Since October, protests in Iraq and Lebanon have re-energized the Middle East region as hundreds of thousands of young people descend onto public squares, repeating 2011 Arab Spring slogans that call for regime downfall. But while Iraq and Lebanon could offer great promise if protesters learn from past failures in the region, they could also prove to be bloodier if Iran gets its way.

Middle East protests that have taken hold in the past decade have had their own unique characteristics, but similarities between Iraq and Lebanon are uncanny. Both are highly segmented societies that have undergone painful sectarian civil wars. Both have power-sharing constitutions or political pacts that attempt to keep the peace by dividing spoils of the state, government roles and administrative positions, and parliamentary seats along ethno-sectarian lines. But the more ominous similarity is the well-known interference of Iran into their domestic politics.

Iran’s financial, political and military s..

The mayor of a city in Bolivia was beaten, dragged through the streets barefoot, covered in red paint and had her hair forcibly cut by a crowd of masked protestors on Wednesday in what appears to be the latest outburst of political violence after a contested election last month.

Patricia Arce, the mayor of Vinto in Bolivia, is a member of President Evo Morales’s Movement to Socialism (MAS) party. The party blamed the attack on opposition protestors, according to local media.

Protesters marched to Vinto city hall in anger following reports of deaths caused when pro-government supporters, who were allegedly sent by the mayor, tried to break up anti-government blockade, local media said.

Arce was forced to walk to a bridge in Vinto, a small town in central Bolivia, by a crowd of masked protesters. There she was forced to kneel down for her hair to be cut and her body sprayed red.

She was then forced to hold a metal pole as she was paraded, barefoot, around the streets with red paint c..

(MIAMI) — U.S. ambassadors from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti sent urgent cables to the White House in the early days of the Trump administration, pleading with them to abandon plans to send hundreds of thousands of migrants back to their home countries.

The cables, made public Thursday, expose the divide between career diplomats and a new administration eager to push through major hardline immigration policies even as it apparently weighed possible fallout on the 2020 presidential race.

Facing legal challenges, the Trump administration later backed down from its hardline position and last month it extended protections for at least a year as U.S. courts work through the disputes.

The internal State Department memos are contained in a report by Senate Democrats that sheds light on diplomats’ alarm ahead of the 2017 decision by the Trump administration to end protections for some 400,000 Central Americans and Haitians living legally in the U.S.

The report suggests that, for the Tru..

(LA MORA, Mexico) — Under a strong security presence, this remote farming community prepared to hold the first funerals Thursday for some of the nine American women and children killed by drug cartel gunmen.

Dozens of high-riding pickups and SUVS, many with U.S. license plates from as far away as North Dakota, bumped across dirt and rock roads over desert, arid grasslands and pine-covered mountains Wednesday as night fell on this community of about 300 people. Many of the residents are dual U.S. and Mexican citizens who consider themselves Mormon but are not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

At least 1,000 visitors were expected to bunk down in the hamlet overnight ahead of Thursday’s funerals, filling floor space in the 30 or so homes or sleeping in tents they brought with them. At least one cow was slaughtered to help feed the masses, as well as the few dozen Mexican soldiers guarding the entrance to La Mora.

Steven Langford, who was mayor of La Mora..