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CARACAS, Venezuela — The fallout from Venezuela’s powerful twin quakes has evolved into a major test for acting President Delcy Rodríguez, sending her scrambling to prevent the humanitarian disaster from becoming a political one as her mandate as interim leader expired Friday.

A day after Rodríguez angrily defended the competence of her government’s relief effort at her first news conference since the June 24 disaster, her main rival, exiled Venezuelan Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado, issued her own appeal.

Speaking Friday from Panama, Machado argued that the government’s quake response exposed its critical weaknesses and that her return to Venezuela “contributes to facilitating the transition process, especially after the tragedy.”

“My presence stabilizes the situation; it is part of the organizing forces that the country needs at a time when the total absence of the state has become evident,” Machado said, referring to widespread criticism of the government’s earthquake response as slow and disorganized. “The country needs figures it can trust.”

The quakes have killed more than 2,295 people and injured over 11,000 others, according to the government, which has not offered updates on the number of dead and injured since Wednesday. Machado’s opposition movement has set up a digital database to locate the missing that currently lists over 36,000 people unaccounted for. Her party has mobilized volunteers to collect donations in Venezuela and solicited aid from the country’s vast diaspora.

“My presence … seeks to bring people together, to unify, not only to address an emergency, but also to heal the wound,” said the opposition leader, who was barred from running in a 2024 presidential election in which President Nicolás Maduro claimed victory. An independently verified vote count carried out by the opposition found that the candidate that Machado endorsed, Edmundo González, was the real winner.

U.S. praises Rodríguez, blocks Machado

When the earthquakes hit, Machado saw a critical opportunity to return home for the first time since fleeing last December to accept a Nobel Peace Prize in Norway. Ever since the United States captured Maduro in a brazen military operation in January, Machado has been seeking a comeback and calling for a democratic transition.

But the Trump administration has thrown its support behind Rodríguez since Maduro’s ouster, praising her business-friendly reforms of the country’s lucrative oil sector and giving no timetable on when elections might be held.

Two senior U.S. officials familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to disclose private diplomatic discussions, told the Associated Press that the Trump administration has grown frustrated with Machado and dissuaded her from returning to Venezuela in the aftermath of the earthquakes.

One official said that Machado had sought assistance from Washington for ferrying her to Venezuela from the Dutch Caribbean territory of Curaçao and also from Panama, where she is now.

The second official said the U.S. suspected she wanted to return to lead protests against Rodríguez and push for political change at a time when the focus should be on quake recovery. This official added that the Trump administration could not prevent Machado’s return but was not in a position to facilitate it.

Earthquake fallout becomes political

Upon learning of Machado’s imminent plans to return, Rodríguez shut down commercial air traffic into Caracas, the U.S. official said. Those canceled flights had been due to bring in hundreds of relief workers to assist with earthquake recovery efforts, the official said.

On Monday, Machado claimed that the government had closed its airspace to prevent her return, without offering evidence. The government did not respond to a request for comment on the alleged closure.

Seemingly concerned that anger over the earthquake response could jeopardize her authority, Rodríguez on Thursday blamed any criticism on what she called “narratives manufactured in propaganda laboratories.” She claimed that rescue crews deployed immediately with adequate equipment to disaster zones — contrary to widespread complaints by residents that they were left alone to search for their loved ones without official teams or heavy machinery for the first 48 hours.

“Those propaganda operations, driven by partisan political interests, are despicable,” she said. “We did not wait one day, two days, or three days. We activated immediately.”

She went on to say that thousands of civil and military rescue workers as well as 11 international field hospitals had been deployed to quake-affected areas, adding that the government had approved the creation of a fund to receive donations for reconstruction.

On Friday, state-run media broadcast her paying a visit in the hospital to Hernán Alberto Gil Flores, a 43-year-old security guard pried from a collapsed basement after surviving nearly eight days under the rubble. His dramatic rescue Thursday served as a rare bright spot in one of the bleakest periods in memory for Venezuela.

Unclear what happens when mandate expires

Under Venezuela’s constitution, temporary absences are to be filled by the vice president — which was Rodríguez’s former role — for up to 90 days, after which they can be extended by the national assembly for an additional 90 days.

On Friday, that 180-day interim period expired. There was no immediate comment from authorities on what, if anything, they would do in response to the expiration of Rodríguez’s mandate.

The National Assembly, controlled by Rodríguez’s party, can trigger a snap election if lawmakers declare the post permanently vacant.

LIMA, Peru — Conservative politician Keiko Fujimori on Friday was declared the winner of the presidential runoff election in Peru, which was dominated by people’s concerns over surging crime.

Fujimori, 51, the daughter of a disgraced former president, was running for the presidency for the fourth time. She will be Peru’s ninth president in 10 years when she takes office later this month.

The election win was certified Friday by the country’s top election authority. Figures released by election officials earlier in the week showed that with 100% of ballots tallied, Fujimori received 9,223,000 votes, or 50.135% of the total, while nationalist congressman Roberto Sánchez earned over 9,173,000 votes, or 49.865%.

Fujimori and Sánchez made it to the June 7 runoff election after defeating 33 other candidates in an April vote.

Voters were primarily concerned with increasing levels of crime, especially extortion by violent organized crime gangs, and Fujimori pledged to combat crime with an iron fist.

The winner is the daughter of the late Alberto Fujimori, the former president whose government in the 1990s defeated the Shining Path extremist rebel group but also took an authoritarian turn. He was convicted in 2009 of human rights abuses in the fight against the rebels, and later of corruption charges.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court just wrapped up a term that yielded significant rulings in cases involving race and discrimination that could have lasting effects on U.S. politics and society.

Justices were at times bitterly divided — and critical of one another — in rulings that winnowed key provisions of a landmark voting rights law, allowed the government to revoke protections for some immigrants, and even challenged the historic understanding of birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants.

The decisions come at a moment when long-standing debates over race and identity have turned toward immigration, increasing racial diversity, and the fairness of policies meant to prevent and redress discrimination.

“This term, we saw a Supreme Court that is moving quickly to eradicate legal protections in ways that will leave vulnerable communities exposed to the harsh winds of discrimination and hatred that we continue to see across the country today,” Kristen Clarke, general counsel for the NAACP and the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Biden administration, told the Associated Press.

Here is a breakdown of the latest decisions involving race and what they may mean going forward:

The temporary protected status case

The court allowed the government to end deportation protections for Haitians and Syrians in the U.S. who have fled violence and natural disaster. President Donald Trump’s administration revoked the temporary protected status last year.

With the president’s more than decadelong track record of denigrating developing nations and immigrants who come to the U.S. from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, attorneys for some affected migrants contended that the government could not cancel the designations, in part because Trump’s comments about immigrants were racist.

“The true reason for the termination is the president’s racial animus towards non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular,” Geoffrey Pipoly, an attorney for the Haitian nationals in the case, said during April oral arguments in the case, Mullin v. Doe. The attorneys noted that, during his second presidential campaign, Trump claimed immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country” and suggested in another instance that migrants have “bad genes.”

Federal authorities denied prejudice played a role in the decision and argued that TPS was supposed to end but has lasted more than a decade in some cases.

In writing for the 6-3 conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito said none of the cited statements was “overtly racial,” reasoning that any of Trump’s actions could have been taken without racial animus and attributing his anti-immigrant comments to “political discourse.”

That’s not how the court’s liberal minority saw the situation.

“The references — of filth, disease, and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent.

The birthright citizenship case

In one of the highest-profile cases of the term, the court reaffirmed that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means all people born in the U.S. are citizens.

On his first day in office last year, Trump signed an executive order seeking to restrict birthright citizenship to the children of U.S. citizens, a move that civil rights groups challenged as unconstitutional and racist.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts traced the arc of birthright citizenship — a principle that all people born on U.S. soil are citizens — from its origins in English common law to its codification in the 14th Amendment.

Roberts noted that race and citizenship had been fiercely debated in courts, speeches, Congress, and battlefields because of Black Americans’ fight for freedom from slavery.

Freed Black Americans did not receive citizenship as a “reward,” Roberts wrote, but because “the Amendment recognized their rightful claim to birthright citizenship simply and solely by virtue of their having been born on American soil.”

The 6-3 ruling was a blow to the Trump administration, which has made restricting immigration its central goal.

“The clause does not extend citizenship to the children of temporary visa holders or illegal aliens,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer argued before the court in April.

Justice Clarence Thomas agreed and wrote in his dissent that African descendants of enslaved people in the U.S. are a unique case separate from the children of tourists or people in the country illegally.

“Blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans. They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority,” Thomas wrote.

In a stark move, liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor directly criticized Thomas’ claim in a joint opinion.

“The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery,” they wrote.

The voting rights case

The Supreme Court handed down a decision in April that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act meant to remedy efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. Among the methods the law permitted to stop voting discrimination in states was the creation of majority-minority congressional districts.

In the majority opinion, Alito found that because race and partisan voting behavior were so intertwined, it was unfair to conclude that a partisan gerrymander of a state’s congressional districts could be racist, given there may be other reasons for the map’s results.

Alito reasoned that “in a state where both parties have substantial support and where race is often correlated with party preference,” partisan actors can “easily exploit” laws meant to protect minority political participation for disingenuous reasons.

The liberal justices balked at the logic and criticized the conservative majority for harming minority representation in politics and culture. They believed that the law’s provisions were still necessary to prevent discrimination by states and worried about the fallout from its removal.

“The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the states where that law continues to matter — the states still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting — minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

The decision has had profound impact on the political landscape, with nearly a dozen Southern states immediately taking steps to redistrict and eliminate majority-Black districts.

Lulu Gribbin was 15 when she survived a shark attack off the coast of Florida. She lost her left hand, part of her right leg and almost her life.

What she didn’t know when she entered the water on that day in 2024 was that another woman had been bitten by a shark 90 minutes earlier and just 3 miles down the beach. Had she known about the earlier attack, there is no way she would have been swimming, she said.

Gribbin’s story has inspired new federal legislation to authorize emergency alerts to mobile phones to warn beachgoers when a shark has bitten someone in the area.

President Donald Trump last week signed Lulu’s Law, which requires the Federal Communications Commission to allow the emergency messages. The legislation, which Gribbin advocated for, authorizes the warnings by classifying a shark attack as an event for which an emergency alert can be issued. It is up to states to implement the warnings. Gribbin’s home state of Alabama approved such a warning system last year.

“It’s really just common-sense legislation. It says that whenever there has been a shark attack in a certain area where you are near, it will send an alert to your phone, exactly like how an Amber Alert system works when a child is abducted,” she said.

Gribbin said she hopes the alert system will help prevent attacks like hers. “I definitely see this law working in the future and I’m really excited to hopefully save lives,” she said.

A fight to survive

Gribbin was one of three people bitten by a shark on June 7, 2024, off the Florida Panhandle.

She was on a mother-daughter trip to the Florida Panhandle. Gribbin said she and her friend had been diving for sand dollars.

“All of the sudden my best friend yelled, ‘Shark!’ and so we all started swimming for our lives,” Gribbin recalled. She said she remembered that sharks are attracted to frantic splashing and yelled for everyone to be calm. Gribbin, who was closest to the shark, was bitten.

“The shark bit off my hand first, and I raised my arm out of the water, and there was just flesh and bone there,” Gribbin said. The shark then latched onto her leg. A man punched the shark off her and strangers on the beach rushed to help. She was flown by helicopter to a nearby hospital.

Doctors were able to save the teen’s life but had to amputate part of her right leg.

Choosing positivity throughout her recovery

In the hospital, Gribbin made a deliberate decision to choose joy and to never give up.

She initially struggled, knowing “that I only have two regular limbs, and that my life would be completely different.”

“I would cry, and I would ask my mom, ‘Why is it happening to me?’ And on that day, we put a Bible verse on my bedside table that said, ‘With God, all things are possible.’ And then she told me that what you look like doesn’t define you, it’s who you are on the inside. And so, I think that stuck with me throughout my whole recovery the past two years.

“It doesn’t matter what I look like, as long as I’m spreading positivity and inspiring others to stay strong and to never give up,” she said.

Gribbin was fitted with prosthetic limbs, quickly regained her ability to walk, returned to sports, and got her driver’s license. She has gone back in the water and learned to surf, meeting Bethany Hamilton, a professional surfer who lost her arm in a shark attack.

U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, the Alabama Republican who sponsored the legislation, said the fact that Gribbin was bitten soon after an attack on another woman prompted discussions about what could have been done differently. That led to the idea of an alert. She contacted Gribbin’s parents who had thought about the same possibility.

“If there had been any type of alert that was given, that there’s no way that Lulu would have been in the water. And so we talked about how a simple change could have made a huge impact,” Britt said.

Shark bites remain rare

While sharks are commonly found in the waters off the United States, shark bites are rare, said Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Museum of Natural History’s shark research program.

There are between 60 to 80 known unprovoked bites worldwide each year, he said. It’s extremely rare that two or more people are bitten in close proximity. He said in a database of known shark bites, called the International Shark Attack File, there have only been a few instances of multiple bites in a single day.

“If somebody is bitten by a shark, and then an alert goes out, the probability that another person’s going to be bitten by a shark within, let’s say, two or three hours is incredibly small,” Naylor said.

When that happens, he said it’s likely because of environmental conditions such as sharks following schools of bait fish closer to the shore. Murky water conditions can also be a factor because they increase the chance that a shark will mistake a person for a fish or seal.

In the area where Gribbin was bitten, there are about 20 to 30 bull sharks 1,312 feet offshore at any time, Naylor said. Great white sharks have been spotted more frequently in the chilly waters of New England and Atlantic Canada, according to conservation groups. A smartphone app called Sharktivity also allows shark spotters to report their sightings.

The sightings might unnerve people, but Naylor said it’s important to remember that shark attacks are rare.

“If sharks wanted to eat people, we’d have about 10,000 bites a day. The fact that we have so few is basically testament to the fact that the sharks are doing their level best to avoid people, not to target them,” Naylor said.

Britt said she believes parents and others on the beach will want the information. “I know as a parent, I want every tool in my toolbox to be able to keep my child safe,” Britt said.

Another survivor praises the alert system

Braxton Rocha, who was bitten by a large tiger shark off the north shore of the Big Island of Hawaii, said he liked the idea of an alert system. He thinks it is information that people, particularly tourists to the island, will want to know.

Rocha was spearfishing in 2015 when he saw the large shark. “Looked like a bus or submarine. She was the biggest thing I’d seen in the ocean at that time,” Rocha said. He started making his way to shore. When he looked back to check where the shark was, the animal was right in front of him. He tried to push the shark away, but the animal was too big and powerful. It latched onto his leg. Rocha punched it in the nose and the shark let go and swam away.

“Everything happened so fast. It was almost like being struck by lightning. I was still kind of out of it. I looked down and see giant clouds of blood just bursting out of my leg,” he said.

It took nearly 100 staples to repair the gaping wound on his leg. But the experience did not dampen Rocha’s enthusiasm for the ocean and wildlife. “I’ve always loved sharks,” Rocha said.