At least 40 die in Mexico drug violence

       A surge in drug-related violence has seen at least 40 people killed in the troubled northern border region and President Felipe Calderon's home state.
       At least 18 people were killed and five wounded on Wednesday when gunmen stormed into a drug treatment centre in northern Mexico's violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez.
       Civil protection officials warned there might be more victims from the shootout.The city lies just across the border from El Paso, Texas, where feuding drug cartels are engaged in a violent struggle.
       In an eerily similar attack last year,eight people were gunned down at a Mexican clinic treating drug addicts.
       Wednesday's slaughter came after 21 people were killed in drug-related violence in Chihuahua state; and the number two security official in Mr Calderon's home state of Michoacan was gunned down.
       Jose Manuel Revuelta had been barely two weeks on the job as deputy director of state security when "he was assassinated together with his two bodyguards"in the state capital Morelia, a state official said on condition of anonymity.
       The killing took place just a few hundred metres from Revuelta's office, the official said.
       The gunmen were said to have intercepted Revuelta's car in the southern part of Morelia, a city where the notoriously ruthless La Familia drug cartel operates. They work in tandem with a feared group of paramilitaries known as Los Zetas, a group made up of former Mexican soldiers.
       Authorities blame La Familia for the deaths of 12 federal police intelligence agents whose bodies were discovered dumped along a road in Michoacan in July.
       The group made a dramatic appearance in 2006 when members rolled five decapitated heads onto a nightclub dance floor.
       Violence has since been on the increase, despite Mr Calderon deploying thousands of soldiers and federal police to Michoacan in what eventually marked the launch of a nationwide crackdown on drug cartel-driven violence.
       Deadly attacks in Michoacan hit a new high after the July arrest of Arnoldo Rueda, an alleged top La Familia operative suspected of managing synthetic drug production and shipping marijuana to the United States.
       The killings in Chihuahua state overnight Tuesday to Wednesday included the gruesome find of a man who was decapitated and dismembered.
       The remains of the 20-year-old were dumped near a police station in central Ciudad Juarez late on Tuesday, the prosecutor's office said.
       Police nearby had found a "threat-ening message" signed by La Linea, a group belonging to the Carrillo Fuentes drug cartel, said prosecutors.
       Separately, a woman was shot dead in broad daylight on a Ciudad Juarez street, another two people were gunned down in a city restaurant on Wednesday,and nine men were killed in other incidents, officials said.
       Other violent deaths were reported across the state, including Nuevo Casas Grandes, about 200km south of Ciudad Juarez, and in the state capital Ciudad Chihuahua.
       More than 9,600 people have died in drug-related violence since 2008, despite Mr Calderon's deployment of about 36,000 troops and police across the country to try to stem the bloodshed.