A key Mexican drug cartel figure who acknowledged ordering 1,500 killings has been captured in the north of the country.

A smattering of summer rain gave a boost to firefighters battling a huge wildfire near Los Alamos, the desert birthplace of the atomic bomb, giving authorities enough confidence yesterday to allow about 12,000 people to return to their homes for the first time in nearly a week.

Hundreds of bicyclists in their underwear, covered in body paint or wearing nothing at all have taken to the streets of Mexico City to demand respect from motorists.

Tired of innocent bloodshed, 90,000 people have participated in a "silent march" in Mexico City to protest against the country's strategy in its "war on drugs", which is estimated to have claimed more than 35,000 lives.

Pilots on an Alaska Airlines flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles locked down the cockpit and alerted authorities on Sunday when flight crew grew alarmed at the behaviour of three men who turned out to be conducting an elaborate Orthodox Jewish prayer ritual.

As mexicos' President, Felipe Calderon, prepared for an official visit to Washington yesterday to meet Barack Obama, frustrations came out into the open with some of the rhetoric regressing to the 1980s, when the two governments routinely traded barbs about drugs, money laundering, trade and investment issues.

Federal police said yesterday that they had captured the new leader of a drug gang formerly led by jailed US-born suspect Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez Villarreal, in another blow to a cartel fighting to control the region south of Mexico City to the Pacific resort of Acapulco.

A 500 kilo bull injures a picador after jumping into the crowd at the Plaza de Toros in Mexico City.

Chelsea, reasonably enough, were somewhat underwhelmed this week by Diego Maradona's offer to take over from Carlo Ancelotti just as soon as he could barrel his way to the airport.

"This film is not optimistic," begins Luis Bunuel's reissued master-piece, as it pans over London, Paris and down into the slums of Mexico City.

Only time will show if Mexico is indeed sliding into drug-war anarchy like that which gripped Colombia in the 1980s. But President Obama's correction of his Secretary of State's suggestion that Mexico's crisis was beginning to resemble the Colombian one underlined one thing: the acute concern in America at events in its vitally important southern neighbour.

Kenya's David Rudisha lowered the 800 metres world record to 1min 41.01sec in Rieti in Italy yesterday, just a week after first breaking the record.