Polls have closed in #Ecuador with about 82.26% participation. The local electoral authorities have announced that official results will start to be released within the hour.

Earlier in the day, Ecuadorians abroad had registered complaints about problems while voting and long waiting times.

Ecuadorians went to the polls today in historic early elections. Preliminary results are being released by the National Electoral Council. Here is the latest update.

With 97.5% of the votes counted, the centrist Cesar Bernardo Arevalo de Leon of the Movimiento Semilla won the elections in Guatemala with 58.7% of the votes. The historic Arevalo win in Guatemala comes after several irregularities in the electoral process.

It's official, Ecuadoreans will have to go to the polls for a second round of elections. People must choose between Daniel Noboa from the National Democratic Alliance and Luisa Gonzalez of the Citizens Revolution movement.

🇲🇾 The International Union of Left Publishers issued a statement of condemnation after a left book store in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was raided by the Malaysian Ministry of Home Affairs who seized several books related to Marxism, and one written by the owner of the establishment. The International Union of Left Publishers is a network of 40 publishing houses from Indonesia to Chile.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/08/20/books-are-not-a-crime-solidarity-with-toko-buku-rakyat-in-malaysia/

🇵🇰 Former member of Pakistan’s parliament and Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) leader Ali Wazir and human rights lawyer Imaan Zainab Mazari were remanded to three days in detention by the country’s anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) on Monday, August 21.

Wazir and Mazari were arrested by security forces on Sunday for participating in a rally organized by the PTM on Friday demanding immediate action against extrajudicial killings and the enforced disappearance of thousands of innocent people from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province in the military’s so-called anti-terror operations.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/08/21/ali-wazir-imaan-mazari-jailed-over-terror-charges/

Brinda Karat, of AIDWA and the Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), speaks on why women are on the frontlines of resisting the right wing attacks from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological parent organization RSS.

She spoke at the national convention of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), where delegates made a commitment to strengthen the women's movement and organize against the attacks on democracy.

UPS workers, organized by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted by an overwhelming majority of 86.3% to ratify a contract negotiated in July.

This is the highest vote for a contract in the history of the union at UPS. The contract is the largest single-employer contract in the country, with UPS Teamsters representing 340,000 workers.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/08/22/ups-teamsters-vote-yes-on-historic-contract/

The first day of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg saw calls for a more democratic global economic order with greater participation of countries from the Global South.

The 15th BRICS summit is being held under the chairmanship of Ramaphosa on the theme ‘BRICS and Africa: Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth, Sustainable Development, and inclusive multilateralism.’ Apart from the heads of states/governments of the existing BRICS members—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—over 60 other countries are participating in the summit. Certain crucial decisions are expected during the summit related to the expansion of the group and its objective of creating a non-hegemonic global economic order.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/08/23/brics-calls-for-global-economic-decision-making-in-the-interest-of-the-majority/