A fire and explosion at a convenience store in northwestern Mexico have killed at least 23 people, including children, and injured 12 others.

Residents in the northern Mexican state of Sonora are battling a new train line that threatens to displace their homes and cut up the local ecosystem.

The former mayor of Mexico City will be the dominant ruling party’s presidential candidate, moving the country closer to electing its first female president next year.

MEXICO CITY – Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador proposed a former journalist and long-time Mexico City government bureaucrat to be the country’s new security chief Friday at a time when the country is on track to set a new annual homicide record. López Obrador said he had not asked her in advance and she was currently in quarantine, recovering from COVID-19. When López Obrador was Mexico City mayor from 2000 to 2005, Rodríguez held posts in public security and was social development secretary. López Obrador has given more responsibility than any other president in modern times to the military and not just in the security realm. “We couldn’t pretend it was going to be easy to fix the problem.”__AP writer Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.

MEXICO CITY – Drug cartel gunmen ambushed three SUVs along a dirt road, slaughtering six children and three women — all U.S. citizens living in northern Mexico — in a grisly attack that left one vehicle a burned-out, bullet-riddled hulk, authorities said Tuesday. While a drug-related violence has been raging for years in Mexico, the attack underscored the way cartel gunmen have become increasingly unconcerned about killing children as collateral damage. In a tweet, President Donald Trump offered to help Mexico "wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth." The 2009 killing of Benjamin LeBaron marked a watershed in Mexico's 2006-12 drug war. In August in Chihuahua, cartel gunmen fired 123 bullets at a man and also killed three girls, ages 4, 13 and 14.

Google MapsCULIACAN, Mexico - Mexican security forces engaged in a prolonged shootout with heavily armed suspected cartel members in Sinaloa state Thursday, in an operation that ensnared a son of imprisoned drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Authorities identified one of the occupants as Ovidio Guzman Lopez. Who is Ovidio Guzman Lopez? Ovidio Guzman Lopez is the son of Guzman and his second wife, Griselda Lopez. In February, Ovidio Guzman Lopez was charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs to be imported into the US, along with his brother Joaquin Guzman Lopez, 34, by the US Department of Justice.