Crews pulled 71 more bodies from the rubble in Venezuela, and the death toll from the June 24 earthquakes climbed Monday to 4,561, authorities said [1]. Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly and brother of acting president Delcy Rodríguez, posted the tally to his Telegram channel. The count of injured held at 16,740, unchanged for seven days.

The two quakes struck 39 seconds apart along the northern coastal range, magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, and set off 1,254 aftershocks. The U.S. Geological Survey ranks them among the strongest recorded in Venezuela in more than a century. Most of the dead were in the coastal state of La Guaira, about 20 kilometers north of Caracas, where a photographer on Sunday found Estefany Landaez seated among the wreckage of a collapsed building, waiting for word of her two children. More than 20,000 people remain in 107 temporary shelters across Caracas, La Guaira and neighboring Miranda.

The rising number is not a fresh disaster but arithmetic: the toll grows as debris removal proceeds, which is why the paper's July 11 accounting kept dated tolls apart from pledges and repair. Online each recovered body reads as breaking horror; AP files it as a dated government tally from Rodríguez's Telegram channel, current only to Monday [1].

-- LUCIA VEGA, Sao Paulo