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STANDISH, Mich. – Federal and state officials visited a maximum-security prison in rural Michigan on Thursday to begin assessing its suitability to house Guantanamo Bay detainees.

About a dozen state officials were joined by 18 representatives from the Defense, Justice and Homeland Security departments and the Bureau of Prisons on the tour of the lockup in Standish, said Russ Marlan, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections.

The prison in Standish, 145 miles north of Detroit, and a military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., are being considered to house the 229 suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters currently at the Guantanamo Bay prison, if it is closed by 2010 as President Barack Obama has ordered.

Wednesday’s was a fact-finding inspection, and federal officials had not proposed transferring detainees to Standish, Marlan said.

“The visit to Standish is to do a preliminary site survey. No final decisions have been made,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs in Washington said about the survey.

Marlan said the group looked at six housing units, the administration building, the health care wing and the cafeteria, where they lunched on the same meal the inmates were served: Salisbury steak, beans, spinach and carrot cake.

None of the federal officials commented to reporters as they left for private meetings with local officials.

The tour was similar to one given recently to a corrections team from California, which has shown interest in sending inmates from its overcrowded prisons to Michigan and is expected to make a decision within a couple of weeks, Marlan said. Michigan also has received inquiries about housing inmates from Pennsylvania.

The region around Standish is hurting economically, with an unemployment rate of more than 17 percent, and some residents welcome bringing in the Guantanamo detainees if it will prevent closing down the prison, which with about 340 workers is the area’s largest employer.

“Let ‘em come. This community is hurting enough,” Gloria Watson, 71, said while lunching in a downtown restaurant.

The terrorism suspects would be no more dangerous than other criminals who have been held in the prison throughout its 20-year history, said Watson, the pastor of a Presbyterian church in nearby Twining. “I just wish people would stop running scared.”

Others fear bringing the Guantanamo detainees to Standish would make the town a target.

“The problem I have is, you almost are putting a bulls-eye on the whole entire area. There are just too many things that could go wrong,” said Tom Kerrins, the chief steward for the Michigan Corrections Organization, the union representing prison workers in Standish.

Kerrins, 49, said the union opposes sending the Gitmo prisoners to Standish in part because it doubts the jobs of watching over them would go to the state officers working there now and would instead go to federal officers.

“They’re still going to kick us down the road. They’re going to use their own people,” the Gladwin resident said Thursday outside the prison.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that he would ask the departments of Defense and Justice to lead a delegation to visit Guantanamo Bay “to better understand the special circumstances and the challenges that these detainees present by moving them to Michigan.”

Hoekstra, who is running for Michigan governor in 2010, is opposed to moving the prisoners to the state.

“Allowing state and local officials to see firsthand these detainees and Guantanamo Bay is necessary for them to understand the challenges and risks,” he said in a statement.

Kansas’ two Republican senators, Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, oppose proposals to move detainees to Fort Leavenworth, and have held up the nomination of New York Republican Rep. John McHugh for Army secretary until they receive more information from the Obama administration about the possible Leavenworth choice.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., called on her Kansas colleagues to relent on Thursday, saying it’s in the best interest of the Army and the nation to swiftly allow the nomination to move forward.

WASHINGTON – A bleak report on retail sales Thursday reinforced a nagging worry of economists: Shoppers won’t spend enough to help a recovery take hold.

The figures served as a reality check for an economy that lately has appeared poised to emerge from recession and grow again. Consumer spending powers about 70 percent of economic activity.

The Cash for Clunkers rebate program helped give auto sales to their biggest jump in six months in July, but sales sank elsewhere. Gas stations, department stores, electronics outlets and furniture stores all suffered.

Overall, sales fell 0.1 percent, the Commerce Department said, after two months of modest gains. Economists had expected a 0.7 percent increase. Excluding autos, sales fell 0.6 percent, also much worse than predicted.

Unemployment, flat wages, tighter credit, fear of layoffs and to urge to save more have caused many consumers to spend less. Shrinking home equity and stock portfolios have compounded the problem.

As a result, “Households are in no position to drive a decent economic recovery,” Paul Dales, U.S. economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note to clients.

Even Wal-Mart, which had managed to post robust sales during the recession, reported an unexpected drop in quarterly earnings. The company faulted lower prices for groceries and other products. But it warned that the economy is also still forcing customers to scale back their purchases.

The latest figures came just a day after the Federal Reserve said the economy appeared to be “leveling out.” The Fed, signaling the recession appears to be ending, said it would hold interest rates at their current record lows.

Meanwhile, the number of newly laid-off workers seeking jobless benefits rose last week, the government said, in another sign of a weak job market. And for those who still have jobs, fear of losing them can cause them to spend less.

“The dismal job situation is the dark storm cloud hanging over consumers,” said Jennifer Lee, an economist at BMO Capital Markets.

In the one bright spot in the retail sales report, Cash for Clunkers pushed auto sales up 2.4 percent in July. The popular program offers drivers up to $4,500 to trade in older vehicles and buy new, more fuel-efficient models.

But some analysts people buying cars under Cash for Clunkers might be holding that money back from other sectors of the economy where they might otherwise spend it.

Some of Europe’s largest economies also benefited from government programs to support the auto industry. Germany and France returned to economic growth in the second quarter, raising hopes the recession will end throughout Europe sooner than thought.

In the United States, weak retail sales were widespread in July. One gauge that excludes autos, gas and building materials fell slightly, the fifth straight month of declines.

Department store sales fell 1.6 percent last month. And the broader category of general merchandise stores, which includes big chains such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp., dropped 0.8 percent.

Gas station sales plunged 2.1 percent in July — more because of falling prices at the pump than shrinking demand.

A separate report Thursday showed that even as home prices and sales are stabilizing, record foreclosures are persisting. The number of U.S. households on the verge of losing their homes rose 7 percent in July.

Foreclosure filings were up by nearly one-third from the year before, according to RealtyTrac Inc. More than 360,000 households — one in every 355 homes — received some type of foreclosure notice.

On Wall Street, stocks rose modestly. The Dow Jones industrials finished up about 37 points at just above 9,398 — their highest close since the market lows of early March.

Employers cut the fewest number of jobs in July in nearly a year, and the unemployment rate fell for the first time in 15 months. But jobs remain scarce.

More than 6.2 million Americans are receiving jobless benefits, the government said Thursday. That’s 140,000 fewer than the previous week, but much of the drop probably came because recipients ran out of benefits and fell off the rolls, economists said.

Counting people taking advantage of an unemployment benefits program enacted by Congress, 9.25 million people received unemployment compensation in the week that ended July 25, down about 100,000 from the week before.

But the nonprofit National Employment Law Project has calculated that 540,000 people will exhaust their emergency benefits without finding work by the end of September. And by the end of the year, it predicts 1.5 million will run out.

That prospect has some in Congress calling for a further extension of benefits. Obama administration officials have said they would support an extension.

CHASKA, Minn. – Missing the cut shouldn’t be a problem for Tiger Woods at this major.

He was better than anyone else at the PGA Championship on Thursday morning, shooting a bogey-free, 5-under 67. He’s one stroke ahead of playing partner and defending champ Padraig Harrington.

“I feel pretty comfortable if I’m playing well,” Woods said. “There are times I’ve put it together and had some pretty good margins of victory. I just feel that, overall, my game over the years has gotten better. It’s become more consistent. When I’m playing well, I usually don’t make too many mistakes.”

He didn’t on this day, breaking 70 in the opening round of a major for the first time since the 2007 British Open. He made birdies on all but one of Hazeltine National’s long par 5s and hitting 12 of 14 fairways. His only “flaw” was a few missed putts, including ones for birdie on each of his last two holes.

“It’s always nice to get off quick, but the first round — you can play yourself out of a tournament but you certainly cannot win it on the first day,” said Woods, who has four Wanamaker Trophys among his 14 major titles.

“You don’t have to be eight ahead after the first round. That’s not it. You’ve just got to keep plodding along. … The whole idea is not to make that many mistakes.”

Harrington, who also won the 2007 and ‘08 British Opens, actually shared the lead with Woods after three birdies in a five-hole span on their back nine. But he settled for par on long No. 7 after his putt from the fringe rolled about two inches past while Woods two-putted from 30 feet for a birdie.

Robert Allenby, whose second-place finish at Bridgestone last weekend was overshadowed by the duel between Woods and Harrington, was at 3 under with Hunter Mahan, Mathew Goggin, Alvaro Quiros and David Toms. Vijay Singh joined them after nearly holing his second shot on the 16th. The ball landed above the hole and spun back toward the cup, stopping at the rim and leaving him an easy tap-in for birdie.

Singh, a two-time winner at the PGA, hasn’t made the cut at the year’s final major since 2005, when he tied for 10th.

Phil Mickelson, who missed the British Open to tend to wife Amy, who has breast cancer, was having an up-and-down afternoon. He was at 3 over after going bogey-double bogey on Nos. 9 and 10, but got one of the strokes back with a birdie on 11.

“The first day of a major, it’s always good to keep yourself in there. I think I probably did a little bit more than that,” Harrington said.

Having an early lead could be key if the weather turns foul. It was hot, humid and breezy Thursday, but strong winds are expected Friday. There’s a possibility of rain during the weekend.

“Obviously, he’s the best in the world so we expect him to win,” Allenby said, referring to Woods. “But you know what? It’s three more days to go. And a lot can happen.”

Especially in this, one of the wackier years for golf. Kenny Perry had the Masters won, then lost it. Bethpage Black did its best imitation of a water park the first two days. Ol’ Tom Watson nearly turned back the clock at Turnberry.

Not even Woods has been immune.

The world’s No. 1 player has won at least one major in each of the last four years, but he’s running out of time this year to keep that streak going. He made a charge Sunday at the Masters, but couldn’t hang on. He wasn’t much of a factor at the U.S. Open, catching a bad break when his side of the draw was deluged.

Then there was the British.

He was the heavy favorite at Turnberry, arriving fresh off a win at his AT&T National tournament. But he was mediocre on Thursday, shooting 71, and then a 74 to miss the cut on the line. It was only the second time in his professional career that he’d missed the cut at a major, and the first time at any tournament in more than three years.

Woods, however, won the last two weekends at the Buick Open and Bridgestone and now clearly looks to be back on his game.

“I had that nice rest there after the British Open, those two days,” he said, drawing laughter.

Much has been made of the supersized Hazeltine, at 7,674 yards the longest course in major championship history. That’s 300 yards longer than it was the last time the PGA was here, just seven years ago. Most of the new length comes on the par 5s — three are 600 yards or longer. The thinking is that No. 7, at “only” 572 yards, will be the lone par 5 that players can still reach in two.

For Woods, though, the holes may as well have bull’s-eyes on them. On 15 — at 642 yards, the longest hole on the course — he actually knocked his second shot over the green and into a bunker.

He also had a birdie on 12, a 518-yard par 4.

“It’s long on the scorecard, but we didn’t play it that long,” Woods said.

WASHINGTON – Scientists have discovered a gene that helps a mother and daughter stay alert on about six hours sleep a night, two hours less than the rest of their family needs.

It’s believed to be a very rare mutation, not an excuse for the rest of us who stay up too late. But the finding, published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, offers a new lead to study how sleep affects health.

The National Institutes of Health says adults need seven hours to nine hours of sleep for good health. Regularly getting too little increases the risk of health problems, including memory impairment and a weakened immune system. A major 2006 study estimated that as many as 30 million Americans suffer chronic insomnia, and millions more have other sleep disorders, including sleep apnea.

University of California, San Francisco, researchers have long hunted genes related to how and when people sleep. In 2001, they discovered a mutation that puts its carriers’ sleep patterns out of whack: These people regularly go to bed around 7:30 p.m. and wake around 3:30 a.m.

Now the same team has found a gene involved in regulating length of sleep. In one family, the 69-year-old mother and her 44-year-old daughter typically go to bed around 10 p.m., and Mom rises around 4 and her daughter around 4:30, with no apparent ill effects. The rest of the family has typical sleep patterns.

Blood tests showed the women harbored a mutation in a gene named DEC2 that’s involved in regulation of circadian rhythms, the body’s clock. A check of more than 250 stored DNA samples didn’t find another carrier.

Then lead researcher Ying-Hui Fu, a neurology professor, and colleagues bred mice and fruit flies that carried the mutation. Sure enough, the flies’ activity and brain-wave measurements on the mice showed those with8.  the mutation slept less — and the mice needed less time to recover from sleep deprivation.

The result: A model that “provides a unique opportunity” to study the effects of different amounts of sleep, Fu concluded.

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Two suicide bombers detonated vests packed with explosives in a cafe in a town near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday, killing 21 people, a health official said, the latest attack in a restive region.

There has been a series of high-profile bombings in and around Mosul in the past fortnight and the U.S. military said on Tuesday that a resilient al Qaeda had set off a string of deadly blasts.

Thursday’s attack took place in Sinjar, 390 km (240 miles) northwest of Baghdad, a town whose inhabitants are members of a pre-Islamic Kurdish sect called Yazidis who live in northern Iraq and Syria.

An attack on the Yazidi community two years ago was one of the deadliest bomb attacks in Iraq since the start of 2007, killing and wounding nearly 800 people.

Bombings and shootings are reported almost daily in and around Mosul, the capital of the northern province of Nineveh, where insurgents have exploited disputes between Arabs and Kurds over territory and oil to remain effective.

A lack of coordination between Kurdish and Arab officials has made it easier for them to operate. Insurgents have also sought refuge in remote mountainous areas around Mosul, eluding capture by security forces.

The blasts were the latest in a series of attacks that cast doubt on Iraq’s ability to defend itself against insurgents before a U.S. withdrawal from the country by the end of 2011.

This week two truck bombs flattened some 40 homes in the mostly Shi’ite village of Khazna near Mosul, killing 30 people.

No group has taken responsibility for recent attacks, but they are probably aimed at inflaming tension between Iraq’s Arab majority and ethnic Kurd minority. They could also be aimed at undermining the credibility of the Shi’ite Arab-led government.

A feud between the Arab-led government in Baghdad and the largely autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in north Iraq has come dangerously close to all-out war.

The Pentagon said on Tuesday it was “very nervous” about Kurd-Arab tensions, which U.S. officials describe as the greatest threat to Iraqi stability.

“These terrorist operations are carried out by al Qaeda and other groups who do not want to see stability in this area,” said Sinjar mayor Dakhil Hassoun.

Kurds see parts of majority Arab Nineveh and other areas in northern Iraq as belonging to an ancient homeland and want them included in Kurdistan, their semi-autonomous northern enclave.

DAVENPORT, Calif. – Thousands of firefighters battled wildfires across California on Thursday, including a growing blaze that forced about 2,400 people to evacuate their homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The Lockheed Fire, which started around 7 p.m. Wednesday, had scorched about 2,800 acres, or 4.4 square miles, in Santa Cruz County, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The blaze, about 10 miles north of the city of Santa Cruz, threatened more than 1,000 homes and other buildings and has not been contained at all.

Authorities issued a mandatory evacuation order Thursday morning for the entire community of Bonny Doon, which has about 2,000 residents and several wineries, said CalFire spokeswoman Julie Hutchinson.

Everyone also has been ordered to leave the nearby community of Swanton, where about 400 people live.

“It’s a significant fire that is burning in a rural, inaccessible, steep terrain with vegetation that has been stressed by the drought,” Hutchinson said. “It’s like having firewood in your fireplace that’s dry and ready to burn.”

The blaze is about three miles from the site of last year’s Martin Fire, which burned 520 acres and destroyed 11 buildings in the Bonny Doon area in June 2008.

Law enforcement officers went door to door Thursday as residents watered down their homes, aiming sprinklers and hoses at the rooftops. They loaded bicycles, pets, computers and other valuables into their cars and trucks.

Many had to evacuate last year when flames threatened the area.

Nancy Macallister said she was disappointed about the mandatory evacuation but said it’s reasonable.

“The fire’s big, the fire’s hot, there’s some rough terrain and the afternoon winds should be coming this direction, so it makes sense. They’re trying to keep people safe,” she said.

A shelter for evacuees was set up in Santa Cruz, where Linda Lemaster arrived early Thursday after leaving her house on Last Chance Road near Swanton.

When she got a recorded call to evacuate, she grabbed some of her son’s paintings, photos, bedding and some food, she said. Her boyfriend stayed behind to take care of the cats and property.

As she drove away, she saw thick smoke and flames.

“I thought of volcano lava the way it was moving in through the trees,” said Lemaster, 60. “If it had kept going like that, it would have headed right to my house.”

Further down the coast, more than 1,600 firefighters were trying to control a wildfire in northern Santa Barbara County that has grown to 56 square miles. More than 170 homes and ranches have been evacuated since the La Brea Fire started Saturday. It was about 10 percent contained Thursday morning.

A temporary emergency shelter was set up at a high school in New Cuyama, and there was a shelter for larger animals like horses and cattle in Santa Maria.

In far northern California, two separate wildfires forced the evacuation of more than 30 homes.

In Trinity County, about 25 homes were evacuated as gusty winds fed the Coffin Fire, which has burned about 1.9 square miles near Lewiston, CalFire spokeswoman Mickie Jakez said. The mountain community 30 miles west of Redding is home to 1,300 people.

Authorities arrested a person suspected of sparking the fire by throwing out a lit cigarette, officials said. The blaze was 40 percent contained Thursday, and firefighters hoped for complete containment Friday if winds cooperate.

Farther east, a fire covering 26 square miles forced the evacuation of 10 homes about 10 miles northwest of Burney. The Shu Fire was 70 percent contained Thursday morning.

Firefighters have nearly contained three other lightning-caused fires in Shasta and Lassen counties.

NEW YORK – Les Paul, the guitar virtuoso and inventor who revolutionized music and created rock ‘n’ roll as surely as Elvis Presley and the Beatles by developing the solid-body electric guitar and multitrack recording, died Thursday at age 94.

Known for his lightning-fast leads, Paul performed with some of early pop’s biggest names and produced a slew of hits, many with wife Mary Ford. But it was his inventive streak that made him universally revered by guitar gods as their original ancestor and earned his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of the most important forces in popular music.

Paul, who died in White Plains, N.Y., of complications from pneumonia, was a tireless tinkerer, whose quest for a particular sound led him to create the first solid-body electric guitar, a departure from the hollow-body guitars of the time. His invention paved the way for modern rock ‘n’ roll and became the standard instrument for legends like Pete Townshend and Jimmy Page.

He also developed technology that would become hallmarks of rock and pop recordings, from multitrack recording that allowed for layers and layers of “overdubs” to guitar reverb and other sound effects.

“He was truly the cornerstone of popular music,” said Henry Juskiewicz, chairman and CEO of Gibson Guitar, which mass produced Paul’s original invention. “He was futurist, and unlike some futurists who write about it and predict things, he was guy who actually did things.”

Paul remained an active performer until his last months: He put out his very first rock album just four years ago, and up until recently played every week at a New York jazz club.

The news of his death prompted an outpouring of tributes from the music world.

“Les lived a very long life and he got to a lot of his goals, so I’m happy for him in that respect. … At least he realized that he was legend in his own time while he was alive” said Richie Sambora, Bon Jovi’s guitarist and a friend of Paul’s, on Thursday. “He was revolutionary in the music business.”

Said Kiss’ Paul Stanley: “The name Les Paul is iconic and is known by aspiring and virtuoso guitar players worldwide. That guitar is the cornerstone of a lot of great music that has been made in the last 50 years.”

A tinkerer and musician since childhood, he experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called “The Log,” a 4-by-4 piece of wood strung with steel strings.

“I went into a nightclub and played it. Of course, everybody had me labeled as a nut.” He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a traditional guitar shape.

The use of electric guitar gained popularity in the mid-to-late 1940s.

Leo Fender’s Broadcaster was the first mass-produced solid body electric on the market in the late 1940s.

Gibson solicited Paul to create a prototype for a guitar, and began production on the Les Paul guitar in 1952. Townshend of the Who, Steve Howe of Yes, jazz great Al DiMeola and Led Zeppelin’s Page all made the Gibson Les Paul their trademark six-string.

The Les Paul series has become one of the most widely used guitars in the music industry. In 2005, Christie’s auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for $45,600.

Paul was born Lester William Polfuss, in Waukesha, Wis., on June 9, 1915. He began his career as a musician, billing himself as Red Hot Red or Rhubarb Red. He toured with the popular Chicago band Rube Tronson and His Texas Cowboys and led the house band on WJJD radio in Chicago.

In the mid-1930s he joined Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians and soon moved to New York to form the Les Paul Trio, with Jim Atkins and bassist Ernie Newton.

Paul started out as an accompanist, working with key artists until he struck out on his own. His first records were released in 1944 on Decca Records. Later, with Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records for hits including “Vaya Con Dios” and “How High the Moon,” which both hit No. 1.

He had met Ford, then known as Colleen Summers, in the 1940s while working as a studio musician in Los Angeles. For seven years in the 1950s, Paul and Ford broadcast a TV show from their home in Mahwah, N.J. (Ford died in 1977, 15 years after they divorced).

Paul had made his first attempt at audio amplification at age 13. Unhappy with the amount of volume produced by his acoustic guitar, he tried placing a telephone receiver under the strings. Although this worked to some extent, only two strings were amplified and the volume level was still too low.

By placing a phonograph needle in the guitar, all six strings were amplified, which proved to be much louder. Paul was playing a working prototype of the electric guitar in 1929.

His work on recording techniques began in the years after World War II, when Bing Crosby gave him a tape recorder. Drawing on his earlier experimentation with his homemade recording machine, Paul added an additional playback head to the recorder. The result was a delayed effect that became known as tape echo.

Tape echo gave the recording a more “live” feel and enabled the user to simulate different playing environments.

Paul’s next “crazy idea” was to stack together eight mono tape machines and send their outputs to one piece of tape, stacking the recording heads on top of each other. The resulting machine served as the forerunner to today’s multitrack recorders. Many of their songs used overdubbing techniques that Paul had helped develop.

“I could take my Mary and make her three, six, nine, 12, as many voices as I wished,” he recalled. “This is quite an asset.” The overdubbing technique was highly influential on later recording artists such as the Carpenters.

Paul’s use of multitrack recording was unique: Before he did it, most recordings were made on a single tape. By recording each element separately, from the vocals to instrumentation on different tracks, they could be mixed and layered, adding to the richness in sound.

“In the old days, if you only had one track, you put a microphone in the middle of the music and hope for the best,” Juskiewicz said.

In 1954, Paul commissioned the first eight-track tape recorder, later known as “Sel-Sync,” in which a recording head could simultaneously record a new track and play back previous ones.

In the late 1960s, Paul retired from music to concentrate on his inventions. His interest in country music was rekindled in the mid-’70s and he teamed up with Chet Atkins for two albums. The duo were awarded a Grammy for best country instrumental performance of 1976 for their “Chester and Lester” album.

In 2005, he released the Grammy-winning “Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played,” his first album of new material since those 1970s recordings and his first official rock CD. Among those playing with him: Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Richie Sambora.

“They’re not only my friends, but they’re great players,” Paul told The Associated Press. “I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.”

Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.

SINFA, Taiwan – Barefoot and helmeted, the frightened survivors of deadly Typhoon Morakot dangled high over jagged rocks and a raging river Thursday as soldiers hauled them to safety one by one along a 100-foot-long cable.

On the far side, a few dozen waited near a hand-painted sign on the craggy foundation of a destroyed bridge: “32 people died here SOS.”

The perilous rescue was part of a massive military effort to save hundreds of stranded villagers after the worst flooding to hit Taiwan in 50 years. Some 14,000 villager have been rescued since the typhoon struck five days ago; hundreds more are feared missing or dead.

As criticism mounted Thursday over Taiwan’s response to the disaster, the government dispatched another 4,000 troops to work with the 14,000 already deployed. Many of them are working in Kaohsiung County, a mountainous farming region in southern Taiwan.

The rugged terrain and widespread devastation played havoc with rescue efforts following the storm, which dumped 80 inches (2 meters) of rain on the island over the weekend.

Soldiers in fatigues and heavy gloves resorted to using a makeshift zipline to haul survivors from the village of Sinkai over the Ba Si Lan River where the bridge was wiped out. For hours they labored, rescuing everyone from a young boy in shorts to an elderly woman who brought along a couple of shopping bags worth of belongings.

Unbuckled from their harnesses, villagers looked dazed and frightened as they recalled the harrowing night of Aug. 8.

“It rained for days,” said Li Wen-chuan, a grizzled-looking man of 68 with sparse salt-and-pepper hair, teeth stained red by years of betel nut chewing. “But the flood came so suddenly and with a tremendous roar. It destroyed everything in the village.”

“This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” he said, adding that many of the 32 who died in village were friends and family. “My life will never be the same.”

Pan Yi-chang, a 32-year-old mother of two, said that when the rains spawned by Morakot began to fall, she had no inkling that this typhoon would be any different from others.

The ravaged villages — most of them scattered in neighboring townships in northern Kaohsiung County — are typically located next to mountains, and they usually have to brace for mudslides during Taiwan’s annual typhoon season during June to September.

But this time was different, residents said.

“Everything happened so fast. Flooding just destroyed everything,” said Pan, adding that she was lucky because all of her family survived — her husband, her two children and her mother and father.

As she spoke, Pan gazed longingly across the river toward the only home she has ever known, a close-knit community of 1,000 whose economy is based on growing mangos and guavas.

In the background, a heavy mist enveloped the summit of a nearby mountain and torrents of water cascaded down its dark green facades.

Scores of villages in the rural south of Taiwan were devastated by the typhoon. One of the worst affected is Shiao Lin, where hundreds remain missing after a catastrophic mudslide spawned by days of torrential rain.

Taiwan’s official death toll from the storm now stands at 108, with another 62 listed as missing. That does not include the toll in Shiao Lin and other remote communities.

Many of those rescued say they can never return to their villages because there is nothing left to return to.

Li, the grizzled veteran of Sinkai, is not one of them.

“I am going back,” he said. “Sinkai is where my roots are. I have no other place to go.”

Many complained that the government was too slow to mobilize the rescue and cleanup effort, saying more victims could have been saved if they had moved sooner and faster.

“Why does the government say only useless things?” a woman eager to learn the fate of relatives trapped in Kaochung village in the south asked. With tears filling her eyes, she told TV reporters: “I’ve been waiting for several days, yet there has not been anyone going to rescue my family.”

In a short interview with CNN, President Ma Ying-jeou blamed the severe damage brought by the flooding on villagers’ inability to get out of their communities before the storm.

Authorities in Kaohsiung County did ask inhabitants from the villages most severely battered by Morakot to leave before the storm, but they did not try to forcibly remove the residents, and some villagers decided against leaving.

“They were not fully prepared. If they were, they should have been evacuated much earlier,” Ma said. “They didn’t realize how serious the disaster was.”

Ma did not comment on whether the government was doing enough to help with the evacuation.

Troops were working Thursday to restore severed roads, rehabilitate ravaged neighborhood and ferry typhoon victims to safety in dozens of helicopter missions.

So far some 14,000 villagers have been rescued — including 600 on Thursday, the island’s disaster relief center said.

Another 2,000 villagers were staying either in open fields or on higher ground and waiting to be taken to shelters, it said. Several hundred more — no one is sure how many — remain unaccounted for and are feared lost in the mudslides.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s push to revamp health care got a boost Thursday as a new coalition of drug makers, unions, hospitals and others launched a $12 million pro-overhaul ad campaign. Meanwhile, the administration sought to regain control of the health care debate by asking supporters to forward a chain e-mail to counter criticism that’s circulating on the Internet.

The e-mail by White House senior adviser David Axelrod offers reasons to support Obama’s agenda — and myths to debunk.

Axelrod wrote that opponents are relying on tactics including “viral e-mails that fly unchecked and under the radar, spreading all sorts of lies.”

“So let’s start a chain e-mail of our own,” he said, inviting supporters to forward a message countering claims that Obama’s plans would lead to rationing, encourage euthanasia or deplete veterans’ health care.

The new ad airing in a dozen states is being paid for by a new coalition called Americans for Stable Quality Care. Members of the group are Families USA, the Service Employees International Union, the drug lobby Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the American Medical Association and the Federation of American Hospitals.

The ad shows a series of photos of doctors and nurses interacting with patients as the narrator asks: “What does health insurance reform mean for you? It means you can’t be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition, or dropped if you get sick.” The ad also cites lowered costs and a focus on prevention, among other things.

Even as public skepticism over Democrats’ health overhaul plans boils over at town hall meetings nationwide, the ad is the latest example of the odd-bedfellows help that Obama is getting in his plea to Congress to enact comprehensive legislation to lower costs and extend coverage to the nearly 50 million uninsured.

“This is really focused on what has been an increasing emphasis for almost all supporters of health care reform, namely trying to make sure families around the country understand the benefits of health reform for them — especially middle-class families that already do have health insurance,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal advocacy group

Pollack said that supporters who’ve been focused on the legislative process in Congress need to turn their attention to public opinion, which has been slipping as conservative activists fuel fears of rationing and government control.

“We have a job now to do to have facts catch up with the myths,” Pollack said.

Families USA, the drug makers, the 2-million-member union and the AMA also were involved in an earlier effort called Health Economy Now that ran ads supporting a health overhaul as a way to improve the economy.

For PhRMA, the ads are a piece of a larger effort that could reach $150 million or above through the fall. Drug makers and other groups stand to gain if millions more people gain access to insurance.

The new ads are running for two weeks in Arkansas, Alaska, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Montana, North Dakota, Maine and Virginia, home to moderate Democrats who would be crucial to passage of any health care legislation.

Separately, the pro-overhaul group Health Care for America Now announced a $200,000 expansion of an ad campaign targeting specific lawmakers and asking them to support health legislation.

Health Care for America Now is targeting several moderate Democratic House members who have voted against health legislation or expressed skepticism about it — Reps. Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota and Rick Boucher of Virginia. Also targeted by the ads are Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Thomas Carper, D-Del.

On the other side, the group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights announced it will run TV and print ads in Bozeman, Mont., and Grand Junction, Colo., to coincide with Obama town halls in those cities on Friday and Saturday. The ads urge opposition to a new public insurance plan supported by Obama that would compete with private insurers.

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon presented a grim portrait of the Afghanistan war Thursday, offering no assurances about how long Americans will be fighting there or how many U.S. combat troops it will take to win.

Defeating the Taliban and al-Qaida will take “a few years,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, with success on a larger scale in the desperately poor country a much longer proposition. He acknowledged that the Taliban has a firm hold on parts of the country President Barack Obama has called vital to U.S. security.

Congress wants answers to what lawmakers described as basic questions to soothe a war-weary American public.

“In the intelligence business, we always used to categorize information in two ways, secrets and mysteries,” Gates, a former CIA director, told a Pentagon news conference.

He added: “Mysteries were those where there were too many variables to predict. And I think that how long U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan is in that area.”

With 62,000 U.S. troops already in the country, and another 6,000 headed there by the end of the year, Gates suggested there is little appetite in Washington to add many more.

He said his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is free to ask for whatever he needs, but Gates said when the general submits a revised war plan in the coming weeks it will not contain a request to expand the U.S. fighting force.

McChrystal is expected to identify shortfalls that could be filled by U.S. forces, but a formal request would come only later. The White House has made no secret of its skepticism about further troop additions in Afghanistan, and Gates said Thursday he still was worried that too many American forces could turn Afghans against those trying to help them.

Obama has made Afghanistan one of his top foreign policy priorities. But his administration is grappling with refocusing on Afghanistan, which the U.S. invaded in October 2001 to hunt for Osama bin Laden, while disentangling 130,000 American troops from Iraq.

In a report released earlier this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned the Obama administration that unanswered questions about lingering U.S. involvement in Afghanistan could frustrate the public.

“The administration has raised the stakes by transforming the Afghan war from a limited intervention into a more ambitious and potentially risky counterinsurgency,” the Senate report concluded. “These core questions about commitment and sacrifice can be answered only through a rigorous and informed national debate.”

Committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., cited “risks and rewards associated with our increasing commitment to the war in Afghanistan.”

As the fight moves toward its ninth year this fall, Gates said allied forces must show this year that they are turning the tide.

“It’s just not possible to predict specific periods of time when you’re in a conflict like this, where … the enemy has a vote and where there are so many variables,” Gates said.

Appearing alongside Gates, the nation’s second-highest ranking military officer agreed there is no date certain for an exit.

Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Marine Gen. James Cartwright said he is looking for evidence of U.S. and NATO troops increasingly turning security missions over to Afghan forces as a sign of when Americans might ramp down their presence.

“When you start to see that attitude change, then you start to have a sense that things are going to move in a direction that would be towards the end of the violence side of this equation,” Cartwright said.

The Senate report also noted the wide-ranging timeline for U.S. troops in the fight cited by unidentified military leaders, policy-makers and outside experts around Washington: anywhere from two years to over a decade.

“None of the civilian officials or military officers interviewed in Afghanistan and elsewhere expected substantial progress in the short term. They talked in terms of years two, five and 10,” the report noted.

The varying timelines, in part, may reflect politics.

Capitol Hill has grown wary of approving annual war chests after years of ever-increasing costs for Iraq. Obama has asked Congress for $68 billion next year to fund defense spending in Afghanistan. The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, recently asked for another $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending, The Washington Post reported this week.

Military officials believe the Afghanistan mission can only succeed if troops are there far longer — anywhere from five years to 12 years.

Cartwright suggested that some changes will be needed “pretty soon.”

“The IED fight is pretty lethal,” Cartwright said, referring to improvised explosive devices left on roadsides which are now the cause of the majority of U.S. and NATO deaths.

Last month 49 coalition troops died in bomb attacks, a more than six-fold increase from the eight killed in roadside and suicide bomb attacks in July 2008, according to U.S. figures.