Millions told to stay home in US and more than a million are left without power, while Australia faces record heatwave

Cold weather across a vast swathe of the eastern US has been the likely cause of at least 49 deaths in the past week.

At one point, about 213 million people were under some sort of winter weather warnings, affecting areas from New Mexico to New England – a spread of about 2,000 miles (3,200km). Millions were told to stay at home, and at one point there were more than a million people without power. As of Wednesday night, there were still 312,000 outages, mostly across Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.