HUNTINGTON, Utah — As frustration mounts over the slow pace of the digging to free six trapped miners, more questions arose Tuesday about whether risky mining methods may have left parts of the coal mine dangerously unstable.

Some mining companies consider the "retreat mining" methods used at Utah's Crandall Canyon so dangerous, they will leave behind coal rather than risk the safety of their workers.

Video images taken early Tuesday showed miners working to clear a heavily damaged mine shaft. They were only a third of the way to the presumed location of the trapped miners — eight days after a thunderous collapse blew out the walls of mine shafts.

A top mining executive estimated the digging would take up to another week.

"It's not fast enough for me," said Bob Murray, chief of Murray Energy Corp., co-owner and operator of the Crandall Canyon mine. "It's very painful."

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GIULIANI VOWS TO CRACK DOWN ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

AIKEN, S.C. — Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani vowed Tuesday to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States by closely tracking visitors to the country and beefing up border security.

"We can end illegal immigration. I promise you, we can end illegal immigration," the former New York mayor said at a community center — the first of the day's two stops in this early voting state.

Giuliani said he would require a uniform identification card for foreign workers and students and create a central database to track the legal status of visitors to the country. He told the crowd of more than 300 that 12 million immigrants have entered the country illegally.

"That's a lot of people to walk over your border without being identified," he said.

Giuliani wants a tamper-proof ID card that includes fingerprinting for everyone entering the country and a central database to track when they leave.

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BENJAMIN NETANYAHU SWEEPS RACE

JERUSALEM — Benjamin Netanyahu swept the race to lead Israel's hardline Likud Party, a party official said, boosting his ambitions to reclaim the country's premiership.

Netanyahu, crowned in recent polls as the front-runner for Israel's top job, faced off against far-right West Bank settler Moshe Feiglin, who would bar Arabs from Israel's parliament and favors their emigration.

A partial tally gave Netanyahu 73 percent of the vote to Feiglin's 22 percent, party executive director Gad Arieli said. World Likud Party Chairman Danny Danon trailed with 4 percent.

While a Netanyahu victory had been all but assured, a strong Feiglin showing could have shored up Israel's extreme right and hurt Netanyahu's efforts to rehabilitate Likud after it was trounced in elections last year.

A telegenic politician and avowed hawk, the M.I.T.-educated Netanyahu speaks flawless, American-accented English. He's tough on defense issues and hands-off on the economy, and in recent months has been trying to position himself somewhere in the political center.

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PANEL MULLS CHANGES TO PREGNANCY WEIGHT GUIDELINES

ATLANTA — Before Jennifer Lepine became pregnant, she heard other soon-to-be moms say she should "eat for two." But that conflicted with what her doctor told her: Consume only 300 extra calories a day and gain no more than 35 pounds.

The slightly overweight suburban Atlanta woman decided to ignore her friends and watched what she ate after she became pregnant with her first child. The 5-foot-2, 145-pound Lepine gained 35 pounds before her son Bryson was born last year. It took her four months to drop the extra weight through healthy eating and exercise.

An influential U.S. medical panel is considering changes to the medical guidelines for how much weight a woman should gain during pregnancy. It's acting on the insistence of doctors who say heavy moms are gaining too much weight and the current recommendations do not factor in the country's obesity epidemic.

Carrying too much weight while pregnant increases the risk of complications for mother and baby, including birth defects, labor and delivery problems, fetal death and delivery of large babies, according to the March of Dimes.