(BOGOTA, Colombia) — Colombia’s capital city elected its first female mayor Sunday in what is being hailed as an important advancement for both women and LGBT rights. Claudia López won the race for mayor of Bogota on a platform promising to combat corruption and advance equal rights for minority communities.

The Alianza Verde candidate captured over 1.1 million votes, or about 35 percent of the vote, defeating runner-up Carlos Galán by 2.7 percentage points.

With her victory, López also becomes the first openly lesbian mayor of a capital city in Latin America, a region slowly advancing in improving LGBT rights but where long-standing cultural biases and inequality remain barriers.

“This is the day of the woman,” she said to a jubilant crowd. “We knew that only by uniting could we win. We did that. We united, we won and we made history!”

She vowed to continue uniting Colombians across the political spectrum and work to improve daily life issues like public transportation.

Many in t..

(BAGHDAD) — Thousands of students joined Iraq’s anti-government protests on Monday, as clashes with security forces firing tear gas canisters killed at least three demonstrators and wounded more than 100.

The students skipped classes at several universities and secondary schools in Baghdad and across Iraq’s majority-Shiite south on Monday to take part in the protests, despite the government ordering schools and universities to operate normally.

One of those killed was a 22-year-old female medical student, the first woman to be killed since the protests began earlier this month. Seventeen students were among the wounded.

Authorities later announced a curfew from midnight to 6 a.m. in the capital, as renewed protests there and across the south raged for a fourth day. A senior security official estimated that 25,000 protesters took part in the demonstration in the capital.

In a separate development, three rockets struck a large military base north of Baghdad that houses U.S. and Iraqi..

Three weeks after President Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to pull out of northern Syria, American spy agencies are seeing disturbing intelligence. Turkish-backed militias, armed by Ankara, have killed civilians in areas abandoned by the U.S., four U.S. military and intelligence officials tell TIME. The officials say they fear that the militias committing those potential war crimes may be using weapons that the U.S. sold to Turkey.

These officials say they are concerned that worse could lie ahead. Turkey and its allies are deploying larger forces and bringing more significant weapons to the field than would be necessary to complete their publicly-stated mission. They have said that they plan only to maintain a security zone along a 18-mile wide ribbon of land south of Turkey’s border with Syria. “They’re far more than the Turks need to conduct the operations they’re supposed to be conducting,” one of the U.S. officials told TIME.

Fighting between Turkish and Syrian forces continued..