TUNIS (AFP) – Tunisian President Kais Saied on Sunday dissolved a top independent judicial watchdog accusing it of bias, the latest controversial move since he sacked the government last year. Saied has broadened his grip on power since July 25, when he sacked the government and froze parliament before moving to rule by decree in Tunisia -- the cradle of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings that ousted a series of autocratic leaders. But political figures and rights groups have warned of a slide towards authoritarianism, and world leaders have expressed deep concern. In a move expected to spark further unease, Saied early Sunday announced he was dissolving the Supreme Judicial Council (CSM) during a meeting with government ministers.
The council “is a thing of the past”, he said according to video footage released by the Tunisian presidency. He accused the CSM, an independent constitutional body set up in 2016 to guarantee the good functioning and independence of the judiciary, of serving political interests. “In this council, positions and appointments are sold and made according to affiliations,” said the head of state. “You cannot imagine the money that certain judges have been able to receive, billions and billions,” he added.
Observers say the government is seeking to clamp down on the Ennahdha party, which has controlled parliament and the various governments since the 2011 revolution toppled veteran leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Militants firing from inside Afghanistan killed at least five Pakistani soldiers at a border post in northwestern Kurram district on Sunday, the Pakistan military said, the second such attack since Taliban took over Kabul in August. The army said it retaliated, causing heavy casualties, but independent confirmation was not immediately possible because the districts along the mountainous Afghan border are off limits to journalists and human rights organizations. “Militants from inside Afghanistan across the international border opened fire on Pakistani troops in Kurram district,” the military’s media wing said in a statement. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistan Taliban, which renewed an allegiance with the Afghan Taliban after the fall of Kabul, claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack. The Afghan government denied the firing had come from within Afghan territory. “We assure other countries, especially our neigh hours, that no one will be allowed to use Afghan land against them,” Bilal Karimi, deputy spokesman for Afghanistan’s Taliban government, told Reuters.

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OTTAWA (Al Jazeera) – Thousands of people opposed to vaccine mandates have rallied in cities across Canada, as the protests against COVID-19 restrictions spread from the national capital. About 5,000 people demonstrated in Ottawa, police said on Saturday, while hundreds more gathered in Toronto, Canada’s biggest city, as well as in Quebec City, Fredericton and Winnipeg. “We’re all sick and tired of the mandates, of the intimidation, of living in one big prison,” Robert, a Toronto protester who did not give his last name, told the Reuters news agency. “We just want to go back to normal without having to take into our veins the poison which they call vaccines.” The “Freedom Convoy” began as a movement against a Canadian vaccine requirement for cross-border truckers but has turned into a rallying point against public health measures and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government – though it is responsible for few of the measures, most of which were put in place by provincial governments. For eight days now, protesters have shut down Ottawa’s downtown core. Police say the well-organized blockade has relied partly on funding from sympathizers in the United States. On Saturday, demonstrators huddled around campfires in bone-chilling temperatures and erected portable saunas and bouncy castles for kids outside the parliament while waving Canadian flags and shouting anti-government slogans.

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IGHRANE (AFP) – Morocco was in shock Sunday after emergency crews found a five-year-old boy dead at the bottom of a well in a tragic end to a five-day rescue operation that gripped the nation and the world. The ordeal of “little Rayan” since he fell down the 32-metre (100-foot) well on Tuesday gained global attention and sparked an outpouring of sympathy online, with the Arabic Twitter hashtag #SaveRayan trending. “The fall of a child who reminded the whole world of the values of humanity,” read one Moroccan newspaper headline, while others bemoaned the “tragic epilogue” that had brought “sadness and shock”. The boy’s father said he had been repairing the well when the boy fell in, close to the family home in the village of Ighrane in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. “Little angel, you fought until the end, a hero”, said one Twitter user called Anouar, while another said “he has brought people together around him”. Throughout the major digging operation to extricate him from the bottom of the well shaft, authorities had cautioned that they did not know whether he was alive. The shaft, just 45 centimeters (18 inches) across, was too narrow for the boy to be reached directly, and widening it was deemed too risky -- so earth-movers dug a wide slope into the hill to reach him from the side. The operation made the landscape resemble a construction site, and red-helmeted civil defense personnel had at times been suspended by rope, as if on a cliff face.

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SAN JOSÉ (AFP) – Costa Ricans began trooping to the polls Sunday to choose a new president from a crowded field, with no clear favorite for tackling growing economic concerns in one of Latin America’s stablest democracies. Voting kicked off at 6:00 am (1200 GMT) and polls remained open for 12 hours in the nation of five million people. The national election tribunal was expected to announce results some three hours after polls close, but a presidential runoff in April is anticipated. Often referred to as the region’s “happiest” country, Costa Rica is nonetheless grappling with a growing economic crisis, and the ruling Citizen’s Action Party (PAC) is set for a bruising defeat. The economy has tanked under President Carlos Alvarado Quesada. And the PAC candidate, former economy minister Welmer Ramos, seems to be paying the price for sky-high anti-government feeling, with only 0.3 percent of people expressing support.

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ANTANANARIVO (Reuters) – Three people were reported dead in southeastern Madagascar on Sunday after cyclone Batsirai made landfall, leaving a trail of devastation including collapsed buildings, power cuts and flooding. One of the towns badly affected was Nosy Varika on the coast where most of the buildings were destroyed and the town was cut off from the surrounding area due to flooding, an official said. Batsirai swept inland late on Saturday, slamming into Madagascar’s eastern coastline with heavy rains and wind speeds of 165 kilometers per hour (103 miles per hour). It was projected it could displace as many as 150,000 people. The damage from the storm system is compounding the destruction wreaked by another cyclone, Ana, which hit the island just two weeks ago, killing 55 people and displacing 130,000 people. Madagascar state radio reported thee people had been killed in the town of Ambalavao, about 460 km south of the capital Antananarivo, when their house collapsed as the storm swept the area. The government’s office for disaster management was expected to release figures of casualties and displacement later on Sunday.