MEXICO CITY – Two Mexican cartels have joined forces to destroy a gang of hit men that has grown into a feared drug trafficking outfit with reach into Central America, federal police said Monday. The shift in allegiances is fueling bloody battles along the Texas border.

Intelligence reports indicate the Gulf cartel has recruited its former rival, La Familia, to crush the Zetas gang in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, said Ramon Pequeno, the head of the anti-narcotics division of Mexico’s federal police.

The alliance followed a break between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas, which started as a group of hit men for the Gulf but quickly began rivaling its creator. Tamaulipas has long been the stronghold of the Gulf cartel, but the Zetas have begun taking over.

It was the first official confirmation of the pact, which has been rumored since banners appeared throughout the region earlier this year announcing the campaign by “the cartels of Mexico united against the Zetas.”

One banner even urged President Felipe Calderon to withdraw the army and let the new alliance exterminate the Zetas. Videos and e-mails were sent around warning families to stay home, saying the conflict would get worse.

Read the whole hot breaking news

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI offered condolences to Poland on Sunday following a plane crash that killed the country’s president and other senior officials, saying he was praying for the victims and the “beloved” Polish nation.

Poles holding up the red-and-white banners of the Polish flag sang mournfully after the pope spoke during his noon blessing from the papal retreat in Castel Gandolfo. Benedict said he had learned with sadness of the crash and the deaths.

“They perished during a trip to Katyn, the place of execution of thousands of Polish military officials assassinated 70 years ago,” Benedict said in Polish, referring to the Poles systematically executed by Josef Stalin’s NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, in 1940.

“In expressing my profound condolences, I assure you from my heart of my prayers of intercession for the victims and support for the beloved Polish nation,” he said.

He noted that according to the church’s liturgical calendar, Sunday commemorates the canonization of Sister Faustina Kowalska, a mystic 20th-century Krakow nun beloved to the Polish faithful and the Polish-born Pope John Paul II.

Read the whole hot breaking news

REYNOSA, Mexico – In a ratcheting up of tactics in a long, bloody war, drug cartel gunmen made seven especially brazen assaults on Mexican soldiers in one day this week, throwing up roadblocks near army garrisons and spraying checkpoints with automatic weapons fire.

The apparently coordinated assaults raise the prospect that parts of Mexico could be descending into open warfare between the cartels and the government.

Drug bosses appeared to have little to show for Tuesday’s attacks near the Texas border except a body count for their own side: 18 attackers dead, while the military said its own casualties were limited to one soldier with a wounded toe.

But there have been more attacks since, and the battles have shown that gang henchmen are as well armed, if not as well trained, as the soldiers. Armored vehicles, explosive devices and grenade launchers were among the items the military seized.

The attacks are occurring as two cartels are engaged in a violent power struggle of their own. Experts on the drug war say drug lords are trying to get military patrols out of the way of the gangs’ increasingly bloody battle for trafficking routes in the northern border states of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas.

Read the whole hot breaking news

LONDON (AFP) –
British Airways cabin crew and their bosses faced off Monday for a fresh day of industrial action, in a dispute that has fuelled an increasingly fierce row between the prime minister and his rivals.

Employees from the Unite union, which represents 12,000 BA cabin crew, entered the third day of their four-day strike, heaping fresh misery on thousands of weary passengers.

The airline and the union spent the weekend trading blows over the impact of the strike, which is the second bout of industrial action by the crews in a week over the carrier’s planned changes to pay and conditions.

BA claimed the number of cabin crew who had turned up for work Saturday was 63 percent, which they said was higher than during last week’s strike — but Unite disputed this claim and said more than half had joined the strike.

Just weeks before an election expected on May 6, opposition Conservative leader David Cameron used the strike to attack Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose Labour party receives much of its funding from Unite.

Read the whole hot breaking news