At least 164 people have died and 971 were injured after a pair of powerful quakes rocked Venezuela, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez said Thursday (Jun. 25). Wednesday evening's 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes were among the strongest to strike Venezuela in more than a century and could be felt throughout the region. Buildings were evacuated in places as far away as Brazil's Amazon, about 1,700 kilometers (1,050 miles) from Venezuela's capital, Caracas.

Footage on state TV showed three children, covered in dust but alive, pulled from the rubble in La Guaira state, which Rodríguez described as a "disaster zone" and one of the areas hardest hit by the quakes because of the large number of collapsed buildings. Rodríguez said authorities were shifting rescue teams from other parts of the country to La Guaira, which sits north of Caracas on the coast. She said officials were trying to make the most of the daylight hours to speed up efforts to rescue people believed to remain trapped under the rubble.

The US and Iran were in dispute Tuesday (Jun. 23) over whether Tehran had agreed to allow UN inspections of its nuclear sites. As officials negotiated over how to permanently end the war in Iran, a separate plan emerged to break the shipping bottleneck through the Strait of Hormuz. The disagreement over nuclear inspections came as Iran's president met with Pakistani mediators and technical teams from the US and Iran continued talks in Switzerland.

A United Nations agency said Tuesday that a plan was underway to move stranded ships and their thousands of crew members through the strait - a vital passage for global energy supplies that Iran had blocked after the US and Israel launched the war on Feb. 28. Earlier in the day, a spokesperson for Iran's Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, told reporters in Tehran that UN inspectors were not scheduled to examine nuclear sites bombed by the US last year, rejecting comments made a day before by US Vice President JD Vance.

Civil society organisations in South Africa said Wednesday that adolescent girls and women are among the first vulnerable groups to feel the pinch of US foreign aid cuts as the Trump administration phases out its more than $400 million support annually for the country's HIV programmes. The US State Department has said that it would "begin a phased drawdown" of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a program that has supported South Africa's battle against HIV and AIDS for the last 20 years and is widely credited with saving more than 20 million lives over that period.

The phasing out of most programmes is expected to be completed by the end of September, with critical personnel support continuing through March next year, according to the U.S. State Department. South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV, with approximately 8 million people, or about 12.7% of its 63 million population.

Supporters of India's viral Cockroach Janta Party banged steel plates with spoons in a protest Saturday to demand the resignation of the education minister over allegations of examination irregularities and repeated paper leaks. The protest near Parliament in New Delhi by hundreds of students and young supporters of the nascent movement added to the pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government while also seeking wider support among Indians.

Authorities deployed heavy security and police used cameras and drones to monitor the protest. Some carried placards and others banged plates, their noise cutting through the crowd protesting and demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The exam paper for a nationwide medical programme was leaked last month through social media app Telegram. Authorities subsequently postponed the exam and also temporarily banned Telegram in India. The exam is scheduled to be held on Sunday (Jun. 28).