■MEXICO
Nine decapitated in Tijuana
Nine decapitated bodies were found on Sunday in a vacant lot in the city of Tijuana across the border from San Diego, California, in the latest gruesome attack involving drug cartels, local officials said. The crime is part of a turf war between rival cartels for control of Tijuana, said Jose Manuel Yepiz, attorney general for the state of Baja California. Five other murders were committed in Tijuana since Saturday. Mexico’s border region from Tijuana east to Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas, has seen most of the drug cartel-related violence that has killed 350 people since early September. More than 4,500 people have been murdered in Mexico, mostly in drug gang warfare, since early this year.
■UNITED STATES
New rules worry Muslims
Some Arab and Muslim-Americans say new Justice Department guidelines that boost the FBI’s power to investigate suspected terrorists could target innocent people. The revised guidelines going into effect today will allow agents to use undercover sources to gather information, interview people without identifying themselves and spy on suspects without evidence of wrongdoing. Critics say the rules will allow for abuses, including more racial and religious profiling. Federal officials say current rules came about in the 1970s and limit their ability to investigate people in national security cases.
■MEXICO
Calderon firm in drug war
President Felipe Calderon pledged on Sunday to clean up corruption within his administration and vowed that his government would never negotiate with drug lords. Promising to continue the battle against organized crime, no matter how violent it gets, Calderon said he would push US president-elect Barack Obama to do his part north of the border. Calderon has long said the US must do more to fight drug consumption and stop the illegal flow of weapons south. Obama has said he would do both.
■ZIMBABWE
Government ignores ruling
The government has rejected a regional court ruling that said 78 white farmers could keep their farms despite Harare’s land reform scheme, state newspaper the Herald reported yesterday. “They [the tribunal] are day-dreaming because we are not going to reverse the land reform exercise,” the Minister of State for National Security, Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, Didymus Mutasa, told the newspaper. Mutasa was reacting to Friday’s ruling by the Southern African Development Community tribunal that said the farmers could keep their farms because Harare’s land reform scheme discriminated against them.
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