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)…[+]

Lawyers in London, Barcelona and Paris acting for three detained Catalan independence leaders have appealed to the United Nations, claiming the men are unlawfully imprisoned.Submissions have been presented to the UN working group on arbitrary detention, asking it to intervene in the cases of the ousted vice-president, Oriol Junqueras, and the Catalan civil society group chiefs Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez.Any determination made by the body, which meets in Geneva, will not be binding on Spanish courts, but will be a signal of international disapproval.

Two years ago, the working group declared that Julian Assange, who remains in Ecuador’s London embassy, was being “arbitrarily detained”.

Cuixart is president of Òmnium Cultural and Sànchez is a former president of the influential Catalan national assembly. They were arrested in October after the independence referendum, while Junqueras was detained early the following month. They have been in prison since then.(theguardian)…[+]

A French mountaineer rescued from Pakistan’s “Killer Mountain” has described how she was forced to abandon her weak climbing partner, descend alone in darkness and wait more than 24 hours for help while suffering altitude-induced hallucinations that made her take a shoe off in freezing conditions.

Elisabeth Revol, 37, returned to France after she was rescued on Sunday from Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest peak at 8,126 metres. She is being treated in a hospital in the Haute-Savoie region, where doctors are assessing whether she will require amputations because of frostbite in her hands and left foot. In an interview with Agence France-Presse she recalled how rescuers urged her to leave her weak and bleeding fellow climber, the Polish mountaineer Tomek Mackiewicz, behind – something she had called “terrible and painful.” Rescuers were unable to reach Mackiewicz, a father of three, who had made six previous winter attempts to scale Nanga Parbat. There is almost no chance of him being found alive.(theguardian)…[+]

Israel is developing archaeological and tourism sites to legitimise illegal settlements in Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, European Union diplomats in the city have warned. A leaked report acquired by the Guardian cited projects in parts of East Jerusalem – occupied by Israel since 1967 – that are being used “as a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimise and expand settlements”.

The report identified settler-run excavation sites in the heart of majority-Arab districts, a proposed cable car project with stops on confiscated land and the designation of built-up urban areas as national parks. “East Jerusalem is the only place where Israeli national parks are declared on populated neighbourhoods,” the report said. The document, a report written annually by the EU Heads of Mission in Jerusalem, presented a bleak picture, saying the overall situation in the city and the prospects for peace had worsened. Marginalisation of Palestinians, who comprise about 37% of the city’s residents, continued unabated, with more than 130 building demolitions and the displacement of 228 people, it said.(theguardian)…[+]

The head of Hawaii’s emergency management agency has resigned and a state employee who sent out an false alarm of an imminent missile attack has been fired, it was announced on Tuesday, after an inquiry into a mistake which caused statewide panic earlier this month.

According to a federal inquiry into the incident, the employee, a watch officer at the emergency management agency, believed the threat of a missile attack to be real as he had not heard a recorded message announcing it as an exercise. According to state officials, the watch officer had been a cause for concern to his colleagues for more than a decade and had twice before mistaken drills for real alerts. It was unclear how he had managed to remain in such a sensitive post for so long. As well as that employee’s dismissal and the resignation of the agency’s chief, Vern Miyagi, another official quit and a fourth has been suspended as a result of the incident. According to an official report, it took nearly 40 minutes to put out the all-clear, because the agency had not rehearsed what to do in the event of a false alarm and found lines jammed by anxious callers. Efforts by Hawaii’s governor to correct the mistake were delayed because he did not know his Twitter login.(Theguardian)…[+]

A 50-strong commission representing most strands of Syrian society will draft a new constitution for the country, the UN and Russia have agreed at the end of a peace conference put together by Vladimir Putin in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.The UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura faced intense criticism from the Syrian opposition for attending the conference, which the opposition boycotted on the basis that it was an attempt to supplant the UN peace process and marginalise their role in ending Syria’s seven-year civil war.

De Mistura defended his presence, arguing that the Sochi conference statement clearly handed back control of the constitution committee to the UN, both in terms of its composition, selection criteria, mandate and terms of reference. He insisted the Syrian Negotiation Committee (SNC), the official UN-recognised opposition that boycotted Sochi, would have a “very substantial participation”, and the commission would not be confined to those attending Sochi.(theguardian)…[+]

The government said it would not oppose a Labour motion calling for the release of a leaked Brexit analysis which showed that the economy would be significantly worse off in every modelled scenario. The announcement paves the way for the documents to be published. Speaking of the decision to release the reports, the junior Brexit minister Robin Walker said elements would be redacted if they could affect negotiations with the EU, and only MPs would be able see the studies in a confidential reading room.

But the government came under pressure to release the documents immediately and to the public, with the cross-party Treasury committee of MPs writing to David Davis, the Brexit secretary, calling for this to happen. The climbdown came as Downing Street said Phillip Lee, a junior justice minister, had been reprimanded for tweeting that if such studies showed the economy would be harmed by certain Brexit options then a change in policy should follow.(theguardian)…[+]

A Muslim woman in the southern Indian state of Kerala has received death threats after leading prayers for a mixed congregation in an act of defiance against established Islamic practice. Jamida Beevi is thought to be the first woman to lead Friday prayers in India for both male and female worshippers, doing so at Wandoor Cherukod village in Malappuram last week. She also delivered a sermon on gender justice.

“I believe in the Qur’an and the Qur’an teaches equality between the sexes. All this discrimination against women is manmade, imposed by the male clergy and I want to change it,” said Beevi, 34, speaking to the Guardian by phone on Tuesday. TradiBeevi said she believed the Qur’an contains no injunction that says only men can lead prayers. She belongs to a small sect called the Qur’an Sunnat Society; it believes only in the Qur’an, not in the hadith – the statements made by the prophet on a variety of subjects and written down by his followers after his death. Most orthodox Muslims believe in both the Qur’an and the hadith.tionally a male imam leads prayers, except when the congregation is all female.(theguardian)…[+]

The carmaker Volkswagen has suspended its head of external relations and sustainability after admitting that he had known about experiments in which monkeys were locked in small chambers and exposed to diesel exhaust. Thomas Steg, a former government spokesman who worked for German chancellor Angela Merkel and her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, is the first person to be relieved of his duties as VW said it was “drawing the consequences” of the scandal, which has rocked both the government and industry.

The company initially tried to distance itself from the institute that commissioned the tests, the European Research Group of Environment and Health in the Transport Sector (EUGT), a car lobby group funded by Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW. But it is now known that VW managers were informed about the testing before and after it was carried out. Steg has been pinpointed as a senior manager who knew that the experiments were going on, with internal papers seen by German media suggesting he had known about them in 2013.(theguardian)…[+]