complain
ed of intimidation by drug cartels, which forced them to adopt extra security measures on the campaign trail. Two local candidates in the state of Chihuahua where Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s most violent city, is located, admitted to the BBC that they kept their public agenda hidden, used
decoy
s like announcing they were heading for a rally and then going to another, and avoided night-time political activity altogether.
Lebanon and the Islamic world have been mourning the death of one of Shia Islam’s most influential clerics, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. He died on Sunday in a Beirut hospital aged 74. From Beirut, Jim Muir.
There’s been a huge and emotional response to Ayatollah Fadlallah’s death. Thousands of mourners, many of them weeping, gathered at a mosque in Beirut's southern suburbs where he lived, to pay their condolences. His legacy includes the many works of Islamic learning that he wrote and the many charitable and educational foundations he left behind. But his death had a
resonance
in the West for other reasons. In the early 1980’s, his name was linked to Hezbollah and it was blamed for many bomb attacks, hijackings and kidnappings aimed at
driving out
the Israelis, Americans and other foreign forces.
A military court in Syria has sentenced an elderly human rights lawyer to three years in prison. The lawyer, Haitham Maleh who’s 78, was charged with