Two days after twin earthquakes struck northern Venezuela, the confirmed death toll has risen to at least 235, with more than 4,300 people injured, according to NPR. Acting President Delcy Rodriguez declared a state of emergency Thursday and announced an initial $200 million reconstruction fund. Rescue teams were still working through collapsed structures Thursday morning in the coastal state of La Guaira, which absorbed the heaviest structural damage, and in Caracas neighborhoods including Altamira and El Paraiso.
International assistance has arrived and is arriving. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed Thursday that search-and-rescue teams from Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles had been deployed to Venezuela. Teams from Mexico, France, Spain, El Salvador, Chile, and Qatar were also on the ground or en route.
The gap between Wednesday’s figures and Thursday’s tells part of the story. Wednesday morning, the government confirmed 32 dead. By Thursday morning, 235. That progression isn’t unusual in a major earthquake response. It reflects rescue operations moving from accessible surface damage into collapsed structures, where most of the deaths tend to be. The USGS issued a risk model Wednesday estimating a 39 percent probability that the final death toll falls between 1,000 and 10,000, and a 37 percent probability of deaths reaching between 10,000 and 100,000. Those figures are probability models based on building types and population density in the affected areas, not predictions. They explain why international teams mobilized at scale before the confirmed count reflected the full scope of the disaster. NBC News has been tracking the casualty figures as they rise.
La Guaira’s position compounds the difficulty. The state sits on the narrow coastal strip between the Caribbean and the mountains north of Caracas, containing Venezuela’s main seaport and the Simon Bolivar International Airport, the country’s principal air gateway. Both sustained damage. A country that needs to receive large quantities of international assistance found its two primary ports of entry impaired at the moment they were most needed. The Venezuelan government faces those logistical problems with severely constrained resources. Years of economic contraction have degraded civilian infrastructure, public health capacity, and emergency services. International teams are operating, in some areas, within a support system that isn’t functioning at full capacity.
A federal judge in Boston issued a ruling Wednesday blocking major provisions of President Trump’s March executive order on elections. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, in a 37-page summary judgment, sided with a coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia in finding that key provisions “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.” Her ruling stated: “The Constitution reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone.” The injunction covers participating jurisdictions for the 2026 midterm election cycle. The Trump administration said it would appeal. Votebeat has the full account of Talwani’s ruling and what it covers.
The provisions blocked would have created a centralized federal voter database and directed the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to names on that database. In practice, this would have given the executive branch the ability to determine which voters in the 24 participating jurisdictions could cast a mail ballot, a function states have controlled since before the republic was formally constituted.
The constitutional ground Talwani stands on is established. States have administered voter eligibility since before the founding. Congress legislated the mechanics of federal election administration through the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002, but neither transferred voter-eligibility decisions to the executive branch. That’s what Talwani found the March order attempted to do. The case goes to the appeals court in a year when the legal timeline has direct practical consequences for November’s midterms.
The two-day Pax Silica summit at the State Department concluded Thursday. Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg hosted the gathering, which added the European Union, Germany, Greece, and the Netherlands as formal signatories. Taiwan participated as a non-signatory observer. Pax Silica, launched in December 2025, is a U.S.-led effort to coordinate supply chains for semiconductors, critical minerals, and AI infrastructure among allied nations. The State Department page has the full list of current partners and summit outcomes.
The initiative is non-binding. No joint funding. No enforcement mechanisms. Its structure is persuasion and common interest: allied governments agreeing to coordinate their technology policies rather than mandating specific actions.
In 1949, the United States and its allies created the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, known as COCOM, to limit transfers of strategic technologies to the Soviet bloc. COCOM wasn’t a treaty. It held together seventeen allied nations through coordinated national export controls, running on shared interest and Cold War pressure for more than four decades. It dissolved in 1994 when those conditions changed and was succeeded by the Wassenaar Arrangement, which expanded the membership but loosened the focus. Pax Silica draws from the same design: informal coordination, aligned nations, agreed principles, and the shared calculation that fragmented national technology policies in a contested AI environment produce worse outcomes than coordinated ones. Taiwan’s presence as an observer, without formal membership, reflects the geopolitical constraints on a country that produces the majority of the world’s most advanced semiconductors but whose status in international arrangements remains perpetually contested.
A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 Tuesday to allow the Trump administration to resume expanded expedited removal nationwide. Expedited removal allows immigration officers to deport some migrants without a hearing before an immigration judge. Before January 2025, it applied only within 100 miles of the border to people who couldn’t demonstrate two weeks’ continuous presence in the country. The Trump administration expanded it in January to apply anywhere in the country to any undocumented migrant. A lower court blocked the expansion. Tuesday’s ruling reversed that block. NPR has the ruling and the dissent.
The majority found the expansion within the administration’s statutory authority under immigration law. Judge Robert Wilkins dissented, writing that officers acting under the expanded policy had failed to advise detainees of their rights and had wrongfully deported people. That dissent isn’t a procedural technicality. Expedited removal is the fastest deportation mechanism the government has. It skips the hearing. It skips the immigration judge. The dissent points to instances where people were moved through that process without the protections the law nominally provides them. Expedited removal was created by Congress in 1996 as a limited border tool. Every administration since has debated its scope. Tuesday’s ruling allows the most significant expansion of the policy since its creation. The case is expected to continue.
The 21st Century Road to Housing Act remains unsigned at the White House. Trump canceled the planned Wednesday signing, tying the bill to the SAVE America Act, a separate measure requiring proof of citizenship to register for federal elections. The bill would ban large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes, streamline certain construction permits, and create new financing tools for affordable housing, with more than 50 provisions in total. It passed the Senate 85-5 and the House 358-32. A bill not signed or vetoed within ten days while Congress is in session becomes law. Congress is in session. NPR has the account of the canceled signing.
Speaker Johnson said Wednesday he spoke with Trump and that the president still plans to sign the bill. Thursday, the ten-day window has three days to run.
Gary Kowalski writes about golf and the outdoors in the Living section. This past Monday he published a piece about binoculars.
Four years ago, Kowalski stopped a round in Traverse City to watch a wood thrush that had landed on the cart path ahead of him. His playing partner, a birder who keeps a life list in a small notebook he carries in his bag, handed him a pair of binoculars without being asked. Kowalski looked at the bird for maybe thirty seconds. The bird flew. They finished the hole. He didn’t think much of it until he went home and told his wife, who has a doctorate in plant ecology and has been identifying birds in their yard since they moved there in 2004. She said “Of course it was.” The way people say things when they’ve been noticing something for years and are waiting for the people around them to catch up.
He now owns three pairs of binoculars and has opinions about all of them: magnification, objective lens diameter, close focus distance, and what the difference between a $75 pair and a $600 pair actually reveals at dawn in heavy tree canopy. The piece walks through all of it with the practical clarity that good gear writing has. What holds it together is the last line. “The birds were there all along. I just hadn’t bothered to look.”
Best Binoculars for Birdwatching is in the Living section.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
