Ecuador runoff

Ecuador’s presidential election will go to an April runoff between leftist government candidate Lenin Moreno and ex-banker Guillermo Lasso. Moreno needed 40 per cent of valid votes and a 10 percentage-point difference over his nearest rival to win outright. He was the clear leader, pocketing 39.21 per cent of valid votes versus 28.34 per cent for Lasso, with 95.3 per cent of votes counted. Many Ecuadoreans link Lasso with the 1999 banking crisis when hundreds of thousands lost their savings and many migrated to Spain or the US. He has also vowed to remove WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London and denounce Venezuela’s Socialist Government. overflowing creek. Further north, farmers used tractors to shore up an endangered levee in California’s agricultural heartland, officials opened a spillway at the Don Pedro reservoir for the first time in 20 years, and a Sierra Nevada highway threatened to collapse after the latest downpours swelled waterways, leaving nearly half of the state under flood advisories.