Antonio Tiberi (Ita/Bahrain Victorious) +1min 9.secs
to get Laura Kuenssberg's expert political insight and insider stories every Thursday.Seven Mexican youths have been shot dead at a festivity organised by the Catholic Church in the central state of Guanajuato.
Gunmen opened fire on a group of people who had stayed behind in the central square of the village of San Bartolo de Berrios after an event organised by the local parish.Eyewitnesses said the assailants had driven straight to the village square in the early hours of Monday and fired dozens of shots seemingly at random.The authorities have not yet said what the motive behind the shooting may have been but messages scrawled on signs left at several nearby locations appear to indicate it was carried out by the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel.
While attacks on nightclubs, bars and cockfighting venues are not unusual in Mexican states hit by cartel violence, an attack on an event organised by the Catholic Church is rare.The Episcopal Conference of Mexico, which represents the country's bishops, condemned the fatal shooting saying it "cannot remain indifferent in the face of the spiral of violence that is wounding so many communities".
The local archbishop, Jaime Calderón, also released a statement blaming the attack on a fight for territory between rival cartels.
Guanajuato, where San Bartolo de Berrios is located, had the highest number of murders of any state in Mexico in 2024 with a total of 2,597 homicides.And at the heart of this shift lay attitudes to immigration and race. Prime ministers have repeatedly tried to soothe public concern; to draw a line under the issue. But worries have remained. After that pivotal year 1968, for the rest of the 20th Century the number of people who thought there were "too many immigrants" in the country remained well above 50%, according to data analysed by the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory.
Sir Keir Starmer's government, elected last year on a manifesto promising to reduce migration, is the latest to have a go, with an overhaul of visa rules announced earlier this month. On Thursday, the net migration figures showed that the number of people moving to the UK fell by almost 50% in 2024 - down to 431,000 from 860,000 the previous year. It's something Sir Keir will likely hail as an early success for his attempts to reduce migration numbers (although the Conservatives say their own policies should be credited).Can Sir Keir succeed where other prime ministers have arguably failed? And is it possible to reach something resembling a settlement with voters on an issue as fraught as migration?
Dig into the nuances of public opinion, and you find a complicated picture.The number of Britons naming immigration as one of the most important issues - what political scientists call "salience" - shot up from about 2000 onwards, as the number of fresh arrivals to Britain ticked up and up. In the 1990s, annual net migration was normally in the tens of thousands; after the Millennium, it was reliably in the hundreds of thousands.