From :- BBC World News By :- Vanessa Buschschlüter - Latin America digital editor Edited by :- Amal Udawatta Reuters Some mourners concealed their identities with face masks Infamous Mexican drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, also known as "El Mencho", was buried in a golden casket by his family on Monday. The cartel leader died after being wounded in a firefight between his bodyguards and Mexican special forces personnel deployed to capture him in late February. The 59-year-old founder of the feared Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) was the country's most-wanted man, while the US had offered a $15m (£11.2m) reward for information leading to his arrest. His death triggered widespread retaliatory violence in which cartel members set fire to vehicles and blockaded roads across 20 Mexican states. Members of the National Guard were out in force to prevent fresh violence from breaking out during the colourful funeral near Guadalajara in Jalisco state, a s...
From History today By ;- Will Garbett Edited by :- Amal Udawatta Eighty years ago the BBC tried to remedy postwar Anglo-American friction with Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America On 1 March 1946 the RMS Queen Mary arrived in New York from Southampton. Among the 2,420 passengers were Mexican diplomats, hundreds of GI brides, and Alistair Cooke, a BBC journalist on a new assignment. In the first months of peacetime a mutual distrust between Britain and America, put to bed by the war, had re-emerged. British officials recognised that they would require American support, but there was a real fear that the US would return to isolation; the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, would remark in later life that only the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 reassured him that the Americans were committed to Europe in the long term. Attlee’s concern was not unfounded. In a September 1945 cabinet meeting, an unnamed official ask...