A growing number of Arizona job seekers are getting ripped off by mystery-shopper pitches, pyramid schemes, work-from-home offers and other scams that seem too good to be true. Blame the recession.

The sixth sense that usually gut-checks suspicious offers can get blocked when a person is growing desperate for work, said Judd Rousseau, chief fraud officer of Scottsdale-based Identity Theft 911, which helps victims clean up after their personal information is stolen.

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office reported an increase of more than a 275 percent in complaints about business opportunity scams, from about 225 during the first quarter of 2008 to about 850 in the first quarter of 2009, a spokeswoman said.

The Better Business Bureau of Central, Northern and Western Arizona has seen a spike, too.

“I think that people who run scams and these schemes follow the trends in the marketplace,” said Felicia Thompson, a BBB spokeswoman. Scam artists “know people are out of work and know that’s an opportunity to gain someone’s trust and violate that trust.”

There are ways to avoid getting duped, according to organizations such as the BBB, Identity Theft 911, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Trade Commission. Here’s how:

Mystery shopping

Rip-off: There are variations on this scam, but in one instance the victim receives an official looking letter and a sizable check to conduct undercover market research.

First, he or she must deposit the check into a personal bank account within a few days.

A portion of those funds is the victim’s payment and shopping money. He or she is instructed to wire the rest to an address provided in the letter.

The money needs to be wired in order to test consumer experience with services like Western Union or MoneyGram, some scams claim.

Here’s the problem: The initial check was fake. By the time it bounces, the company is long gone with the victim’s own money that has been wired.

The victim could be on the hook for thousands of dollars.

Warning signs: The Mystery Shopping Providers Association in Dallas warns consumers that shoppers never pay up-front fees. Also, mystery shoppers typically earn roughly $10 on average for an evaluation – not hundreds or thousands.

“People should always look at mystery shopping purely as an opportunity to make a few extra bucks,” said John Swinburn, the group’s executive director. “They can’t depend on mystery shopping to keep them solvent.”

Other sophisticated scammers spoof the Web sites of legitimate mystery-shopping companies.

Swinburn advises people to go to his association’s Web site (www.mysteryshop.org) and double-check the Web site address of its list of legitimate companies.

Pyramid scheme

Rip-off: A victim pays hundreds or even thousands of dollars to become a “distributor” for a company that sells items like perfume, lotion or vitamins – often at an insanely high price.

The more friends and family recruited to this “multi- level marketing plan,” the more money is made, the pitch goes.

But only the scammers end up rolling in dough. The scheme eventually collapses under its own weight when there are no more recruits.

Warning signs: A pyramid scheme promises a get-rich-quick approach. New products on the market can take years to make money.

Also, be wary of initial membership fees. You never should have to spend money to get a job.

Work from home

Rip-off: Earn a handsome salary from the comfort of home by stuffing envelopes or processing medical billing claims.

Don’t take the bait. If it worked, everyone would apply for these positions.

Scammers, for example, may charge envelope stuffers to learn the “secrets” of the industry and provide help. But the victims are left to drum up their own business.

It’s worse for medical billing. Scammers can charge victims thousands of dollars to start a firm to help doctors with outsourced billing, accounts receivable, electronic insurance-claim processing and practice management, according to the FTC.

This rarely ever makes money. “Competition in the medical billing market is fierce and revolves around a number of large and well-established firms,” the agency reported.

Warning signs: Not all work-from-home offers are scams, but be wary. In writing, the company should provide information on duties, pay, when your first check will arrive and total cost for supplies, equipment and membership fees, according to the FTC.

Contact the local BBB or Attorney General’s Office and speak to as many references provided by the company as you can.

And research the company online.

Social-networking ads

Rip-off: There’s an advertisement circulating on Facebook and other social-networking sites that features a stay-at-home mom who claims she adds “$67,000 a year to my family’s income working 10 hours a week (that’s over $128 an hour!) by creating Web sites that host Google ads,” according to the BBB.

The advertisement takes the victim to a “blog” that urges signing up for a “risk-free trial” to learn how to get a site up and running. But read the fine print. Victims can be charged $60 to $70 every month if they don’t cancel the trial.

Warning signs: Just because a company uses the word “Google” doesn’t mean it’s a part of or sanctioned by the Internet search giant.

The company’s AdSense program is free and allows users to display targeted ads on pages and earn money from clicks.

A spokesman for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company recommended that “users exercise the same amount of caution they would when evaluating other types of get-rich-quick claims.”

Faraway interviews

Rip-off: Chandler resident Carrie Landry, who was furloughed from her job as a US Airways pilot, answered a classified advertisement in The Arizona Republic for a food and beverage server on a corporate jet.

A man called her back and said the firm had many rich and famous clients who took charter flights to cruise ships and private yachts. It paid $950 and $1,250 per week.

Landry also had nine years as a flight attendant and said she was interested. But the interviewer seemed nervous about her wide range of experience. He hung up on her.

However, the man offered to fly Landry’s friend, who had less experience, from her home in Ohio to San Diego for an interview. She had seen the same ad in a different newspaper.

She was told she would need to wire $300 to help cover the travel expenses. If she was hired, she’d be reimbursed. The woman wired the money, and it was gone before she and her husband learned they’d been taken.

Warning signs: Most companies will not make you pay up-front to travel to a job interview. Reimbursement never should depend on getting hired.

Most importantly, contact the publication where you saw the advertisement.

“We monitor all advertising for fraudulent activity; key is hearing from our readers about their experiences,” said Peter Ricker, senior vice president of advertising at The Republic. “Our staff is trained to handle matters like this with referrals to the proper agencies. Several notices are placed throughout our classified products alerting the consumer on what to look out for and how to direct their complaints.

“Unfortunately on occasion, we do experience advertisers who bypass our safeguards. Once we are informed, they are removed from our products.”

Mexican army soldiers catalog seized weapons in a warehouse at the Secretary of the Defense headquarters in Mexico City. In all, the military has 305,424 confiscated weapons locked in vaults, just a fraction of those used by criminals in Mexico, where an offensive by drug cartels against the military has killed more than 10,750 people since December 2006. The U.S. has acknowledged that many of the rifles, handguns and ammunition used by the cartels come from its side of the border.

MEXICO CITY — Deep inside a heavily guarded military warehouse, the evidence of Mexico’s war on drug cartels is stacked two stories high: tens of thousands of seized weapons, from handguns and rifles to AK-47s, some with gun sights carved into the shape of a rooster or a horse’s head.

The vault nestled in a Mexican military base is the government’s largest stash of weapons — some 88,537 of them — seized from brutal drug gangs. The Associated Press was recently given rare and exclusive access to the secure facility.

The sheer size of the cache attests to the seemingly hopeless task of ever sorting and tracing the guns, possibly to trafficking rings that deliver weapons to Mexico. And security designed to keep the guns from getting back on the streets is so tight that even investigators have trouble getting the access they need.

The warehouse — on a main drag in northeastern Mexico City near the horse racing track — is surrounded by five rings of security. There are two military guards at the door and five more are in the lobby. Inside, another 10 soldiers sort, clean and catalog weapons. Some are dismantled and destroyed, a few assigned to the Mexican military.

The guns are stacked to the two-story ceiling in a warehouse the size of a small Wal-Mart. The rifles lie on 22 metal racks; the pistols hang from metal poles by their triggers.

The cavernous warehouse is impeccably clean, the only smell coming from the coffee the soldiers prepared for their rare visitors. The clash of metal and sounds of the soldiers at work echo off the walls.

The security, bolstered by closed-circuit cameras and motion detectors, makes the warehouse practically impenetrable, said Gen. Antonio Erasto Monsivais, who oversees the armory.

In all, the military has 305,424 confiscated weapons locked in vaults, just a fraction of those used by criminals in Mexico, where an offensive by drug cartels against the military has killed more than 10,750 people since December 2006. But each weapon is a clue to how the cartels are getting arms, and possibly to the traffickers that brought them here.

The U.S. has acknowledged that many of the rifles, handguns and ammunition used by the cartels come from its side of the border. Mexican gun laws are strict, especially compared to those in most U.S. border states.

The Mexican government has handed over information to U.S. authorities to trace 12,073 weapons seized in 2008 crimes — particularly on guns from large seizures or notorious crimes.

But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which handles the U.S. investigations, is at the mercy of local Mexican police for the amount and quality of the information.

“Many of these rural municipalities that may come into a gun seizure … may not even know anything about tracing guns,” ATF spokesman Thomas Mangan said.

A police officer in Mexico submits a description, serial number and distinctive markings of the gun. The weapons are then turned over to the military for storage in one of a dozen armories such as the one in Mexico City.

When U.S. investigators need additional details, as they often do, the request goes back to the original police officer, who must retrieve the gun from a military vault — sometimes hundreds of miles away.

Mexican police must ask permission each time they need to look at a stored gun, Monsivais said. Even if that permission is granted, the investigator cannot go past the metal fencing separating a reception desk and the shelves holding the guns. A soldier has to bring out the requested weapons.

The security, language differences and bureaucracy add up to a painstaking process, said J. Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the ATF’s Houston Field Division.

“The military does a very good job when the weapons come into their custody of securing them,” he told the AP. “Because of the systems in Mexico, it’s very difficult for us to get in.”

Webb said recent talks between the two countries were beginning to ease access, but also noted other problems.

Many mistakes are made because of difficulty translating technical terms about firearms, Webb said. A Spanish-language version of eTrace, the Web-based method of submitting tracing information, won’t be available until next year.

About a third of the guns submitted for tracing in 2007 were sold by licensed U.S. dealers.

U.S. agents need the information to track the gun back to the manufacturer and determine when it was made and what wholesaler it was shipped to, ATF spokeswoman Franceska Perot said. Agents follow the gun to the local licensed dealer who sold it and determine the buyer.

ATF offices around the U.S. are swamped with tracing requests, trying to determine who actually bought the weapons and whether they were part of a firearms trafficking scheme. The ATF has sent an extra 100 agents to Houston to help unclog the 700-weapon backlog as part of its Project Gunrunner.

The seized weapons are kept in the vaults as long as they are needed as evidence, Monsivais said. Most have been there for years, an indication of how slow criminal investigations proceed and how few crimes are ever solved.

Indeed, the ATF gave the AP data showing the average “time to crime” — the time between when a gun was sold and when it was seized in a crime — is 14 years.

That’s an average of four years longer than guns in American crimes, the ATF said. The older the street age, the harder it can be to track how the gun wound up at a crime scene.

When the criminal investigations are complete, most of the weapons are destroyed and melted down. Some of the more powerful arms, such as M16 machine guns and sniper rifles, are added to the military’s own arsenal. Showpieces are destined for museums.

Most of the guns traced were originally sold by U.S. dealers in border states, with more than half purchased in Texas. Not only does Texas have the most gun dealers of any state, it makes up 1,200 miles of the 2,100-mile U.S.-Mexico border, with many of the established drug and trafficking routes.

Details on the 2008 tracing requests are not yet available.

It’s less clear how cartels are getting military-grade weapons. Amid the shelves of pistols and rifles, there is a 9 mm grenade launcher and a portable shoulder-fired anti-tank rocket launcher.

Such military-grade weaponry represents a tiny fraction of the seized weapons. But Monsivais said he’s most worried about the rising caliber of assault rifles and semi-automatic guns that have been found.

“There are weapons that have a lot of firepower and great penetration, like the .50-caliber Barrett … which can penetrate armored vehicles, body armor, and that normally only militaries use,” Monsivais said.

Thirty percent of AK-47 assault rifles seized have been modified to become fully automatic. He said about three of every 1,000 AR-15 assault rifles have been modified to take .50-caliber bullets, the kind of high-powered ammunition designed for sniper rifles.

“In my experience, I had never seen a modified AR-15 rifle,” Monsivais said. “It’s something new, and it is to a certain extent worrisome that they can have and use this type of weapon.”

Briant Rodriguez

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. – Investigators were searching Monday for a 3-year-old boy kidnapped by two gunmen who broke into his family’s home, tied up his mother and four siblings, and stole property, authorities said.

The California Highway Patrol issued an Amber Alert late Sunday for 3-year-old Briant Rodriguez, about nine hours after the family called San Bernardino County authorities.

The men, each carrying a handgun, burst through the front door around 2:30 p.m. and tied up the boy, four of his siblings and their mother, Maria Rosalina Millan. They then ransacked the house and stole money and other property, the county sheriff’s department said.

After about 20 minutes, the men left with Briant, telling the still-bound mother and the other children not to call police, the department said in a statement.

A motive for the abduction remained unclear.

“It’s horrifying,” sheriff’s Lt. Rick Ells said. “I don’t think I could impress on you how rare a kidnapping like this is.”

One of the children – an 8-year-old boy – wiggled free from his ties and freed the rest of the family, sheriff’s spokeswoman Cindy Beavers said. Briant is the youngest sibling of Millan’s seven children. Her 16-year-old boy was not home and another adult child does not live at home. No witnesses saw the men’s vehicle.

The boy’s father, Raul Rodriguez, was at work at the time and the initial investigation pointed to the kidnappers being strangers to the family, Ells said. There were no emergency responses to the house in the previous 90 days.

Sheriff’s spokeswoman Jodi Miller said authorities along the U.S.-Mexico border had been put on alert, and FBI investigators were also helping in the investigation.

The family lives in a modest, single-story home in a mainly lower-income slice of county territory abutting the city of San Bernardino, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. Journalists photographed a distraught-looking Millan standing outside her home Monday.

Briant is a Hispanic boy 3 feet tall and weighs 40 pounds, with brown eyes and long, curly brown hair. He was wearing a yellow shirt, blue-striped shorts and black sandals when he was taken.

Question is whether treatment of girl, 13, was appropriate

Redding

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court seemed worried Tuesday about tying the hands of school officials looking for drugs and weapons on campus as they wrestled with the appropriateness of a strip-search of a 13-year-old girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen.

Savana Redding was 13 when Safford, Ariz., Middle School officials, on a tip from another student, ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear looking for pills. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs.

Her lawyer argued to the Supreme Court that such an “intrusive and traumatic” search would be unconstitutional in every circumstance if school administrators were not directly told the contraband was in her underwear.

“A school needs to have location-specific information” to put a child through such an embarrassing search, lawyer Adam B. Wolf said.

Would it be constitutional if officials were looking for weapons, or drugs like crack, meth or heroin? “Does that make a difference?” Justice Anthony Kennedy asked. No, Wolf replied.

That leaves school administrators with the choice of embarrassing a child through a search or possibly having other children die while in their care, Justice David Souter said. “With those stakes in mind, why isn’t that reasonable?” Souter said.

Wolf said school officials violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches. School officials didn’t bother to search her desk or locker, or even question additional students to find out if anyone thought Redding could be hiding drugs in her underwear, he said.

“There needs to be suspicion that the object is under the clothes,” Wolf said.

A 1985 Supreme Court decision that dealt with searching a student’s purse said school officials need only reasonable suspicions, not probable cause. But the court also warned against a search that is “excessively intrusive.”

A schoolmate had accused Redding, then an eighth-grade student, of giving her pills.

Vice Principal Kerry Wilson took Redding to his office to search her backpack. When nothing was found, Redding was taken to a nurse’s office where she says she was ordered to take off her shirt and pants. Redding said they then told her to move her bra to the side and to stretch her underwear waistband, exposing her breasts and pelvic area. No pills were found.

A federal magistrate dismissed the lawsuit Redding and her mother, April, brought, and a federal appeals panel agreed that the search didn’t violate her rights. But in July, a full panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the search was “an invasion of constitutional rights.”

The court also said Wilson could be found personally liable.

The school’s lawyer argued that the courts should not limit school officials’ ability to search out what they think are dangerous items on school grounds. “We’ve got to be able to make decisions,” lawyer Matthew Wright said.

But justices worried that allowing a strip search of school age children might lead to more intrusive searches, such as body cavity searches. “There would be no legal basis in saying that was out of bounds,” Souter said.

Redding, now a 19-year-old college freshman living in her hometown of Safford in rural eastern Arizona, took her first airplane ride to watch the arguments. “It was pretty overwhelming,” she said, standing before a bank of cameras and a few dozen reporters outside the building.

She said she is considering becoming a counselor, which might mean she could end up working in a school.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Two FBI workers are accused of using surveillance equipment to spy on teenage girls as they undressed and tried on prom gowns at a charity event in a West Virginia mall.

Gary Sutton Jr. and Charles Hommema were charged with conspiracy and committing criminal invasion of privacy.

The men were working in an FBI satellite control room at the mall when they positioned a camera on clothes-changing rooms and zoomed in on girls for at least 90 minutes, Marion County prosecutor Pat Wilson said Monday.

DENVER – A Southwest Airlines flight from Phoenix to Detroit was diverted to Denver after a woman was involved in an altercation with another passenger.

Airline spokesman Chris Mainz says he doesn’t have details on what happened on Flight 1402 Saturday, but he says he does not know of any injuries.

He says the flight was on the ground in Denver about 30 minutes while the woman was removed from the flight and turned over to authorities. The flight then headed to Detroit.

There were 137 people on board.

Denver police could not immediately be reached late Sunday for comment on whether the woman faces charges. Her name wasn’t released.

Steven E. Erwin, 29, of Tucson was sentenced Friday to more than 12 years in prison in a multistate marijuana smuggling case.

Erwin, 29, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in East St. Louis, Ill., on Nov. 3 and admitted he helped to smuggle more than a ton of marijuana from Arizona to Atlanta; St. Louis; East St. Louis, Ill.; and cities in Ohio from 2001 to 2007, said Thomas E. Murphy, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

He and 13 others were charged in the case involving 2,200 pounds of the drug, authorities said.

The DEA investigated the case.

Wreckage litters the scene of a fatal single-vehicle crash involving an SUV on Highway 101 about one mile south of Los Alamos on Thursday night. Six people were killed and one, the driver, was hospitalized.

LOS ALAMOS, Calif. – An SUV filled with foreign students swerved off a highway, slammed into a tree and burst into flames, killing six of the seven people aboard, California Highway Patrol officials said Friday.

All but one of those in the vehicle that crashed Thursday evening near Los Alamos, about 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles, were foreign students studying in San Francisco: four from France and one each from Russia and Turkey. The remaining passenger, a 30-year-old San Francisco man and U.S. citizen, was among the dead.

The group was headed to the Los Angeles area when the Toyota Land Cruiser drifted into the dirt median on Highway 101, the driver, Jeanne Ostrowski, 19, swerved to the right, CHP Sgt. Ben Ruth said. The SUV then veered off the road and slammed into a cottonwood tree. No other vehicles were involved.

A witness helped the driver out of the burning vehicle. Ostrowski, who is French, suffered major injuries and is in serious condition at a hospital, Ruth said.

Two of the passengers were ejected from the vehicle and landed about 10 feet away. The other four victims were likely killed on impact before the SUV caught on fire, Ruth said.

Ruth said alcohol was not a factor in the crash but the SUV was going about five miles over the speed limit.

“Some people, when something unexpected happens on the road, instead of just taking their foot off accelerator, they overcorrect. That causes them to lose control, and it appears that’s what happened here,” Ruth said.

All six of the students were in their 20s. Five attended the Embassy Center for English Studies and one attended LINES Ballet School, both in San Francisco.

Embassy spokesman John LoGrasso declined to comment on the accident. A message left with the ballet school was not immediately returned Friday.

TIJUANA, Mexico – The Mexican army says soldiers rescued eight kidnapping victims who were being held at a ranch near the northern border city of Tijuana.

An army statement says the eight were freed after a shootout that left one kidnapper dead.

It says the raid on the ranch between Tijuana and the border city of Tecate came after an escaped captive told authorities that more people were being held on the property.

The statement didn’t say if anyone was arrested in Wednesday’s raid, which involved at least seven armed cars.

The region near the California border has been plagued by drug-related violence and kidnappings. Officials say drug cartels have been locked in increasingly bloody battles for control of trafficking routes.

LAS VEGAS – The charter bus company that owned the tour bus involved in an Arizona crash last week that killed seven Chinese tourists had its charter certificate suspended on Monday by the California Public Utilities Commission.

The commission’s Web site listed the carrier status of D.W. Tour & Charter of San Gabriel, Calif., as suspended, but did not say why. Details about the suspension were not immediately available; a request seeking comment from the commission was not immediately returned.

The lead federal investigator for the crash said Monday that the company, which owns two buses and employs four drivers, passed its last federal review in August 2007, six months after a prior review showed the company had insufficient drug and alcohol testing and policies for vetting drivers.

Pete Kotowski, lead investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said D.W. Tour & Charter was considered a “satisfactory” carrier by federal standards at the time of the accident.

He said the 30-seat bus was smaller than a typical tour bus — similar in size to typical airport rental cart shuttles — and did not have seat belts. All the seats faced forward, and the bus was federally certified for travel on all U.S. highways, Kotowski said.

The company did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

Investigators have been unable to speak to the 48-year-old hospitalized driver of the bus because of his injuries, Kotowski said. Kotowski said it was not clear whether the driver worked directly for D.W. Tour & Charter or was hired to drive the bus just for the trip.

The Friday crash along a desert stretch of U.S. 93 south of Hoover Dam killed seven Chinese tourists and injured 10 on the bus, authorities said. Authorities say the bus was returning north to Las Vegas after a trip to the Grand Canyon.

The bus drifted into the right shoulder lane before the driver overcorrected, sending the bus across two traffic lanes and into a gravel median separating the northbound and southbound lanes, Kotowski said. It rolled over at least once — ejecting most of its passengers out of the windows — before coming to rest on its side.

Kotowski did not say how fast the bus was traveling. The speed limit on the straight stretch of road is 65 mph.

A motorcyclist traveling south on the highway was injured during a crash trying to avoid the bus, Kotowski said. Kotowski said the rider didn’t hit the bus.

The bus driver remains in fair condition at University Medical Center in Las Vegas, about 70 miles northwest of the crash, hospital spokesman Rick Plummer said Monday. Two women, ages 35 and 40, remained in critical condition, and a 61-year-old man was in fair condition.

An 8-year-old boy was released Sunday to his parents, who were earlier released after treatment at Kingman Regional Medical Center in Arizona.

An 18-year-old woman and a 57-year-old man were in fair condition Monday at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in Las Vegas after their conditions were upgraded Sunday, hospital spokeswoman Ashlee Seymour said.

A 41-year-old woman was in good condition at the Kingman hospital on Monday, hospital spokesman Ryan Kennedy said.

“Still surrounded by loved ones, but there’s no imminent date for discharge,” Kennedy said.

The location and condition of the motorcyclist was not immediately available. The Arizona Department of Public Safety did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press on Monday.

Kotowski declined to identify the dead and injured, referring questions to the state agency.

Authorities say the group was returning to Las Vegas from the Grand Canyon when the bus crashed about 4 p.m. Friday near Dolan Springs, Ariz., 26 miles from the dam that straddles the Nevada-Arizona border.

Tourists on the bus were Chinese nationals who had flown from Shanghai to San Francisco and had most recently been in Las Vegas, the Arizona Department of Public Safety has said.

MEXICO CITY – Mexican federal police have found three suspected drug tunnels under construction in the city of Nogales near the Arizona border.

Mexico’s Public Security Department says two of the tunnels ran beneath the U.S.-Mexico border. One of those still had wood boards and the other was lined with cement.

Officials say the third was about 7 meters long and appeared to have no exit.

The department on Tuesday did not say when the tunnels were found.

Dozens of tunnels believed built by Mexican drug cartels have been found along the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years, many of them incomplete.

OAKLAND, Calif. – A heavy police presence greeted Bay Area Rapid Transit commuters Thursday after more than 100 people were arrested in violent protests over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a transit police officer.

Three cars were set on fire, store windows were smashed and a police cruiser was vandalized in what started as a peaceful demonstration Wednesday over the Jan. 1 shooting of Oscar Grant, 22. Police used tear gas on demonstrators.

MEXICO CITY – The country that gave the world chewing gum is getting gummed up: The average square yard of Mexico City sidewalk has 70 blobs of discarded chew.

Now Mexico is responding with innovations ranging from expensive sidewalk steam-cleaners to natural chewing gum that breaks down quickly. It’s even telling its citizens (gulp!) to swallow their gum.

The general in the war on discarded chewing gum is Ricardo Jaral, Mexico City’s director for conservation of public spaces. He bemoans the blackened gobs that mar the newly restored 700-year-old downtown area, whose rough, porous paving stones serve as stubborn gum traps.

Jaral has purchased 10 German-designed machines that treat sidewalks with steam and chemicals, and plans a large-scale cleanup starting Feb. 1. He is also looking to launch a public-awareness campaign.

“When you finish chewing a piece of gum, you either have to put in a piece of paper and deposit it in a trash receptacle, or swallow it,” Jaral said.

Not so fast, says Dr. Nick Desai, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee. He said swallowing gum isn’t a good idea. It usually passes through the digestive system, but can ball up with other objects and cause an intestinal blockage.

“It’s nothing to get too upset about if it happens,” Desai said. “But we shouldn’t make a habit of it.”

Jaral shrugged off such concerns Wednesday: “I’ve always swallowed my gum, and it’s never done me any harm.”

The sticky problem involves the long-lasting, synthetic chewing gum base used since the 1940s to replace the latex-like chicle resin that ancient Mayans had long collected from the Sapodilla tree. The Mayans chewed unflavored chicle to clean their teeth.

Modern chewing gum was born in the 1860s when Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna brought some Mexican chicle to U.S. inventor Thomas Adams, who first experimented with it as a possible rubber substitute but later added flavorings and sold it as a treat.

Mexico largely forgot its natural, biodegradable gum base and wholeheartedly adopted U.S. synthetic gum. Mexicans now chew an average of 2.6 pounds (1.2 kilograms) of gum each year, half what the average American chews but still among the highest rates in Latin America.

Of course, gobs of discarded gum are a problem around the world. Singapore once famously banned chewing gum outright to save its sidewalks, and still requires chewers to register at the pharmacy. The Rid-a-Gum company of Staten Island, New York, sells about 200 of its $3,500 cleaning machines a year.

“It’s a major, major problem for malls, schools, any kind of public facility,” said Rid-a-Gum owner Jack Hurley.

Mexico says the solution may lie in the past, with its natural chicle producers.

In the jungles of southern Mexico, Manuel Aldrete’s cooperative of chicle harvesters is about to launch a line of organic chewing gums. He says his product breaks down far more quickly on park benches, streets and sidewalks.

“It dries up, breaks down and turns to dust,” Aldrete said. “When it’s hot it is sticky, but when it cools it dries up and peels off almost automatically.”

But Jaral notes that marketing campaigns by top brands will make it hard for chicle to compete. And in any case, only about 300 tons of chicle are produced annually, a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of tons that would be needed to supply even Mexico’s domestic market.

Plus, Aldrete notes, the “environmentally conscious consumers” who buy organic gum probably aren’t the same people spitting their chews onto the sidewalk.

“They’re the kind who are probably going to find a garbage can and deposit it in the one labeled ‘organic waste,”‘ he said.

MADRAS, Ore. – A couple who hadn’t been seen since New Year’s Eve have been found dead inside their locked bedroom with their crying 9-month-old daughter in an apparent murder-suicide. Three older children had been left out on their own.

The bodies of Hannah Crowe and Julian Wallulatum were discovered Saturday after the older children asked a neighbor to help.

Crowe, 26, and Wallulatum, 21, had both been shot, said police Sgt. Dennis Schneider.

A preliminary investigation showed it “appears to be a murder-suicide resulting from a domestic dispute,” Detective Tanner Stanfill said in a statement.

The statement listed Crowe as the victim.

The three older children had been playing outside Thursday and Friday so nothing seemed wrong, said neighbor Andrew Smith.

But on Saturday, the kids knocked on his door, led by the oldest, an 8-year-old girl, Smith said.

“The oldest one said ‘I can’t wake my mom up. I can’t wake my mom and dad up, ’cause I think they’re still passed out, but I can see blood on my mom’s leg, under the door,”‘ Smith told KTVZ-TV of Bend.

Smith said he went to the couple’s apartment, smelled a foul odor and heard the couple’s baby crying. He kicked down the locked bedroom door and found them dead in the same clothes they were wearing New Year’s Eve.

The baby was beside them; her shirt stained with their blood.

“My knees, they wobbled,” Smith said. “It just took it out of me. I almost fainted.”

“How could they leave the babies?” asked neighbor Ashley Barker. “If something was going on, an argument, why didn’t they send them to the neighbors?”

Smith said the state Department of Human Services took the baby into protective custody, and the other children were with relatives.

Madras is a town of just over 6,000 people, about 100 miles southeast of Portland.

Aspen police officer Bill Linn looks from behind a wall at a sled holding wrapped packages left in an alley in downtown Aspen, Colo., on Wednesday.

ASPEN, Colo. – A former resident, bitter over this city’s transformation into a playground for the rich, left four gift-wrapped bombs downtown in a bank robbery attempt, turning New Year’s Eve celebrations into a mass evacuation, police said Thursday.

The bombs were made of gasoline and cell phone parts. The 72-year-old man suspected of placing them in two banks and in an alleyway Wednesday shot and killed himself later, police said.

The body of James Chester Blanning, who grew up in Aspen and lived in Denver since 2003, was found Thursday in his vehicle after an apparent suicide, police said.

Blanning walked into two Aspen banks about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday and left packages wrapped in holiday paper along with notes saying the boxes contained bombs, police said. The notes threatened “mass death,” demanded $60,000 in cash and included criticisms of President Bush, said Assistant Police Chief Bill Linn.

Blanning’s notes said he was targeting four banks, police said, but only a Wells Fargo Bank and a nearby Vectra Bank received the packages. Later, police found two similar packages atop a black sled in a downtown alley.

“We believe the suspect abandoned his plan halfway through,” said Linn.

The threats prompted police to clear nearly all of downtown Aspen, 16 blocks that otherwise would have been filled with tens of thousands of New Year’s Eve revelers.