-rising waters.

NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Isaac pushed water over a rural levee to flood some homes, knocked out power and immersed beach-front roads in Louisiana and Mississippi early Wednesday as it began a drenching slog inland from the Gulf of Mexico with a newly fortified New Orleans in its path.

NEW ORLEANS -- A New Orleans police officer on trial for burning the body of a man who was fatally shot by a different officer testified Monday that he set the fire because he didn't want to let another corpse rot in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath.

"I was exposed to so much death, so many bodies," said Officer Gregory McRae, one of two officers charged with burning the body of 31-year-old Henry Glover in the back seat of a car on Sept. 2, 2005.

McRae said nobody ordered him to torch the car or Glover's body, and he denied setting the fire to cover up a police shooting. McRae said his decision was influenced by having seen other bodies floating in the flood waters that inundated New Orleans.

NEW ORLEANS -- BP conceded Thursday that more oil than it estimated is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico as heavy crude washed into Louisiana's wetlands for the first time, feeding worries and uncertainty about the massive monthlong spill.