Deadly storms in US

• The death toll, including those who were killed by storms earlier in the week in Arkansas, reached 333. On Friday evening, Alabama emergency officials announced that the state’s death toll had reached 232.
• Power remained out for hundreds of thousands throughout the South, rendering gas stations, grocery stores and banks useless. Fifteen hundred people were staying in more than 65 Red Cross shelters, a fraction of those who were left homeless but an indication of the numbers who are now destitute.
• So far in Alabama, 654 families have been displaced from public or government-assisted housing units, according to an initial count by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• Insurance claims are already growing exponentially, and could approach $1 billion