What happened
Mexico has sent security forces into several regions to quell widespread disorder following the fatal shooting of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho”, head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The defence ministry said 2,500 additional soldiers were sent to western states yesterday, bringing the total deployed since Sunday to about 9,500. Violence has flared in at least 20 states.

Oseguera Cervantes was cornered in Jalisco after troops located a romantic partner he was due to meet. He was gravely wounded in a shootout that killed a number of his bodyguards and died while being transported to hospital in Mexico City. Since then, unrest has claimed the lives of National Guard personnel, officials and suspected drug cartel members.

Who said what
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum praised the military for its actions and said her priority was restoring order. “There is calm, there is government, there are armed forces and there is a lot of co-ordination,” she said.

What next?
Mexican military personnel may have “fulfilled their mission”, according to Defence Minister Ricardo Trevilla Trejo. But the country “faces an uphill battle” in its bid to pacify “kingpin Donald Trump”, said Oscar Lopez in The Guardian. The killing of “El Mencho” has “highlighted the intense pressure exerted by Trump on the Mexican government” and the “continued struggle” that Sheinbaum will face in her “efforts to appease her US counterpart”.

What happened
The Pope has called for priests to resist using artificial intelligence to write homilies. In a meeting with clergy from the Diocese of Rome, he also advocated that they should avoid seeking “likes” or a social media following.

Who said what
“The brain needs to be used, and your intelligence needs to be exercised,” said the Pope. “Like all muscles in the body, if we do not use them, if we do not move them, they die.”

Since his election the Pope has made “AI a focus of his papacy”, said CNN. He has “called for an ethical framework” for the technology and “clear distinctions” between manmade and AI-generated content.

The Pope has a “reputation of being fond of technology”, said The Times. However, even for the “tech-savvy” pontiff, “the use of artificial intelligence has gone too far”.

What next?
Despite this rebuff of AI, the Vatican has announced that congregations at St Peter’s Basilica will be able to follow services in up to 60 languages from this spring via an AI-powered app generating text on smartphones, said The Times.

After nearly a century in wide circulation, mass-market paperbacks are “shuffling towards extinction”, according to The New York Times. Sales have dropped over the years, “peeled away by e-books, digital audiobooks and even more expensive formats like hardcovers and trade paperbacks”, the mass market’s “larger and pricier cousin”.

Since the 1930s, mass-market paperbacks have been “beloved for making reading accessible”, said Smithsonian Magazine. Typically printed on cheaper paper and measuring “roughly four by seven inches”, they were “marketed wherever people shopped, filling racks in grocery aisles, drugstores, gas stations, newsstands and malls”.

However, mass market unit sales “plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%”, according to industry data firm Circana BookScan, and sales through to last October were only about 15 million units, said Publishers Weekly.

Yet it wasn’t publishers “leading the move away from mass markets”, said the Times, “it was readers”. And mass markets were not just “cannibalised digitally”. Readers appear “more willing to buy books in larger, pricier formats”. Romance readers “happily shell out three or four times the price of a mass-market paperback on deluxe hardcovers with colorfully stained edges on the paper or other embellishments”.

The removal of mass-market paperbacks is an “indication of the book affordability crisis”, said R. Nassor at literary website Book Riot. A trade paperback that is “50% more expensive – even accounting for inflation”, and a “pricey monthly book subscription are not enough to replace a $10 book you could own”. Now is not the time to “roll back affordable options for consumers in any entertainment space”.