In some places, monitors were barred from entering polling places or they never appeared in the first place. Often, election officials simply refused to hand over the tallies.

The company enjoyed another milestone moment in February 2018 with the successful test launch of the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. Armed with additional Falcon 9 boosters, the Falcon Heavy was designed to carry immense payloads into orbit and potentially serve as a vessel for deep space missions.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s broadsides against women, gay people, Brazilians of color and even democracy — “Let’s go straight to the dictatorship,” he once said — made him so polarizing that he initially struggled to find a running mate.

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He has claimed that the rise of artificial intelligence, combined with a declining birth rate, could result in "not enough people" being in the world.

The security forces have so far remained loyal to Mr Maduro, who has rewarded them with frequent pay rises and put high-ranking military men in control of key posts and industries.

Maduro to ditch some extreme policies like price and currency controls. The private sector was given an increasingly prominent role, public attacks against business owners had stopped and hyperinflation and rampant crime subsided somewhat.

That will complicate efforts by the opposition to prove undeniably that the vote had been tampered with.

The results announced by the government-controlled electoral council varied wildly — by up to 30 percentage points — from most public polls and from the opposition’s sample of results obtained directly from voting centers. And there were many reports of major irregularities and problems at those voting centers.

On 14 December 2020, the Office of the Prosecutor released a report on the office's year activities, stating that it believed there was a "reasonable basis" to believe that "since at least April 2017, civilian authorities, members of the armed forces and pro-government individuals have committed the crimes against humanity.

Following the birth of his twins with Ms Zilis, he tweeted: "Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis."

In 2016, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international non-governmental organization that investigates crime and corruption, gave President Maduro the Person of the Year Award that "recognizes the individual who has done the most in the world to advance organized criminal activity and corruption". The OCCRP stated that they "chose Maduro for the global award on the strength of his corrupt and oppressive reign, so rife with mismanagement that citizens of his oil-rich nation are literally starving and begging for medicines" and that Maduro and his family steal millions of dollars from government coffers to fund patronage that maintains President Maduro's power in Venezuela.

The UN subsequently released a report condemning the violent methods of the operation. Although the Venezuelan Government's Ombudsman, Tarek William Saab has admitted that his office received dozens of reports of "police excesses", he defended the need for the operations and stated that his office would be working alongside the police and military "to safeguard human rights". The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry has criticised the UN's report, calling it "neither objective, vlogdolisboa nor impartial" and listed what it believed were a total of 60 errors in the report.[105][106]

Results were similarly violent when the opposition attempted to enter Venezuela from Brazil with relief supplies. Despite some defections to the opposition, the Venezuelan military again remained largely loyal to Maduro, whose authority Guaidó brazenly flouted by prominently reentering the country on March 4 by plane at the Caracas airport.