U.S. President Joe Biden’s counsel said he found five additional pages with classified markings at the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, home on Thursday.

“While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages. The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them,” Biden’s special counsel, Richard Sauber, said in a statement on Saturday.

Biden’s legal team acknowledged this week it had found classified documents relating to his time as vice president in the Obama administration at his Delaware home, including some in his garage. Aides previously found another batch of classified documents at his residence, and at a Washington think tank he was associated with. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel on Thursday to probe the matter.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for President Joe Biden found more classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged Saturday.

White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden’s private library. The White House had said previously that only a single page was found there.

The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Biden’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president. The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records from the Obama administration are under investigation by a former U.S. attorney, Robert Hur, who was appointed as a special counsel on Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Sauber said in a statement Saturday that Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have security clearances, stopped their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber found the remaining material Thursday, as he was facilitating their retrieval by the Department of Justice.

“While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.”

Sauber has previously said that the White House was “confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”

He reiterated Saturday that the White House would cooperate with Hur’s investigation.

A series of tornadoes unleashed lethal weather across the Southeastern U.S. this week, killing at least nine people—seven in Alabama and two in Georgia—including a five-year-old boy. The search for victims has continued since the storms struck hardest on Thursday, destroying homes and infrastructure, and cutting out power for thousands in both states.

Seven of the reported deaths were in Alabama’s Autauga County, northwest of Montgomery. In Butts County, Georgia, the five-year-old boy who died was killed when a tree fell on top of the car he was in. A state employee working on storm response efforts was also killed in Georgia.

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“Our entire family is heartbroken over this tragedy. As we continue to monitor state response to these storms, we are praying for this family as they mourn this terrible loss,” Georgia governor Brian Kemp tweeted Thursday.

The National Weather Service had 50 possible tornado reports on Thursday, spanning Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. In Autauga County, the tornado that hit was rated EF-3 status, meaning it had winds between 136 – 165 mph. EF-2 tornadoes, whose wind speeds start at 111 mph, also hit central Georgia and the cities of Selma and Greensboro.

Rescue efforts continue for people who may have been trapped in damaged buildings, especially in Autauga County where at least 40 homes were utterly destroyed and deemed uninhabitable. Both Alabama and Georgia governors have declared a state of emergency, focusing on the worst affected municipalities and organized state response measures.

The storms also brought widespread power outages across Georgia and Alabama, leaving about 40,000 electric customers without power until Friday. As of Saturday morning, more than 14,000 customers still lack power in Georgia.

Damage from the storms could take days to evaluate, with high winds pummeling power lines, trees and all sorts of buildings. Marking the latest of many deadly weather events to affect the country in recent months, experts point to the climate crisis exacerbating severe weather phenomena, from hurricanes to snowstorms, to wildfires and the ongoing flooding in California

Former White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

• Kellyanne Conway in a new essay wrote that a 2024 Trump White House campaign shouldn’t be dismissed.
• Conway in her New York Times piece also emphasized that GOP leaders needed to embrace early voting.
• “Republicans must … invest in and be vocal about early voting,” Conway wrote in the essay.

Former Trump White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway in a recent opinion piece said it was “ridiculous” that some states allowed voting “nearly two months before Election Day” as part of coronavirus-related measures in 2020, but argued that the Republican Party must embrace the reality of early voting in order to survive.

Conway, a veteran pollster who managed former President Donald Trump’s successful 2016 White House campaign, in a New York Times essay presented the case for and against a second term for the ex-president, who launched his third White House bid late last year.

In the essay, Conway noted that Trump had experienced a decline in support from Independents and white college-educated from 2016 to 2020 — blocs that provided critical votes to now-President Joe Biden in tightly-contested swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the latter election.

And she also pointed out the growing importance of early voting, which has soared in popularity across the country and has been wholly supported by Democratic candidates — who have encouraged voters to come out to cast ballots using this method. Trump, however, has long alleged — without proof — that early and mail-in balloting is rife with fraud.

But after the 2022 midterms — which saw Republicans vastly underperform relative to expectations — some strategists within the party have said that Trump’s crusade against early voting may very well have cost them critical levels of support in states where they’ll need to boost their standing ahead of 2024 to have any chance of defeating Biden and securing a majority in the United States Senate.

“Republicans must … invest in and be vocal about early voting,” Conway wrote in the essay. “This is a competition for ballots, not just votes. As ridiculous as it was to vote nearly two months before Election Day and count the votes for three weeks thereafter, some of the state-based Covid-compelled measures for voting are now permanent.”

“If these are the rules, adapt or die politically,” she added.

Last month, Conway went after Republican senators who didn’t campaign for former NFL star Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia who was defeated by incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in a December 2022 runoff election.

“People are saying, ‘We need a new message.’ Let me just say something respectfully to the 49 Republican senators: Where were most of you? Why weren’t you in Georgia?” she asked during an appearance on Fox News.

Conway also reiterated that the GOP must figure out a way to incorporate early voting into their turnout strategies going forward.

“We need to bank these votes early,” she continued to say while on Fox. “We’re taking a big chance somebody can get off work, out of the house, out of traffic, not feeling sick that day. If you can bank their votes in October, let’s do it.”

“I don’t like it because it’s pro-incumbent. I don’t like it because it’s not Election Day, it’s election season, election trimester. But these are the rules,” she added.

The incident occurred on a Pegasus Airlines flight from Tel Aviv.

Thiago Prudencio/Getty Images

• Passengers “were in a panic” after being sent images of plane crashes, per Keshet 12.
• 10 people were taken off the Pegasus Airlines flight in Tel Aviv for questioning.
• Passengers on another Pegasus flight in November were sent threatening videos. 

A flight from Tel Aviv, Israel, to Istanbul Turkey, was delayed on Friday after passengers were sent images of plane crashes via Apple AirDrop, according to reports in Israel.

Ten passengers, including a primary suspect, were taken off the plane for questioning at Ben Gurion International Airport, The Times of Israel reported.

One of the images was of US Airways Flight 1549, which made an infamous emergency landing in the Hudson River in 2009 following a bird strike.

The picture was captioned “I wish all of us will die” in Arabic, according to documentation provided by the Israel Airports Authority to Israeli newspaper Ynet.

“People were in a panic when they saw the photos,” one passenger told Israeli TV channel Keshet 12, The Times of Israel reported.

Passengers who received the images alerted flight attendants, who called police. Ten individuals were ultimately removed from the aircraft.

The flight departed two hours behind schedule after passengers’ luggage was unloaded and rechecked, per Ynet.

Last May, nine Israeli citizens were detained after passengers on a plane bound for Turkey received graphic photographs of former plane crashes via AirDrop. They included images of Asiana Airlines Flight 214, which stalled and crashed on final approach into San Francisco International Airport in 2013, killing three people and injuring 187. 

Last November, another Pegasus flight from Tel Aviv was delayed after passengers were sent threatening videos, including one of a man practicing at a shooting range, according to Ynet.

Israel Airports Authority, Ben Gurion International Airport, Pegasus Airlines, and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider.

Russia unleashed a major missile attack on Ukraine on Saturday, smashing a nine-storey apartment block in the city of Dnipro, killing at least five people and striking vital energy facilities across the country, officials said.

The nation’s Energy Minster German Galushchenko warned the strikes that targeted the majority of the regions would make the coming days “difficult.”

Fifteen people were rescued after being buried under a section of an apartment block that was reduced to rubble in the east-central city of Dnipro, where smoke billowed into the sky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office said.

“Tragedy. I’ve gone to the site…. We will be going through the rubble all night,” Borys Filatov, mayor of the rocket-making city on the Dnipro river, said.

At least 27 people, including six children, were also wounded in the attack, with more people were still trapped under the rubble, the regional governor said.

Pictures showed firefighters putting out a blaze around the carcasses of some cars. A broad chunk of the apartment block was missing. The exterior of the rest of the building was badly damaged.

Wounded people were carried away on stretchers in footage circulated by Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne.

Russia, which invaded Ukraine last February, has been pounding its energy infrastructure with missiles and drones since October, causing sweeping blackouts and disruptions to central heating and running water as winter bites.

Missiles on Saturday also struck critical infrastructure facilities in the eastern region of Kharkiv that borders Russia and the western region of Lviv that borders Poland, officials said.

The entire Kharkiv region lost power after officials were forced to order emergency power cuts. In Lviv, disruptions to electricity and water supplies were also possible, regional governor Maxim Kozytsky said.

“Thanks to efficient air defence work in Kyiv, damage to critical infrastructure objects was avoided,” Serhiy Popko, head of the city military administration, said.

Moldova’s interior ministry said missile debris had been found in the north of the country near the Ukraine border following the air strikes.

The attack on Saturday came hours after a smaller-scale missile attack hit critical infrastructure in Kyiv and the eastern city of Kharkiv. The first attack was unusual because missiles struck their targets before the air raid siren even sounded. No one was reported hurt then, but missile debris caused a fire in one area and houses were damaged outside the capital, officials said.

Ukrenergo, which runs Ukraine’s power grid, said its workers were racing to fix damage and that the network was struggling with a power deficit caused by earlier attacks even though it was -2 Celsius (28 Fahrenheit) in Kyiv, only mildly cold.

Colder weather generally puts more strain on the system because energy consumption goes up.

DTEK, the biggest private electricity company, introduced emergency blackouts in several regions.

Residential infrastructure was also hit in the village of Kopyliv just outside the capital. The windows and roofs of 18 privately owned houses were shattered or damaged by the blast, Oleksiy Kuleba, the regional governor, said.

Commenting on the first attack, Air Force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said Russia’s missiles had likely been fired along a high, looping ballistic trajectory from the north, which would explain why the air raid siren did not sound.

Ukraine is not able to identify and shoot down ballistic missiles, he told the Ukrainska Pravda online outlet.

In Ukraine’s northeast, two S-300 missiles struck the city of Kharkiv near the Russian border early on Saturday, according to regional governor Oleg Synehubov.

The attacks hit critical energy and industrial targets in the Kharkiv and Chuhuev district of the region, he said.

Saturday’s strikes came as Ukrainian and Russian forces battled for control of Soledar, a small salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine that for days has been the focus of a relentless Russian assault.

Russia said on Friday that its forces had taken control of the town, in what would be a rare success for Moscow after months of battlefield setbacks, but Kyiv said its troops were still fighting there.

Reuters could not immediately verify the situation in Soledar.

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Iran has executed a British-Iranian national who once served as its deputy defence minister, its judiciary said, defying calls from London and Washington for his release after he was handed the death sentence on charges of spying for Britain.

Britain, which had declared the case against Alireza Akbari politically motivated, condemned the execution, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calling it “a callous and cowardly act carried out by a barbaric regime”.

Akbari, 61, was arrested in 2019.

The Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency reported the execution without saying when it had taken place. Late on Friday, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly had said Iran must not follow through with the sentence.

The execution looks set to further worsen Iran’s long-strained relations with the West, which have deteriorated since talks to revive its 2015 nuclear deal hit deadlock and as Tehran unleashed a deadly crackdown on protesters last year.

France and the United States both condemned the execution.

In an audio recording purportedly from Akbari and broadcast by BBC Persian on Wednesday, he said he had confessed to crimes he had not committed after extensive torture.

“Alireza Akbari, who was sentenced to death on charges of corruption on earth and extensive action against the country’s internal and external security through espionage for the British government’s intelligence service … was executed,” Mizan said.

The Mizan report accused Akbari of receiving payments of 1,805,000 euros ($1.95 million), 265,000 pounds ($323,989.00), and $50,000 for spying.

Sunak said on Twitter he was “appalled by the execution”, saying Tehran had “no respect for the human rights of their own people”. Cleverly said in a statement it would “not stand unchallenged”, later announcing Britain had imposed sanctions on Iran’s prosecutor general.

U.S. Ambassador to London Jane Hartley called the execution “appalling and sickening”.

“The United States joins with the U.K. in condemning this barbaric act,” she wrote on Twitter.

British statements on the case have not addressed the Iranian charge that Akbari spied for Britain.

Iran’s foreign ministry summoned the British ambassador on Saturday over what it called London’s “meddling in Iran’s national security realm”, the state news agency IRNA reported.

Iranian state media, which have portrayed Akbari as a super spy, broadcast a video on Thursday, which they said showed that he played a role in the 2020 assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in an attack outside Tehran which authorities blamed at the time on Israel.

In the video, Akbari did not confess to involvement in the assassination but said a British agent had asked for information about Fakhrizadeh.

Iran’s state media often airs purported confessions by suspects in politically charged cases.

Reuters could not establish the authenticity of the state media video and audio, or when or where they were recorded.

Akbari was a close ally of Ali Shamkhani, now the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who was defence minister from 1997 to 2005, when Akbari was his deputy as part of the administration of reformist President Mohammad Khatami.

He fought during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s as a member of the Revolutionary Guards.

It marks a rare case of the Islamic Republic executing a serving or former senior official. One of the last occasions was in 1984, when Iranian navy commander Bahram Afzali was executed after being accused of spying for the Soviet Union.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the execution was a “despicable and barbaric act”. “His name adds to too long a list of victims of repression and the death penalty in Iran,” he wrote on Twitter.

Iran’s ties with the West have also been strained by its support for Russia in Ukraine, where Western states say Moscow has used Iranian drones during the invasion.

Britain, which has a long history of fraught ties with Iran, and other Western states have been fiercely critical of Tehran’s crackdown on anti-government protests, sparked by the death in custody of a young Iranian-Kurdish woman in September.

Iran has issued dozens of death sentences as part of the crackdown, executing at least four people.

In the audio recording broadcast by BBC Persian, Akbari said he had made false confessions as a result of torture.

“With more than 3,500 hours of torture, psychedelic drugs, and physiological and psychological pressure methods, they took away my will. They drove me to the brink of madness… and forced me to make false confessions by force of arms and death threats,” he said.

Amnesty International said the execution displayed again Tehran’s “abhorrent assault on the right to life”.

In Akbari’s case “it is particularly horrific given the violations he revealed he was subjected to in prison,” it said in a Tweet.

The Iranian authorities have not responded to accusations that Akbari was tortured.

An Iranian state TV report – details of which Reuters could not independently verify – said he was arrested on espionage charges in 2008 before he was freed on bail and left Iran.

It 2009 he went to Austria under the pretext of medical treatment, then to Spain and eventually to England, the report said.

In an interview with BBC Persian broadcast on Friday, Akbari’s brother Mehdi said he had returned to Iran in 2019 based on an invitation from Shamkhani.

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