What happened
Powerful back-to-back earthquakes in Venezuela yesterday evening collapsed buildings in Caracas and other cities, sending people rushing out to the streets. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez said in a televised address that 32 people were confirmed dead and more than 700 were injured, but she didn’t yet have numbers for the “hardest-hit region” of La Guaira.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the initial magnitude 7.2 quake was followed less than a minute later by a magnitude 7.5 temblor, the biggest to hit Venezuela since 1900. “High casualties and damage are probable,” USGS said, with the death toll likely in the thousands. 

Who said what
“We urge our population to remain calm,” Rodríguez said. “We urge unity.” Simón Bolívar International Airport outside Caracas sustained heavy damage and was closed, she said, and train, subway and residential gas services were suspended. School was also canceled for the rest of the week. Traveling through Caracas this morning, said New York Times correspondent María Victoria Fermín, “I saw neighborhoods with no lights on and streets flooded by burst water pipes.” 

What next?
The U.S. was among several countries that promised aid, search-and-rescue help and rebuilding assistance. “We will be there for our new and great friends,” President Donald Trump said on social media. “Early reports are not good!!!”

What happened
The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday ruled that Michigan was not obligated to turn over confidential voter information to the Trump administration, siding with lower court judges in Michigan and eight other states where similar requests were blocked. In Boston, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper yesterday permanently barred President Donald Trump from implementing most of an executive order seeking to overhaul how states run elections. The Constitution “does not grant the president any specific powers over elections,” she wrote. 

Who said what
Yesterday’s appellate decision was the “biggest setback yet” in the Trump administration’s effort to create its own nationwide voter roll, CNN said. That endeavor is part of a so-far unsuccessful “administration-wide push” by “Trump and his allies to find evidence of voter fraud,” The New York Times said. But they’ve run into “significant headwinds — and stern rebukes” — from “judges appointed by presidents of both parties,” including five Trump appointees.

What next?
A second election-related executive order Trump issued to create a national voter list and limit mail ballot “also faces multiple legal challenges,” The Associated Press said. Postmaster General David Steiner yesterday told a Senate panel that under a proposed Trump-ordered rule, the U.S. Postal Service would not deliver mail-in ballots to states that declined to turn over private voter data.

The U.S. military will include Australia in a global pre-positioning program for weapons, ammunition and vehicles for the first time, according to Agence France-Presse. This “growing U.S. footprint” is “important in terms of building our own military capability,” Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles told reporters in Western Australia. But critics, like University of Sydney international affairs expert James Curran, are asking whether Australia is “acting like America’s 51st state.”

Although Australia does not permit foreign military bases on its soil, it hosts U.S. Marines for exercises in the northern city of Darwin for six months of the year, and a “rotating force” of U.S.-commanded submarines will arrive in Western Australia next year, said AFP. If the U.S. and China “come to blows over Taiwan,” said The Wall Street Journal, the naval base in Western Australia “offers a berth” that would bring American nuclear-powered submarines “close to the fight” and provide a “haven if things go wrong.”

There’s “little political appetite” for a “massive increase in Australian defense expenditure,” said John Blaxland, an international security professor at Australian National University, to AFP. So “facilitating greater U.S. investment in Australian real estate is widely considered to be the most prudent approach to take.”

But if Australia changes its mind, there are “precedents” for close allies withdrawing permission for U.S. access to jointly operated military bases and airspace, Curran wrote in Australia’s Financial Review. Spain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have all restricted Washington’s use of such facilities, and Australia “could, if it so chose, do the same.”