As well as suffering hidden mikes and video spies, it recently recanted a ruling issued in its name which would prevent Mr Chávez from standing in any post-referendum election, saying that it was a forgery.Some supporters of Mr Chávez point out that past governments in Venezuela could count on politically pliant courts.
Jérémie Bouchaud and his colleagues at the German office of iSuppli, a market-research company that has been analysing the sector, are increasingly finding a new sort of tiny microphone in the products which they tear apart in order to identify manufacturing trends.These mikes use a technology known as MEMS (microelectromechanical systems).
Most pastors wear wireless, battery-powered mikes inside their rubber waders precisely to prevent the sort of mishap that killed Mr Lake.Worshippers in the state are prone to horrifying incidents most famously the explosion at the Davidians' besieged compound in 1993.
Small mikes are easier to fit into earpieces, and recently they have been getting very small indeed.
Mr Bouchaud is finding more than one MEMS microphone inside ever more of the products he disassembles, and these extra mikes are often being used to add noise-cancelling features.
The audience is gone, the lights are down, you're getting ready to cut the mikes off and you are still on the stage singing".
"At the end of the first day, I shed a tear and with my head in my hand said, 'This is not why I became an actor,' forgetting the mikes were still on!" However, the actor expressed his pride about taking part in the films, saying how "moving" it was to see young people camping outside in the streets ahead of the London premiere on 1 December.
* The club may say in their defence that referees sometimes cover their mikes when talking to players.
As for the final passage of Obamacare in 2010, Biden muttered in the President's ear and injudiciously close to one of those tiresome live mikes, that it was "a big fucking deal".
"You know, in the sound-system culture, you had the DJ, the mikes man would be the host and he's literally toasting on the mike, keeping the vibe up.
"I wouldn't say I was a singer... I'd say I was a mikes man," he concedes.
