Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Shashank Joshi, filling in for Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Guillermo Lassau, a self-made banker, was elected Ecuador's president in April, with high hopes for reform and investment.

Now, he's mired in problems, from violent crime to hostile lawmakers. Can he find a way out?

And learning a foreign language isn't just about the vocabulary and the grammar.

There are also a host of

unspoken rules that are rarely taught, where the emphasis goes in words, which sounds are

allowed, or the rhythm of a sentence. We look at the secret of accents.

First up, though,

There are protests raging in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where a military coup took place yesterday.

Early on Monday morning, the Prime Minister, Abdallah Hamdok, was arrested by the army.

In a televised statement, Abdul Fata al-Burhan, Sudan's military leader,

dissolved the government and declared a state of emergency.

But people didn't take this lying down.

By mid-morning, thousands of pro-democracy protesters had already taken to the streets.

All of this might seem a little familiar.

Two years ago, demonstrators from all over Sudan marched over the bridges crossing the Nile

to topple Omar al-Bashir.

He was a ruthless Islamist despot who had ruled Sudan for three decades. Out of that

revolution emerged a power-sharing pact. It was struck in August 2019 between some unlikely

bedfellows, the protest leaders and the generals who had staged a coup against Mr Bashir when it

...