Though Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died in March, his successor Nicolas Maduro says he's still "everywhere." Everywhere, it turns out, means even in the rocks deep below Caracas, where workers are busy carving out a new subway tunnel. Maduro claims that late one night this week, workers briefly saw the late leader's face appear in the rocks.

Consider the latest from the gatekeeper of the late Hugo Chávez's experiment in "21st-Century Socialism": the Deputy Ministry of Supreme Social Happiness. Last week, to much fanfare, Nicolas Maduro unveiled this new government subdivision, which he said will oversee and troubleshoot some 30 separate social programs, known collectively in Venezuela as "missions."

Everywhere he looks nowadays, Nicolás Maduro sees conspiracies. At least a dozen plots to assassinate him have allegedly been detected since he became Venezuela’s president in April. Mr Maduro recently expelled three American diplomats for supposedly conspiring with the opposition, business groups and unions to wage “economic war” and overthrow the government. Some plots may even be real: there are rumours of discontent in the armed forces, on which the president is lavishing time and money. But publicly, at least, the opposition media are Mr Maduro’s prime suspects.

The army has been sent into toilet paper factories, fights for basic foodstuffs have resulted in several deaths and new, multi-million dollar oil tankers are sitting idle in dock. And, despite sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela’s socialist government can’t quite manage to keep the lights on.

The United States has expelled three Venezuelan diplomats in response to their government's decision to order three US officials out of Venezuela. The US government gave 48-hour deadline on Tuesday to Venezuelan charge d'affaires Calixto Ortega Rios, Second Secretary Monica Alejandra Sanchez Morales at the Washington embassy and Consul Marisol Gutierrez de Almeida at the Houston consulate, to leave the country.

President Nicolas Maduro said Tuesday that Venezuela will not have cordial relations with the United States as long as U.S. diplomats continue what he alleges are attempts to destabilize his country. He said "new points of contact" can be established, but only if Washington ends such activity. Maduro's tough talk came a day after he announced the expulsion of the top U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, Charge d'Affaires Kelly Keiderling, and two other embassy officials, alleging they conspired with "the extreme right" to sabotage the economy and power grid.

With parts of Venezuela still dark after a mysterious blackout that left the capital and 17 states without electricity, President Nicolas Maduro was to meet Wednesday with public utility and military officials to respond to the power failure, which he blamed on opposition sabotage. The power shutdown began midday Tuesday after an apparent failure involving high-voltage transmission lines in western Aragua and Guarico states, which led to total power outage in several of the country’s most populous areas.

When it comes to corruption, Venezuela has long languished near the bottom of the international league table. According to the latest index of perceptions of corruption compiled each year by Transparency International, a Berlin-based watchdog, only eight out of the list of 176 countries were seen as more graft-ridden. Even places like Haiti and Zimbabwe ranked higher. The organisation’s Venezuela chapter found that 65% of respondents in a recent survey thought corruption had worsened in the previous two years. Well over half thought government measures to tackle it were ineffective.