A large swath of the eastern U.S. was bracing for severe weather as the Memorial Day weekend came to a close. Deadly storms over the long weekend also knocked out power to hundreds of thousands across the South and disrupted holiday travel at busy airports in the northeast.

Severe storms were expected to stretch from Alabama to upstate New York on Monday evening, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters said the storms could lead to intense rainfall in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, with flash flooding possible. Hail, heavy winds and tornadoes were also possible from northeast Maryland to the Catskill Mountains of New York, according to the NWS.

The threat of severe weather Monday followed a string of powerful and deadly storms that swept through the South and parts of the Midwest over the holiday weekend. At least 23 people were killed in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama and Kentucky as a result of severe weather.

Earlier in the week, a deadly tornado also hit Iowa.

In a news conference Monday, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said four people were killed in four different counties after storms ripped through most of the state Sunday. Later Monday, Beshear confirmed a fifth storm-related death.

The tiny southwestern Kentucky community of Charleston took a direct hit from a tornado, officials said.

Beshear said the twister appeared to have been on the ground for 40 miles.

“It could have been much worse,” Beshear said of this weekend’s storms. “The people of Kentucky are very weather aware with everything we’ve been through.”

To the east of Charleston, parts of Hopkins County, Kentucky, also saw damage Sunday night. Western Kentucky, including a number of communities in Hopkins County, endured a series of devastating tornadoes in 2021 that killed 81 people.

“There were a lot of people that were just getting their lives put back together and then this,” Hopkins County emergency management director Nick Bailey was quoted by The Associated Press as saying. “Almost the same spot, the same houses and everything.”

The website Poweroutage.us reported hundreds of thousands without power on Monday. More than 120,000 customers in Kentucky were without power as of 5:30 p.m. ET, according to the website. Data showed Arkansas and West Virginia each had more than 40,000 customers without electricity.

The White House said the Federal Emergency Management Agency was on the ground conducting damage assessments with state and local authorities. President Biden has directed federal agencies to provide support as needed.

Holiday travel had also been disrupted as a result of the weekend storms.

According to the flight-tracking website Flight Aware, more than 400 flights in the U.S. had been canceled as of 5:30 p.m. Monday — and another 5,200-plus flights had been delayed. New York’s LaGuardia Airport and Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey were most affected by delays and cancellations.

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Argentina’s Javier Milei will meet tech executives including Tim Cook and Sam Altman in California this week, marking the libertarian president’s fourth trip to the US in five months as he seeks to build hype for his economic reforms.

Milei will spend Tuesday to Friday in San Francisco, meeting business leaders including the Apple and OpenAI chief executives, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, the president’s office said on Monday.

His spokesperson said the trip was designed “to position Argentina in the world once again”. The Latin American country’s tech sector is one of the region’s largest.

Milei has travelled extensively since taking office in December, courting the global spotlight via friendships with rightwing figures such as Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, who he met at the carmaker’s Austin factory in April, and giving fiery conference speeches defending his free market “anarcho-capitalist” beliefs.

By the end of June he will have completed eight foreign tours — a record for Argentine presidents in their first six months in office, per newspaper La Nación. None have been within South America.

Opposition politicians have criticised Milei’s travel, and three lawmakers have asked police to investigate his officials for using public funds on a trip to a far-right political conference in Spain, which they argue was made in a personal capacity.

For many Argentines, roughly half of whom approve of Milei’s government, his global profile has been a “novelty”, said Cristian Buttié, director of pollster CB Consultora.

“We are not used to Argentine presidents being famous internationally; for young voters the photos with Elon Musk have a certain allure,” he said. “But the question is: will that fame benefit Argentina, or will it just benefit Milei?” 

Analysts said international businesses were likely to hold off on investing in Argentina, which is suffering its worst economic crisis in two decades. Annual inflation was running at 289 per cent in April and economic activity was down 8.4 per cent in March compared to a year earlier.

Milei has slashed government spending to halt the use of money printing and bring down inflation. But he has yet to secure longer term reform in congress, where he controls fewer than 15 per cent of seats.

“Many, many years of a volatile investment climate have [badly damaged] Argentina’s international reputation,” said Kezia McKeague, managing director of McLarty Associates, which advises multinationals operating in Argentina. “You don’t change that in six months.”

“There is a great deal of excitement in some sectors, but companies aren’t ready to pull the trigger yet,” she said.

Negotiations are dragging on in the Senate over Milei’s first two bills, which include measures to cut the fiscal deficit and an incentive scheme for investments in mining and other sectors.

Musk and Milei discussed lithium, the key electric vehicle battery metal of which Argentina has some of the world’s largest reserves, when they met in April, according to the president’s team. But Musk did not announce any new investment.

The government also has yet to lay out its plan for removing Argentina’s strict currency controls, which limit companies’ ability to take profits out of the country, and whether or not it will pursue Milei’s controversial campaign pledge to replace the peso with the US dollar.

“There is a lot of inconsistency . . . which makes it impossible to plan investments,” said Fabio Rodriguez, director at consultancy M&R Asociados. “That’s what I’d want to hear about if I were an investor meeting with Milei, rather than socialism and capitalism and freedom.”

An 81-year-old man who investigators say terrorized a southern California neighborhood for years with a slingshot has been arrested, police said.

While conducting an investigation, detectives “learned that during the course of 9-10 years, dozens of citizens were being victimized by a serial slingshot shooter”, the Asuza police department said in a statement.

The man is suspected of breaking windows and car windshields and of narrowly missing people with ball bearings shot from a slingshot, the statement said. No injuries were reported.

The man was arrested on Thursday after officers served a search warrant and found a slingshot and ball bearings at his home in Asuza, about 25 miles (40km) east of Los Angeles, police said.

The Azusa police Lt Jake Bushey said on Saturday that detectives learned that most of the ball bearings were shot from the suspect’s backyard.

“We’re not aware of any kind of motive other than just malicious mischief,” Bushey told the Southern California News Group.

The man was scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday.