Brazil elects first female president
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- NEW: "My mission is to eradicate poverty," Rousseff says in victory speech
- Dilma Rousseff wins against Jose Serra in a runoff
- She's a a former left-wing guerrilla fighter turned chief of staff
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As the nation's first woman to hold the office, Rousseff said she has a mission to fight for more gender equality in Brazil.
"I hope the fathers and mothers of little girls will look at them and say yes, women can."
Rousseff -- President Luiz Inacio da Silva's right-hand woman -- has served as his chief of staff.
Previously, as energy minister, she claims to have helped turn Brazil into one of the world's leading energy giants.
A left-wing guerrilla fighter during the military dictatorship rule in the 1960s, Rousseff said during a congressional hearing that she was "barbarically tortured" after she was charged with subversion by the military regime.
Her opponent, Jose Serra, also suffered persecution during Brazil's military rule and was forced into exile during the 1960s.
A centrist politician, he served as health minister during Fernando Henrique Cardoso's government. He recently left his job as governor of Brazil's richest state, Sao Paulo, to run for presidency.
Millions of voters lined up across Brazil's vast territory to vote in the heated runoff.
In 60 Brazilian cities, voters used their thumbs instead of ballots on a newly launched biometric system, where voters scan their fingers to log in and vote.
TSE officials said all regions, however remote, will have the ubiquitous electronic voting machine. In indigenous areas in the Amazon, these voting machines were delivered by boats and helicopters. It costs the state of Amazonas 5 million reais. (U.S. $3 million) to place the voting machines.
One of the most challenging trajectories, officials said, is the one to Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira, a densly-forested area in the Amazon.
"There, our electronic machines first leave Manaus by plane," said Pedro Batista, TSE Director for the Amazon.
"It's loaded onto a helicopter, and then travels by boat before being carried on some one's back for a long walk to a remote village," he said.
In Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city, voters faced heavy rains and threats of flooding.
If I have the time to go to work, make money in order to sustain my family but have no Love, then I am a house keeper not a home maker...
Reuters 
Toyota Motor Corp.'s legal problems aren't limited to the federal multidistrict litigation over unintended acceleration of its vehicles. Scores of lawsuits are working their way through state courts across the nation, and some of them could pave the road for the MDL. 
Since 2003, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened — and closed — five investigations of sudden unintended acceleration in Toyota and Lexus vehicles before the automaker recalled about 6 million vehicles in the United States. Why didn't the agency take action on the earlier complaints? 
Publicly, Congress has done little on the Toyota recalls since a series of tense hearings two months ago. Behind the scenes, however, Toyota Motor Corp. has been waging a lobbying campaign to rebuild its image.
The 26 lawyers appointed to steer the nationwide litigation against Toyota Motor Corp. have traveled down similar roads before, having obtained billion-dollar settlements in some of the nation's largest mass actions involving catastrophic automobile defects.