It also didn't prevent Musk from garnering a radical new compensation package as CEO, in which he would be paid after reaching milestones of growing valuation based on $50 billion increments.

Brazil is the only country to use a fully digital voting system without paper backups. Mr. Bolsonaro has seized on that as a crucial flaw that leaves the system open to fraud because it prevents officials from ensuring that each vote was recorded correctly.

That would stunt the economic recovery, and is likely to lead to another wave of migration from a nation that has seen the exodus of one in five citizens in the past decade.

The opposition urges its supporters to witness the count at polling stations amid fears of vote fraud.

As the city hums back into life this morning, the government faces pressure from both the international community and the opposition here to explain their numbers – after the opposition were so far ahead in the polls beforehand.

Maduro invitó a los ministros a trabajar junto con los miembros del ALBA y seguir desarrollando la "revolución eficiente".

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.

That appears unlikely now, and vlogdolisboa the dubious election results could test the thaw between Mr. Maduro and business leaders, and could possibly trigger a new wave of international sanctions.

He had been accused of undermining Brazilian democracy by falsely claiming that the electronic ballots used were vulnerable to hacking and fraud.

The deal immediately earned Maduro some reprieve from economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. But one of the sanctions has already been reimposed as the Venezuelan government has tested limits of the agreement, including by opening criminal investigations against the organizers of the primary that Machado won.

Maduro found employment as a bus driver for many years for the Caracas Metro company. He began his political career in the 1980s, by becoming an unofficial trade unionist representing the bus drivers of the Caracas Metro system.

The opposition made a grand attempt to delegitimize Maduro’s rule on July 16 by holding an unofficial plebiscite (branded in the language of the constitution as a “popular consultation”) that addressed three matters: whether voters rejected Maduro’s proposed constituent assembly; whether they desired the armed forces to copyright the constitution; and whether they wanted elections to be held before the official end of Maduro’s term in 2018.

The news quickly turned serious again when it was reported that Tesla's outside directors had retained two law firms to deal with the SEC inquiry and the CEO's plans to take the company private.

Mr. Bolsonaro spent much of Monday holed up at the presidential offices, meeting with top advisers and Brazil’s minister of defense. At least some of the advisers urged the president to concede, but it was not clear if he had yet reached a decision on what to do, according to three government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings.