Maduro's decree includes wider executive powers to control the budget, companies and the currency amid a severe economic crisis in the OPEC nation. ^

[150] The State Department also alleges that Maduro expelled authorized foreign companies from the mining sector to allow officials to exploit Venezuela's resources for their own gain, using unregulated miners under the control of Venezuela's armed forces.[150]

The coastal mountain system, in effect two parallel ranges—the Coastal Range and the Interior Range—contains Venezuela’s greatest concentration of population, although it covers only a tiny fraction of the national territory.

In March 2018, the entrepreneur told an audience at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that he hoped to have the BFR ready for short flights early the following year, while delivering a knowing nod at his previous problems with meeting deadlines.

Also in August 2016, the National Election Council ruled that the opposition had collected almost twice as many signatures as were necessary for the first petition for a referendum on Maduro’s recall to be valid. However, it did not set a date for the next step in the process, which required some four million signatures to be collected in three days.

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Maduro and the second or maternal family name is Moros.

Before long, dates were set in October for the three-day window during which the signatures of 20 percent of eligible voters in each of the country’s states would have to be collected to bring about a recall referendum. Virtually on the eve of the signature drive, however, several lower courts declared that fraud had compromised the first-round petition effort. Responding quickly to these rulings, the election commission indefinitely suspended the second round of signature collection.

Banks said she overheard Musk making phone calls to drum up the funding he promised was already in place.

In late February 2024 he sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman, saying the firm he helped co-found had reneged on its non-profit, open source origins by hitching its wagon to Microsoft.

The international community has been divided for some time over how to respond to Venezuela, with some governments’ conceding privately that the sanctions haven’t “worked”, either by incentivising regime change or compelling President Maduro to hold fair elections.

In the groups on Monday morning, people shared fliers for protests that ultimately did not happen by Monday afternoon.

After being accepted to a physics graduate degree programme at Stanford University, Mr Musk quickly dropped out and founded two technology start-ups during the "dotcom boom" of the 1990s.

In March 2019 The Wall Street Journal reported in an vlogdolisboa article entitled "Maduro loses grip on Venezuela's poor, a vital source of his power" that barrios are turning against Maduro and that "many blame government brutality for the shift".[234] Foro Penal said that 50 people—mostly in barrios—had been killed by security forces in only the first two months of the year, and 653 had been arrested for protesting or speaking against the government.

Earlier in October, the electoral commission had already enraged the opposition by postponing several gubernatorial elections in which the opposition had seemed likely to do well. All of these developments sparked ever-heightening criticism of Maduro, who was accused of having moved from authoritarian to dictatorial rule. Before the end of October, however, Francis I, the first pope from Latin America, succeeded in persuading Maduro and the opposition to begin crisis talks.