A man believed to be the leader of the Gulf drug cartel, which controls some of the most valuable and violently contested smuggling routes along the US border, has been arrested by Mexican marines, the navy said.

Police in a Mexico City suburb have arrested a mother and several relatives for allegedly gouging out the eyes of her five-year-old son in what authorities said was a drug-fuelled ritual.

Mexican marines have captured a founding member of the brutal Zetas drug cartel, the navy announced.

MEXICAN investigators have found a total of 116 bodies in pits near the US border, 28 more than previously reported, Attorney General Marisela Morales revealed.

Fifty-nine bodies were found buried in a series of pits in the northern Mexico state of Tamaulipas, near the site where suspected drug gang members massacred 72 migrants last summer, officials said.

Alleged drug cartel leader Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen was killed in a shootout in the border city of Matamoros, a Mexican official said.

The sprawling remains of Hurricane Alex has drenched much of northern Mexico, paralysing the major city of Monterrey.

Hurricane Alex ripped off roofs, flooded streets and forced thousands of people to flee coastal fishing villages today as it pushed into northern Mexico after making landfall as a powerful Category 2 storm.

BP Plc defended its chief executive yesterday after Russia’s deputy prime minister said he expected Tony Hayward to resign soon, as a strengthening storm threatened efforts to capture more oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

The mysterious disappearance of a former Mexican presidential candidate has sparked fear that nobody is safe from relentless kidnapping and rampant drug violence.

Officials in the US state of Texas are today preparing for Hurricane Dean.

A tropical storm watch has been issued for parts of Texas and Mexico as a tropical depression formed in the central Gulf of Mexico.

Nearly three million Muslims from around the world, chanting “I am here, Lord” and raising their hands to heaven, marched through a desert valley outside Mecca in Saudi Arabia today on the first day of the annual hajj pilgrimage.

HURRICANE Emily was gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday as it took aim at north-eastern Mexico and south Texas, a day after ripping roofs off resort hotels and stranding thousands of tourists in the Yucatan Peninsula.

A Texan who confessed to suffocating, stabbing and beheading his common-law wife’s three young children told a judge today he wants to be executed.

A Texas man who attempted to walk and canoe the 1,952-mile US-Mexico border said the harsh land and intense heat forced him to abandon his plans and catch a Greyhound bus home after just two days.

Police want to question a Mexican man whose wife and three American children were shot execution-style and dumped in a cornfield outside Mexico’s second-largest city.

A US drugs baron has been executed by lethal injection on the same stretcher which Timothy McVeigh was on when he was killed.