When Ecuadorians vote this weekend on barring former president Rafael Correa from re-election, they will also be choosing whether to buck a trend across South America in which overbearing former presidents just can’t let go of power.After Lenín Moreno was elected Ecuador’s president in 2017 he was expected to keep the seat warm for his predecessor’s return in 2021. Over a decade in power, Correa allied with the leftist governments of Venezuela and Bolivia, ploughed public money into social spending – and also sheltered the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. For half of that period, his vice-president was Moreno.

But since taking office, Moreno – the world’s only wheelchair-using head of state – has made good on his pledge to be his own man. He sacked the former vice-president Jorge Glas, a close ally of Correa who was later sentenced to six years in jail for corruption. He has also repeatedly hinted he wants to remove Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The result has been a bitter feud between former allies. Correa called Moreno a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and returned to Ecuador from his wife’s homeland of Belgium to lead the no campaign against the referendum. Moreno, in turn accused Correa of bugging his office.(theguardian)…[+]

Kenyan authorities defied a court order to lift a ban on three private television stations and briefly detained an opposition figure on Friday, setting the scene for a new confrontation between the judiciary and Uhuru Kenyatta’s government.

Miguna Miguna, who has declared himself a “general” of the opposition’s National Resistance Movement, was detained in a dawn raid on his Nairobi home, and later released on bail of 50,000 Kenyan shillings (£350).

He had stood alongside opposition leader Raila Odinga at a symbolical inauguration ceremony on Tuesday, which was described by government lawyers as an act of treason. Authorities cut live transmission of the country’s top three TV channels to prevent coverage of the ceremony and later declared the NRM an organised criminal group meaning members could face imprisonment up to 10 years. The tensions come three months after Kenyatta won a further five-year term in a rerun that was triggered when the supreme court annulled the result of the presidential election in August because of irregularities.(theguardian)…[+]

At least 90 people are feared drowned off the coast of Libya after a smuggler’s migrant boat capsized, the UN’s migration agency has said. Ten bodies have so far washed ashore near the Libyan town of Zuwara, Olivia Headon, a spokeswoman for International Organisation for Migration, said. Eight were believed to be Pakistani, and two Libyan. Two survivors swam to shore and another was rescued by a fishing boat, Headon said. The deaths highlight the increasing number of Pakistanis travelling to Libya in an effort to reach Europe. They were the 13th largest nationality among migrants making the crossing last year, but the third-largest contingent in January.

Despite an early surge in the total number of migrants trying to reach Italy from Libya at the start of January, the figures for the month as a whole were down on the same period in 2017 from 4,531 to 4,256. There were 218 deaths on the Libya to Italy route in January and 246 in the Mediterranean as a whole, making it the second deadliest month since June 2017.(theguardian)…[+]