Mexico City  - US President Barack Obama arrived in Mexico Thursday for an overnight visit to meet with Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa welcomed Obama at Mexico City's international airport. Obama immediately helicoptered to the presidential residence Los Pinosto to join Calderon.

Regular activity was suspended for 35 minutes at the airport around the landing of Air Force One.

This is the first visit to Mexico City by a US president since then-president Bill Clinton in 1997.

Washington  - One day before President Barack Obama travels to Mexico, the administration named Alan Bersin to lead efforts to police the United States' southern border and announced a new clampdown on Mexican drug gangs.

Bersin, who served in a similar capacity under former president Bill Clinton, will lead the effort to make our borders safe while working to promote commerce and trade," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said during a visit to El Paso, Texas.

Mexico City  - Only five US presidents have visited Mexico City in the past 100 years, but one more name will be added to the list Thursday with the arrival of President Barack Obama.

Obama is set to visit the city, which was once ancient Tenochtitlan - the former capital of the Aztec civilization, on Thursday, 12 years after the last visit of then-president Bill Clinton. The city is today the second-largest in the world in terms of population, with 19 million people in its metropolitan area.

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Mexico City  - An inmate who was serving time for drug trafficking was murdered and chopped up in pieces in a prison in the western Mexican town of Uruapan, authorities in the state of Michoacan said Monday.

The guards at the prison, some 400 kilometres west of Mexico City, noticed the man's absence when they went through the list of inmates after visiting hours Sunday afternoon, a spokesman for the Michoacan public prosecutor's office told dpa.

Mexico City, April 6 : Mexican archaeologists have begun the recovery of a great Mayan city buried under tons of earth and jungle in the archaeological area of Ichkabal on the Yucatan peninsula.

According to a report in the Latin American Herald Tribune, previous archaeological digs in Ichkabal indicated the existence at this site of a vast Mayan settlement comprising many buildings, of which the biggest is some 200 meters (656 feet) wide at the base and 46 meters (151 feet) high.