(Continued from page 25)

tial candidates.
• For challenger Mitt Romney, the state now looms as a battleground crucial to his presidential hopes.
• Obama will travel to the southeast and southwest corners of the state Friday, courting young and African-American voters in the Virginia Beach-Hampton area before turning to more conservative Roanoke, unwilling to cede votes to Romney. On Saturday, he will campaign in Richmond, a once-staunchly Republican region that he won in 2008.
• Both campaigns acknowledge Virginia's new role as a fiercely contested state after years of being virtually overlooked in presidential politics. Obama won the state by a 53-46 margin over his 2008 rival, Sen. John McCain.
• Obama's visit comes after a day of hostile exchanges between the campaigns over Romney's tenure at the private equity firm he founded in 1984. Documents filed

by the company, Bain Capital, conflict with Romney's statements about when he gave up control of the firm. Both sides accused the other of being dishonest.
• ___

• PHOENIX (AP) -- Two drug-smuggling tunnels outfitted with lighting and ventilation systems were discovered along the U.S.-Mexico border, the latest signs that cartels are building sophisticated passages to escape heightened surveillance on land.
• Both tunnels were at least 150 yards long. One began under a bathroom sink inside a warehouse in Tijuana but was unfinished and didn't cross the border into San Diego. The Mexican army found the tunnel Wednesday.
• The other was completed and discovered Saturday in a vacant strip mall storefront in the southwestern Arizona city of San Luis. It showed a level of sophistication not typically associated with other crude smuggling passageways that tie into storm drains in the state.
• "When you see what is there and the way they designed it, it wasn't something that your average miner could put together," said Douglas Coleman, special agent in charge of the Phoenix division of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "You would need someone with some engineering expertise to put something together like this."
• As U.S. authorities heighten enforcement on land, tunnels have become an in

(Continued on page 27)