A couple and their three children were shot to death in western Mexico, prosecutors said on Friday, marking the fifth killing of families in two weeks.
Mexican criminal gangs used to avoid targeting the family members of their rivals, but in recent weeks, gunmen have mowed down fathers, mothers and children indiscriminately.
Michoacan state prosecutors said in a statement that the latest killings occurred in the drug-plagued city of Arteaga, once the headquarters of a Knights Templar cartel leader. One person survived the attack by unidentified gunmen and is being treated at a hospital.
In the normally less violent southern state of Oaxaca, a man, a woman and their son were shot to death this week in the city of Juchitan. A hand-lettered sign left at the scene suggested the slayings were linked to a dispute between criminal gangs.
Three days earlier, eight adult members of a family were killed in the popular Oaxaca beach resort of Puerto Escondido.
The prosecutor’s office said that the victims were shark fishermen and that an early line of inquiry was whether they might have been involved in other activities while at sea.
In the northern border state of Tamaulipas, two families were gunned down in two separate attacks earlier this month.
In the first attack, gunmen entered a home and killed 11 members of the same family while they were sleeping, including four girls.
In the second attack, five members of a family — two women and three minors — were killed in their home by armed intruders.
The violence in Tamaulipas, across the border from Texas, has not abated since then.
On Friday, the state government reported that five suspected kidnappers were trying to toss the lifeless body of one of their victims on a rural road when a marine patrol intercepted the two vehicles they were traveling in.
The suspects opened fire and tried to flee. The marines returned fire, and both vehicles caught fire; five suspects died in the flames.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion