[TYPO3-english] orphaned tt_news categories

[Douglas La Farge]

I had an entire set of tt_news categories that I no longer needed so I deleted the top level "parent" category of those categories.

It's now obvious that I have a whole bunch of "orphaned" categories that I cannot edit/delete, etc.  Actually, I probably can delete them but trying to do that is a less than ideal situation as there are about 90 total categories.

Is there an easier way to get rid of the unwanted categories?  

Why no recursive deletion within the extension?

thanks in advance,
doug