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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Ads target illegal border crossings

Compiled from wire reports The Spokesman-Review

San Diego

The U.S. government is launching two new media campaigns to try to stop immigrants from attempting clandestine border crossings and trying to sneak children into the country in car trunks, engines and even gasoline tanks.

One ad unveiled Thursday shows a young girl gasping for air inside a car trunk while her mother bangs desperately on the lid as the vehicle sits snarled in traffic. Others invoke images of a graveyard and a funeral procession.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced some of the ads Thursday at San Diego’s San Ysidro border crossing, the nation’s busiest.

Since October, authorities at the San Ysidro border crossing say they have discovered nearly 300 different vehicle compartments used to smuggle immigrants.

Sheehan goes home after mother’s stroke

Crawford, Texas

The grieving woman who started an anti-war demonstration near President Bush’s ranch nearly two weeks ago left the camp Thursday after learning her mother had had a stroke, but she told supporters the protest would go on.

Cindy Sheehan told reporters she had just received the phone call and was leaving immediately to be with her 74-year-old mother at a Los Angeles hospital.

“I’ll be back as soon as possible if it’s possible,” she said. After hugging some of her supporters, Sheehan and her sister, Dede Miller, got in a van and left for the Waco airport about 20 miles away.

Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey died in Iraq, said the makeshift campsite off the road leading to Bush’s ranch would continue.

Bodies of four cave explorers found

Provo, Utah Four friends who disappeared while exploring a cave near Provo were found dead Thursday in a narrow, underwater passageway between its chambers, officials said.

The bodies of the two women and two men, ages 18 to 28, were found inside the passageway, all facing the outer chamber, where they entered the cave, said Lt. Dave Bennett of the Utah County sheriff’s search and rescue team.

A preliminary report from the state medical examiner’s office lists the cause of all four deaths as drowning.

Illness shuts down water playground

Albany, N.Y. Gastrointestinal illness possibly stemming from a state-run water playground has sickened more than 700 people, mostly children and teenagers, the state Health Department said Thursday.

Seneca Lake Park’s Sprayground, which has water jets shooting up from a hardtop surface, was closed after tests showed the tank system that feeds the water jets was contaminated with a common waterborne disease called cryptosporidiosis.

The disease is highly contagious and can cause diarrhea, nausea and fever that can last for weeks.