Nicolas Maduro succeeds the late Hugo Chavez as Venezuela's new president Friday, hosting a lavish inauguration after defusing opposition demands for a vote recount and winning the approval of fellow Latin American leaders. Maduro flew home from Lima, Peru where a summit of South American presidents congratulated him on his victory in snap elections Sunday, shortly after Venezuela's National Election Council yielded to demands for an expanded audit of the results.

Venezuelan troops will parade past Nicolas Maduro after he is sworn into office Friday, but keeping their loyalty will be tricky for a leader lacking the charisma and savvy of his predecessor. Since Hugo Chavez's March 5 death, Maduro has staged frequent public events with top military leaders, showing off "civic-military unity" of the leftist regime he inherited from "el comandante." "We have a Chavista armed forces, which is to say patriotic, Bolivarian, revolutionary, anti-imperialist," Maduro said Tuesday. But cracks also have appeared on the facade of unity.

The Democratic United Party, arguably the longest-standing political party in Korea, is in danger of breaking apart. Voters can see why and how the main opposition party has fallen into such a serious state of decline, from the DUP’s own report on the reasons it was defeated in the Dec. 19 presidential election.Yet most conspicuous about the 364-page report is not its content but the timing of its release.

The Venezuelan opposition and the government accused each other on Wednesday of seeking support from the military to meddle in the April 14 election to replace late president Hugo Chavez. Opposition lawmaker Alfonso Marquina presented to the National Electoral Council (CNE) a list of active military officers who, he said, "conduct activities to mobilize" voters for the election "in coordination with political leaders" of the ruling PSUV party.