Raging storms swept the Washington, D.C., area Friday night, claiming at least two lives and knocking out electricity for more at least 3.6 million residents. Five people in Tennessee and Missouri are thought to have died earlier on Friday from the stifling heat. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin of West Virginia declared a state of emergency, saying, “The damage from today’s storms is widespread and in many places severe.” At state of emergency was also declared in Virginia Officials were investigating the deaths in Tennessee and Missouri, including that of a baby and two young boys, to determine if they were related to the heat. The storm was followed by further sizzling temperatures in many states on Saturday.

Romney’s desperately trying to sell independent voters on repealing Obamacare. But don’t count on it working. America thinks it’s time to move on, writes The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky.

Mohammed Morsi was sworn in Saturday as Egypt’s first freely elected president and the first to take power since ruler Hosni Mubarak was deposed last year. The Islamist president-elect held a rally in Tahrir Square on Friday ahead of his inauguration, saying that as president he would work to free Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheik” imprisoned in the United States. Morsi, a 60-year-old member of the Muslim Brotherhood, arrived at Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court for his official swearing-in ceremony at 11 a.m. local time Saturday. "We aspire to a better tomorrow, a new Egypt and a second republic," Morsi said in his official speech.

A mid-Atlantic area storm that left more than a million people without electricity on Saturday also kept customers from documenting their powerless woes in sepia tones. According to Forbes, the severe thunderstorms that whipped around the nation’s capital tearing out power lines also took down a major Amazon cloud computing location in North Virginia. The popular photo-sharing service Instagram temporarily went down, as did Pinterest and Netflix. The Daily Beast also experienced difficulties on Saturday morning due to damage caused by the storm, and was working to restore updates to its homepage as of 10am.