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Notre Dame’s practice Tuesday gave coach Brian Kelly a good indication that the Irish (7-5) are ready to play Miami (7-5) in the Sun Bowl on Dec. 31 in El Paso, Texas. Notre Dame completes practices in South Bend today before the team disperses for Christmas, and the coaches and players will reconvene in El Paso on Sunday. The Irish will head to Texas with no major injury issues. Kelly is also making sure there is no chance his players will wander into Juarez, Mexico, which is plagued by drug-related murders, by taking their passports. “That’s serious. Don’t go over...

(CNN) -- Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, made its own history Tuesday as its homicide rate reached 3,000 deaths for the year -- 10 times the number of killings annually that the border city counted just a few years ago. With two weeks left in the year, 2010 is now the deadliest year Juarez has ever seen, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general's office told CNN. "At 12:15 p.m. we hit 3,000 murders for the year. The state attorney general's office had the number at 2,998 as of Monday and with the two murders today that brings us to 3,000,"...

He famously once declared that Left-wing Italian women were less attractive than their Right-wing counterparts. But having proved his point by packing his government with ex-beauty queens and showgirls, Silvio Berlusconi is discovering that good looks do not necessarily go with good tempers. In the latest crisis to hit the scandal-ridden prime minister, his tottering centre-right coalition is under threat after a vicious catfight between two of his most glamourous female allies. In one corner is Mara Carfagna, 34, a former topless model who Mr Berlusconi - without any apparent sense of irony - appointed equal opportunities minister two years...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Gunmen burst into a bar called "Desesperados" in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and opened fire on Sunday, killing five people and wounding nine others, authorities said. Assailants also killed the state's prisons director and his son in a second attack in the area, which has turned into a deadly battleground for warring drug cartels. Gunmen opened fire on the vehicle carrying Chihuahua prison director Gerardo Ortiz and his son in Chihuahua city, the state capital, located south of Ciudad Juarez. The state's prisons used to be the site of frequent battles between gangs,...

SAN ISIDRO, Mexico -- An El Paso woman and a small child were shot in the Juarez Valley Wednesday morning. Three others in the same SUV were killed. Six Americans have been killed in our sister city in the past week. The shooting happened shortly after 11 a.m. in San Isidro -- across the border from Clint, Texas. According to Juarez media, the woman and small child were rushed to the Juarez General Hospital. U.S. Customs officials said the 61-year-old woman, who suffered gunshot wounds, was then taken to University Medical Center in El Paso. Juarez media report two vehicles...

CNN) -- Eighteen people were killed in separate shootings throughout Mexico's Ciudad Juarez on Saturday, marking it as one of the bloodiest days this year in the nation's most violent city, officials said Sunday. In one incident, a family of seven was slaughtered while they were outside their home in the southeastern part of the city, Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office spokesman Carlos Gonzalez said. "Among [the seven killed] were two brothers who we believe were targeted," Gonzalez said. Local newspaper El Diario de Juarez reported that five of the bodies were found inside a car and another two bodies...

A University of Texas El Paso student has been shot to death in Ciudad Juarez, becoming the fifth U.S. citizen killed in that border city this week. The U.S. consulate has confirmed Eder Diaz, who was killed along with a classmate, is the latest victim. U.S authorities said the 23-year-old student was traveling Tuesday with his fellow classmates when gunmen opened fire on their car. Diaz died from his injuries Wednesday and his classmate was killed on the scene. Killings of U.S. citizens are on the rise in Mexico, which has seen more than 28,000 deaths so far in its...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Four U.S. citizens were shot to death in separate attacks in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexican authorities said Monday. Chihuahua state prosecutors' spokesman Arturo Sandoval said Edgar Lopez, 35, of El Paso, Texas, was killed Sunday along with two Mexican men when gunmen opened fire on a group standing outside a house. On Saturday, a 26-year-old U.S. woman and an American boy were slain shortly after crossing an international bridge from El Paso. Giovanna Herrera and Luis Araiza, 15, were shot to death along with a Mexican man traveling with them just after 11...

Three people who were killed in Juarez over the weekend are believed to be El Paso residents. Mexican officials said a group of armed gunmen fired shots at the people as they sat in a late model BMW station wagon. The El Diario newspaper reports Juarez officials said the victims were 23, 15, and 26 years old. They are identified as Joanna Herrera, William Araiza Hildalgo and Luis Carlos Hidalgo. One teen, who was 14 years old, managed to jump in the back of the vehicle to escape injury, the paper reported. The attack occurred at Independence Boulevard and Juárez-Porvenir...

MEXICO UNDER SIEGE Reporting from Mexico City — Armed men opened fire on buses carrying assembly-plant workers near the Texas border early Thursday, killing four people and wounding 15 others in the latest spasm of violence to rattle Mexico. Authorities in the northern state of Chihuahua said the victims, identified as employees of a U.S. car-upholstery plant called Eagle Ottawa, were riding home about 1 a.m. when three company buses came under fire outside Ciudad Juarez. Officials said they had not determined a motive. Witnesses said gunmen jumped aboard looking for a male passenger. "As soon as they located him,...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Gunmen killed three Mexican federal police officers as they waited for a person to cross a bridge from the United States, authorities said Wednesday, a shootout that briefly forced closure of the international crossing. The attack on the undercover officers took place beside the Cordova Americas International Bridge between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, on Tuesday. The Chihuahua state attorney general's office gave no further details, but motorists crossing the bridge at about 1:30 p.m. were told by officials that there was a delay because of a shooting. In a separate incident, a Chihuahua state...

EL PASO- We first told you about it last night. A 25 year-old El Pasoan, brutally murdered in Juarez yesterday. Rasiel Ayala's family is speaking out exclusively to NewsChannel 9. NewsChannel 9's Matt Rivers spent hours with the family. Initial shock and disbelief has turned into overwhelming sadness today. Family members told me about a young man who's life was cut short. She refused to wash the blood off her hands. Rasiel Ayala's grandmother watched her grandson die, held his lifeless body, and brought back the hat he was killed in, spattered with his blood. Off camera, she told me...

JUAREZ - Three more Juarez police agents have been targeted for murder. Gunmen attacked a police unit on the city's east side yesterday and killed two agents on the spot. A third died at the hospital. Seven police agents have been killed in Juarez in the past week.

Gunmen stormed a party in the border city of Ciudad Juarez and opened fire, killing at least 13 people and wounding 14 others, authorities said Saturday. ... authorities said a group of men armed with assault rifles burst into the party, which was being held in two adjacent homes in a neighborhood called Horizontes del Sur. The attackers opened fire "in an indiscriminate manner," said Carlos Gonzalez, spokesman for the prosecutor's office in the state of Chihuahua. The victims who had been identified were between 16 and 25. A 9-year-old boy was among the wounded. El Diario de Juarez newspaper...

A town near drug cartel capital Juarez, Mexico, had just one applicant for police chief after a spate of killings of public officials in drug-related violence. So now the new chief in Guadalupe, a town of 10,000 residents near the Texas border, is 20-year-old college criminology major Marisol Valles García. Public officials have increasingly become the targets of assassination as Mexican cartels try to tighten their grasp on the country. Just this year, 11 Mexican mayors have been slain, including the former mayor of Guadalupe, who was killed in June. In the small town, "police officers and security agents have...

EL PASO, Texas — Authorities say a 21-year-old Texas National Guard soldier was one of two men killed on a street in the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Spokesman Arturo Sandoval of the Chihuahua state attorney general's office says family members identified the soldier as 21-year-old Jose Gil Hernandez of El Paso. The identity of the other man was not available, and details on the incident and the dead were few. A message left with FBI El Paso spokesman Michael Martinez by The Associated Press on Wednesday night was not immediately returned. However, he told the El Paso...

SNIPPET: "CIUDAD JUAREZ – A woman was found beheaded in this violent city on Mexico's northern border, the Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office said Wednesday. The body was discovered wrapped in a blanket, with the woman's severed head beside it, on the corner of Cañaveral and Centeno streets in Ciudad Juarez. Though beheadings are not rare in Mexico's increasingly bloody drug war, this is the first case of a decapitation of a woman in Chihuahua, the AG's office said. Women make up more than 10 percent of the more than 2,300 people slain so far this year in Juarez, Mexico's...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Gunmen have stormed two homes and killed nine people in a neighborhood of the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. The Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office says gunmen burst into a home where a family was having a party. Three women and two men died at the scene Sunday night, and a man and a woman died at the hospital. The statement Monday says gunmen attacked a second home in the neighborhood minutes later, killing two men.

Two Others Hospitalized MEXICO -- Authorities investigated a crime scene along the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday morning after shots were fired on the embankment on Mexico's side, near Paisano by Asarco. According to our partners at the El Paso Times, a Juarez traffic officer was ambushed and killed by an unknown shooter near the U.S. border. Roxana Monroyl, 33, was shot about 10:30 a.m., said Juarez city spokesman Jaime Torres. After she was shot, she called for help. Two other traffic officers arrived at the scene to assist her and were also shot, he said. Those officers were taken to a...

(RTTNews) - A prominent newspaper in Mexico's border city of Ciudad Juarez has published an editorial requesting guidelines on media publishing from drug cartels operating in the city after one of its employees was shot dead by suspected drug operatives last week. The unprecedented editorial carried by the El Diario de Juarez newspaper on its front page on Sunday was prompted by the killing of Luis Carlos Santiago, 21-year-old photographer working for the paper, last week. Santiago and a co-worker was shot by unidentified gunmen in Ciudad Juarez on 17 September when they were sitting inside a parked car outside a...