Several tornadoes touched down in Kentucky, one of them traveling for more than 200 ruinous miles. At least 70 people had been killed in the state, a toll that was likely to rise.

While the destruction was spread throughout western Kentucky, much of the estimated death toll came from a single building, the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory, just southwest of the small city of Mayfield. Officials described an almost unfathomable level of destruction there, a knot of concrete and metal strewn with cars and 55-gallon drums leaking corrosive fluids into the wreckage.

“We had to at times crawl over casualties to get to live victims to get them out and mark those casualties as we worked our way through the rubble,” said Jeremy Creason, chief of the Mayfield Fire Department and the director of the city’s emergency medical services.

Mr. Beshear said that the death toll at the candle factory “may end up being the largest loss of life of any tornado event in a single location” in Kentucky history.

Mayfield, a town of around 10,000 people in a western corner of the state known as the Jackson Purchase, was the site of some of the worst destruction of the outbreak. On Saturday, the city’s grid of narrow streets was a perilous maze of downed power lines and rubble, with the insides of buildings spilling out over the sidewalks. The main fire station was hit, as was the police station, many of the police cars destroyed along with it.

The First United Methodist Church, which had a cavernous sanctuary with a stone facade, had almost entirely collapsed. Along the two-lane highways snaking into town, the tornado had left displays of its wrath, with homes missing brick exteriors, churches without roofs and seemingly sturdy trees that had been snapped like twigs.

Outside Jackie Nelson’s home, a reindeer, a Santa figure and a sleigh filled with presents were strewn across her lawn along with pieces of the roof. Her windows were blown out, and a trailer had been shoved into the trees near the house. She and her husband had huddled in the basement when the local news warned that a deadly storm was coming. Her husband’s sister did not make it, she said; his brother-in-law is in the hospital.

When presented with The Times’ findings, several current and former senior Special Operations officers denied any widespread pattern of reckless airstrikes by the strike cell and disregard for limiting civilian casualties. Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesman for the military’s Central Command, which oversees operations in Syria, declined to comment.

As bad strikes mounted, the four military officials said, Talon Anvil’s partners sounded the alarm. Pilots over Syria at times refused to drop bombs because Talon Anvil wanted to hit questionable targets in densely populated areas. Senior C.I.A. officers complained to Special Operations leaders about the disturbing pattern of strikes. Air Force teams doing intelligence work argued with Talon Anvil over a secure phone known as the red line. And even within Talon Anvil, some members at times refused to participate in strikes targeting people who did not seem to be in the fight.

The four officials worked in different parts of the war effort, but all interacted directly with Talon Anvil on hundreds of strikes and soon grew concerned with its way of operating. They reported what they were seeing to immediate superiors and the command overseeing the air war, but say they were ignored.

The former Air Force intelligence officer, who worked almost daily on missions from 2016 to 2018, said he notified the main Air Force operations center in the region about civilian casualties several times, including after a March 2017 strike when Talon Anvil dropped a 500-pound bomb on a building where about 50 people were sheltering. But he said leaders seemed reluctant to scrutinize a strike cell that was driving the offensive on the battlefield.

Every year that the strike cell operated, the civilian casualty rate in Syria increased significantly, according to Larry Lewis, a former Pentagon and State Department adviser who was one of the authors of a 2018 Defense Department report on civilian harm. Mr. Lewis, who has viewed the Pentagon’s classified civilian casualty data for Syria, said the rate was 10 times that of similar operations he tracked in Afghanistan.

“It was much higher than I would have expected from a U.S. unit,” Mr. Lewis said. “The fact that it increased dramatically and steadily over a period of years shocked me.”

Mr. Lewis said commanders enabled the tactics by failing to emphasize the importance of reducing civilian casualties, and that Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, who commanded the offensive against the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017, was dismissive of widespread reports from news media and human rights organizations describing the mounting toll.

Supporters of abortion rights have criticized Texas for drafting its abortion ban to evade review in federal court, where it might be blocked. It effectively deputizes ordinary citizens, including those outside Texas, to sue clinics and others who violate the ban, awarding them at least $10,000 per illegal abortion if they are successful.

In a 5-4 decision led by the conservative majority, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion clinics could sue the state’s licensing officials to halt the new law, but could not sue state court judges, court clerks or the state attorney general. Otherwise, the court allowed the law, in effect since September, to stand.

As the Supreme Court has signaled that it might overturn Roe v. Wade, California political leaders have said they will work to make the state a refuge for women in parts of the country where abortion could be outlawed. Mr. Newsom’s response seemed to fulfill warnings that if the high court backed Texas’ legal strategy, liberal-leaning states might use the same tactic to limit rights dear to conservatives, such as gun rights.

The governor said that “if states can now shield their laws from review by the federal courts that compare assault weapons to Swiss Army knives, then California will use that authority to protect people’s lives, where Texas used it to put women in harm’s way.”

The reference was a swipe at a court ruling this year in which a federal judge overturned California’s three-decade-old ban on assault weapons, comparing the powerful guns, frequently used in mass shootings, to military pocketknives.

The president then said the extremist views displayed by some members of the Republican Party had eroded some of that bipartisanship.

Mr. Biden has appeared on Mr. Fallon’s show twice before, both in September 2016, toward the end of his time as vice president and again in 2020, in an interview that took on a much more serious tone during the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Biden, who as president will often add emphasis during his speeches or interviews with mentions of “That’s not hyperbole” and “It’s not a joke,” has shown a willingness to joke around a bit on late-night shows.

Mr. Biden told Mr. Fallon how his family was not used to having every meal made for them in the White House and that he reached an agreement with “the guys who run the kitchen” that the first family would make breakfast for themselves.

“You make your own eggs?” Mr. Fallon asked.

“Well, I don’t — Jill does,” Mr. Biden said, referring to the first lady of the United States.

Mr. Biden also foreshadowed some of his forthcoming goals during the appearance on the show. When asked what he hoped he would be talking about this time next year, he said he hoped he would be celebrating his administration getting the pandemic under control, even as the rise of the Delta variant this summer factored into his dwindling approval ratings. He added that he was focused on putting in effect more measures to combat climate change.

And Mr. Biden said that he hoped to pass legislation that would preserve the right to vote, something he acknowledged during a CNN town hall in October that had not received his full attention while he tried to secure enough votes to pass his infrastructure and social spending packages.

Mr. Biden said the Republican attempts to restrict voting rights in more than a dozen states were “literally un-American.”