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Despite a fresh warning in Washington about a prolonged economic slump, President Bush said Monday that he thinks Americans’ attitudes about the financial turmoil are shifting away from “near panic.”

“I have heard that people’s attitudes are beginning to change from a period of intense concerns — I would call it near panic — to being more relaxed,” Bush told reporters after a closed meeting with business leaders at the Central Louisiana Chamber of Commerce.

He said people are starting to see the effects of freed-up credit, while warning, “We’ve got a long way to go.”

Back in Washington, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the House Budget Committee that the time was ripe for a second government stimulus package.

“With the economy likely to be weak for several quarters, and with some risk of a protracted slowdown, consideration of a fiscal package by the Congress at this juncture seems appropriate,” Bernanke said.

Pressed for how large such a stimulus package should be, Bernanke demurred, saying that was up to Congress. But he said it should be “significant.”

White House press secretary Dana Perino said the president’s position on the possibility of a second stimulus remained unchanged. She reiterated concern with recent Democratic proposals that the administration does not believe would energize the economy.

“We’ve had an open mind about it, but what we are focused on right now is the urgent need to get this rescue package implemented,” Perino said about the $700 billion government rescue program for the financial system that Congress passed Oct. 3.

Perino said Bush’s endorsement of any kind of second stimulus would depend on the details of legislation drafted by Congress.

“We’d like to see the details of what would be proposed, because there are several programs that have been recommended that are coming in a cloak of being stimulative, and we don’t think that those would actually stimulate the economy,” Perino said. “So anything that we would do, we would have to take a careful look at.”

Earlier this year, Congress enacted a $168 billion stimulus package that included tax rebates for people and tax breaks for businesses. The rebate checks of up to $600 per person helped to lift economic growth in the spring.

However, consumers cut back sharply as rising unemployment, harder-to-get credit, shrinking paychecks and falling home values made people much more cautious. In turn, businesses — worried about a drop in consumer spending — also have retrenched.

Bush is on a nearly daily campaign to remind the nation that his government is working to fix the financial crisis. As people fret about their rising bills and plummeting retirement savings, Bush is urging patience. He says it will take time for credit to flow freely again.

He reiterated why a free-market advocate like himself would support massive government intervention. “The answer is because I was deeply concerned about a financial crisis becoming so profound, so acute that it hurt the people, small business owners here” in Alexandria and other local communities.

Bush said community banks such as the one in central Louisiana are strong, and they should not be lumped in with the giant financial institutions that have gone under.

In the midst of a frantic election season, Bush has tried to retain a sense of in-charge leadership during the crisis. He has now spoken about the economic meltdown on 28 of the last 33 days, from formal speeches to radio addresses to the off-the-cuff comments like Monday’s.

Bush also plans to host a high-profile international summit on how to fix the world financial system before year’s end. The date and site of that have meeting have not been set.

Yet confidence in the volatile financial markets remains shaky. All the economy’s problems are feeding off each other, creating a cycle that Washington’s leaders — including a president in the waning days of his second term — are finding difficult to break.

The share of people who believe the United States is moving in the right direction has plunged in just a few weeks, from 28 percent in September to 15 percent in October, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll of likely voters that was released Monday.

President Bush said Sunday he will visit Texas on Tuesday to express sympathy for victims of Hurricane Ike and lend support for recovery efforts.

“This is a tough storm and it’s one that’s going to require time for people to recover,” the president said from the White House’s Roosevelt Room after receiving an update from his disaster relief chief, the energy secretary and others.

Ike came ashore early Saturday at Galveston, Texas, as a strong Category 2 with 110 mph winds.

“First priority is search and rescue,” Bush told reporters. He also mentioned restoring electricity, clearing debris and getting sewage plants running again.

He urged residents who had evacuated ahead of the storm to heed warnings from local authorities before trying to return home.

“It’s very important for citizens, who I know are anxious to get home, to take your time and listen, take the advice of the local folks,” the president said.

On his trip to Texas, Bush said he intends to express “the federal government’s support — sympathy on the one hand and support on the other — for this recovery effort and rebuilding effort.”

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who went to Texas on Saturday, updated Bush by phone.

“This is all part of our efforts to help Texas and Louisiana with a focused, effective recovery effort,” Bush said.

The eye of the hurricane missed the center of Houston, as well as the largest concentrations of oil and gas refineries. Still, retail gasoline prices have jumped based on Ike’s landfall in the region, which accounts for about one-fifth of the nation’s petroleum refining capacity. Refineries, even if they were not damaged, may remain shuttered for days, some because of power outages.

“The federal government, along with state governments, will be monitoring very carefully as to whether or not consumers are being mistreated at the pump — in other words, gouged,” Bush said. “It’s very important for our fellow citizens during this period of temporary disruption to be treated fairly.”

Bush said the federal government is providing 1.5 million liters of water a day and 1 million meals a day to help the displaced.

As the U.S. presidential elections draw closer, voting activists are bracing themselves for an onslaught of online dirty tricks and misinformation campaigns designed to deceive and disenfranchise voters.

Political dirty tricks and misinformation close to election time are, of course, nothing new. But experts say they are about to get nastier and more prevalent because of the ease of disseminating them online.

They cite young people, who are more likely to seek out information online, as being particularly vulnerable to these attacks.

Low-income and minority voters have been vulnerable in the past to nefarious tactics used to prevent them from exercising their right to vote.

This was a common feature of the 2006 election, when 14,000 Latino voters in Orange County, California, received letters telling them it was illegal for immigrants to vote.

Lillie Coney, associate director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told of a variety of online tactics that are being used by would-be election saboteurs, determined to skew election results in their party’s favor.

“We’re seeing all sorts of ways in which these people can put out the message to first-time voters and those who are unsure of their voting rights. They are replacing the tactics we saw in previous election cycles,” she said.

In the past, political gamesmanship relied on traditional methods like telephone calls, direct mail and leafleting.

During the U.S. 2004 and 2006 elections, flyers were distributed that falsely claimed that voters could be disqualified from voting in elections if they had parking violations, late rent or

Tough action has since been taken in the United States with the introduction of a Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, which makes it a federal crime to “knowingly provide false information with the intent to disenfranchise another person in a federal election.” Violators face up to five years in prison and fines of up to $250,000.

But tricksters have moved online because of the low probability of being caught, and also because anti-spam laws and “no-call” lists exempt political messages.

The timing of misinformation efforts is vital as the bad information needs to be sent relatively close to election day, with enough time to reach voters but not enough for opponents to employ countermeasures.

One of the most popular deceptive campaign methods is using Voice Over IP calls or “robocalls,” Coney said.

These are popular because the calls don’t come from a central location, so tracing the perpetrator is much harder. The number of calls that can be made is practically limitless.

What’s more, Internet phone calls are not regulated, making it relatively easy for someone to misinform a huge number of people.

For example, during the primary season, anonymous robocalls were made during North Carolina that were designed to give voters the false impression that they were not already registered to vote.

Many of the voters who received those calls were black.

Voters in 11 states complained about similarly deceptive calls suggesting that they were linked to a national strategy of voter deception.

The speed of online communications allows scammers to be precise in reaching their targets, especially by taking advantage of existing Internet scams, like phishing and pharming.

Phishing typically involves fraudulent bulk e-mail messages that guide recipients to legitimate-looking but fake Web sites and try to get them to supply personal information.

Pharming secretly redirects traffic from a Web site to a different site altogether, even though the browser seems to be displaying the Web address that Internet users wanted to visit.

A hacker was able to redirect visitors to Barack Obama’s Community Blogs site to Hillary Clinton’s Web site in April by using similar methods.

“By early November, we’re expecting spam emails to be sent giving the wrong location for a polling station, or, incorrect details about who has the right to vote,” Coney said.

“There’s even a Web site that’s offering to register voters for $9.95. Of course, it doesn’t cost anything to vote,” Coney added.

Certainly, most Internet users are savvy about phishing emails and don’t necessarily fall for them, but it is the mass reach that has activists like Coney worried.

In a tight race where every voter counts, the implications are serious.

Another weapon in the arsenal of online political scammers is “typo squatting,” where people not connected to campaigns buy rights to a candidate’s Internet address, with their name misspelled, using them to steal and potentially misinform supporters.

These people are virtually impossible to trace, especially if they use sites like DomainsByProxy, which specialize in maintaining the anonymity of Web site owners.

Oliver Friedrichs, director of Symantec’s security response unit, said his company found that 47 out of 160 variations on www.barackobama.com were being “typo-squatted.”

“You can guarantee that more of these will become common in future elections,” Friedrichs said.

However, in the same way that saboteurs are using the Internet to spread misinformation and create voter confusion, there are numerous examples that highlight the positive ways the Internet is being used as a great democratic tool.

The Obama campaign has certainly exploited Internet social networking tools to the full. His success in primaries and caucuses across the country, as well as in raising unprecedented amounts of money through small donations, can be traced back to the Internet.

A group of University of Washington students has created a Facebook application called Your Revolution, where anyone with a Facebook account can join the cause and register to vote.

The application takes advantage of Washington and Arizona’s new online voter registration legislation.

Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, argues that online voter-generated activism has become a full-fledged political force and one that can no longer be ignored.

“It’s really rebalancing the power, not into the hands of the special interests and those with money but into the hands of citizens who actually now can organize themselves,” he said.

“Let me just add that organized minorities are always more powerful than disorganized majorities.”

Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, keynoting the Democratic National Convention, said Tuesday that American voters “have one shot to get it right” by electing Barack Obama president to end Republican leadership that is stuck in the past.

Warner rebuked President Bush and GOP nominee-to-be John McCain, but his address was hardly a summons to political arms against them. He mentioned McCain’s name only twice, and he said he’d learned in the cell phone business that made him millions that a strategy of tearing down the competition doesn’t suffice.

“I know we’re at the Democratic convention, but if an idea works, it really doesn’t matter if it has an R or a D next to it,” said the moderate Democrat. “Because this election isn’t about liberal versus conservative. It’s not about left versus right. It’s about the future versus the past.”

And “in George Bush and John McCain’s America, far too many” people don’t know whether that future will hold what they need, said Warner, who argued that Obama will change that.

In his sharpest words for the Republican nominee, Warner said, “John McCain promises more of the same.”

“A plan that would explode the deficit that will be passed on to our kids. No real plan to invest in our infrastructure. And his plan would continue spending $10 billion a month in Iraq,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but that’s not just right. That’s four more years that we can’t just afford.”

He said Obama will built a future of promise, in which “old partisanship gives way to new ideas … and hope replaces fear …”

Four years ago, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic Convention, a speech that propelled him onto the national political stage.

Warner, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in a state with a habit of split-ticket voting, spent part of his national address talking about his achievements as governor of Virginia, dealing with a GOP legislature “and a whole lot of good folks who didn’t see themselves as either Democrats or Republicans but as Virginians.”

The Democratic delegates applauded him dutifully, cheered briefly when he said continuation of the war in Iraq is wrong, but generally just listened to the lecture-like keynote speech.

“Right now, at this critical moment in our history, we have one shot to get it right,” Warner said. “And the status quo just won’t cut it.”

In energy, health care, education and America’s world standing, there are opportunities with change and risks without them, Warner said. Obama is the candidate who “knows we don’t have another four years to waste.”

“And Barack Obama knows this too,” he said. “We need leaders who see our common ground as sacred ground. We need leaders who will appeal to us not as Republicans or Democrats but first and foremost as Americans.”

Warner’s featured role fit the Obama campaign’s plan to challenge the Republicans in what has been reliable presidential territory for them. Virginia has voted Republican in every presidential election since Lyndon Johnson carried the state in 1964. This time, the Obama campaign sees an opening to wrest away 13 electoral votes.

“The race for the future is on, and it won’t be won if only some Americans are in the running,” Warner said. “It won’t be won with yesterday’s ideas and yesterday’s divisions.

“And it won’t be won with a president who is stuck in the past,” he said. “We need a president who understands the world today, the future we seek, and the change we need. We need Barack Obama.”

Warner is running for the Senate, and holds a hefty lead in the polls against Republican Jim Gilmore, another former governor. The seat now is held by retiring Republican Sen. John Warner, who is no relation.

A jail inmate was charged on Friday with sending a threatening letter laced with white powder to U.S. presidential candidate John McCain, triggering a security scare at his Colorado campaign office.Authorities said the suspect, Marc Harold Ramsey, 39, was pinpointed quickly because the return address included his name, inmate number and location of the jail where he is incarcerated — as required on all outgoing mail from the jail.

The letter, addressed to McCain and opened by a campaign staffer, arrived at the senator’s suburban Denver campaign office on Thursday, prompting its evacuation.

The letter began with the statement: “IFF (sic) you are reading this than you are already dead!”

Several campaign workers went to the hospital as a precaution, and more than a dozen others underwent decontamination procedures at the scene, but no one was injured, authorities said.

McCain, 71, the presumed Republican Party nominee for president, was taking the day off from the campaign at the time, spending the day at his home in Sedona, Arizona.

Within hours, the U.S. Secret Service said the letter had been traced to a Colorado jail inmate with a history of making such threats, and tests of the envelope and its contents turned up negative for hazardous materials.

The precise composition of the powder in the envelope had yet to be determined, officials said.

Ramsey was charged with a single count of mailing a threatening communication, a felony that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

He had been held at the Arapahoe County detention center, awaiting trial on charges of perjury and felony menacing stemming from an unrelated murder case, since September. He was later charged with assaulting a guard there.

Since being charged with making the threat, “his mail privileges have been significantly modified now,” Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson told Reuters.

In an affidavit accompanying the federal criminal complaint, the FBI said Ramsey admitted sending the letter to express anger at the U.S. government over his father’s exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange during military service in the Vietnam War.

“Ramsey stated that his father was in Vietnam during the same time as Sen. McCain, and that the government takes care of Sen. McCain, but not his father,” the affidavit said.

“A death threat is not a legitimate form of political expression,” said U.S. Attorney Troy Eid. He added that federal prosecutors had not verified that Ramsey’s father had actually served in Vietnam.

The postal scare came weeks after a U.S. Army scientist committed suicide as federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him in connection with the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York.

Federal investigators said Thursday they have solved a mystery of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories.

The 47-story trapezoid-shaped building sat north of the World Trade Center towers, across Vesey Street in lower Manhattan in New York. On Sept. 11, it was set on fire by falling debris from the burning towers, but skeptics long have argued that fire and debris alone should not have brought down such a big steel-and-concrete structure.

Scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology say their three-year investigation of the collapse determined the demise of WTC 7 was actually the first time in the world a fire caused the total failure of a modern skyscraper.

“The reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery,” said Dr. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator on the NIST team.

Investigators also concluded that the collapse of the nearby towers broke the city water main, leaving the sprinkler system in the bottom half of the building without water.

The building has been the subject of a wide range of conspiracy theories for the last seven years, partly because the collapse occurred about seven hours after the twin towers came down. That fueled suspicion that someone intentionally blew up the building in a controlled demolition.

Critics like Mike Berger of the group 9/11 Truth said he wasn’t buying the government’s explanation.

“Their explanation simply isn’t sufficient. We’re being lied to,” he said, arguing that there is other evidence suggesting explosives were used on the building.

Sunder said his team investigated the possibility that an explosion inside the building brought it down, but found there was no large boom or other noise that would have occurred with such a detonation. Investigators also created a giant computer model of the collapse, based partly on news footage from CBS News, that they say shows that internal column failure brought down the building.

Investigators also ruled out the possibility that the collapse was caused by fires from a substantial amount of diesel fuel that was stored in the building, most of it for generators for the city’s emergency operations command center.

The 77-page report concluded that the fatal blow to the building came when the 13th floor collapsed, weakening a critical steel support column that led to catastrophic failure.

“When this critical column buckled due to lack of floor supports, it was the first domino in the chain,” said Sunder.

The NIST investigators issued more than a dozen building recommendations as a result of their inquiry, most of which repeat earlier recommendations from their investigation into the collapse of the two large towers.

In both instances, investigators concluded that extreme heat caused some steel beams to lose strength, causing further failures throughout the buildings until the entire structure succumbed.

The recommendations include building skyscrapers with stronger connections and framing systems to resist the effects of thermal expansion, and structural systems designed to prevent damage to one part of a building from spreading to other parts.

No one was killed in the collapse of building 7 because it had been fully evacuated. A new, slightly taller World Trade Center 7 opened in 2006.

A spokesman for the leaseholder of the World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein, praised the government’s work.

“Hopefully this thorough report puts to rest the various 9/11 conspiracy theories, which dishonor the men and women who lost their lives on that terrible day,” said Silverstein spokesman Dara McQuillan.

In discussing the findings, the investigator Sunder acknowledged that some may still not be convinced, but insisted the science behind their findings is “incredibly conclusive.”

“The public should really recognize the science is really behind what we have said,” he said, adding: “The obvious stares you in the face.”

Colton Burkhart was just 4 when he swallowed a quarter-sized medallion that nearly took his life.

He didn’t choke on it. But the metal trinket from a gumball-type machine contained 39 percent lead, and nearly five years later — after surgery to remove the toy, batteries of tests and therapy, the Oregon boy still has elevated levels of lead in his body and some short-term memory loss.

Colton’s ordeal helped hasten recalls last year of millions of Chinese-produced toys, from Barbie doll accessories to Thomas the Tank Engine. And now his family is celebrating a new law that bans lead from children’s toys.

President Bush is expected to sign it this week, two weeks after Congress approved the measure.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Colton’s mother, Kara Burkhart, an instructional assistant at the Redmond School District in central Oregon. “We can feel comfortable about buying toys again.”

She traveled to Washington several times in the past year to lobby for the bill, telling anyone who would listen about dangers hidden in seemingly innocent toys like the one that wound up in her child’s hands.

Colton fared better than another 4-year-old, Jarnell Graham of Minneapolis, who died of lead poisoning under similar circumstances. Burkhart said her heart still breaks for Jarnell’s family.

“No child should have to go though something like this. They are playing with toys. They shouldn’t be harmed because of it,” Burkhart said.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates there are about 28,000 deaths each year from unsafe products, including toys, in the United States. More than 33 million people were injured last year by consumer products.

Last month, Burkhart, 30, her husband Todd, 33, and sons Cody, 11, and Colton, now 9, were in the Capitol when the toy-safety bill won final approval in the Senate.

Until the bill passed, she added, “there was no way I was going to buy my children a toy again.”

The legislation would impose the toughest lead standards in the world, banning lead beyond minute levels in products for children 12 or younger. Lead paint was a major factor in the recall of 45 million toys and children’s items last year, many from China

The bill also bans a chemical called phthalates that is widely used to make plastic products softer and more flexible. And it bolsters the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which took the brunt of criticism last year over the massive recalls and the government’s failure to monitor toy imports before they reach store shelves. The bill would double the agency’s budget, to $136 million by 2014, and give it new authority to oversee testing procedures and penalize violators.

“This bill represents the most significant improvements to product safety since Congress created the CPSC in the 1970s,” said Rachel Weintraub, senior counsel with Consumer Federation of America.

“Congress responded to the wishes of parents and children all across America and passed legislation that will help restore our confidence in the safety of our toys and everyday products,” said Ami Gadhia, policy counsel for Consumers Union, another advocacy group.

Burkhart said she was especially grateful for a provision that requires pre-market testing of children’s products by certified independent laboratories.

“It’s like a security blanket,” she said.

As for Colton, he is set to enter the fourth grade and seems healthy, his mother said, but he has some short-term memory loss and requires regular blood tests to monitor his lead levels.

“God has blessed us with our son being OK and now gave me a tool to say we need to have this stopped,” Burkhart said. “It’s not OK for lead to be in children’s toys.”

Russia dispatched an armored column into the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia on Friday after Georgia, a staunch U.S. ally, launched a surprise offensive to crush separatists. Witnesses said hundreds of civilians were killed. Fighting reportedly raged well into the night with Georgia’s interior ministry saying early Saturday that warplanes attacked three Georgian military bases and key facilities for shipping oil to the West.

The fighting, which devastated the capital of Tskhinvali, threatened to ignite a wider war between Georgia and Russia, and escalate tensions between Moscow and Washington. Georgia said it was forced to launch the assault because of rebel attacks; the separatists alleged Georgia violated a cease-fire.

“I saw bodies lying on the streets, around ruined buildings, in cars,” said Lyudmila Ostayeva, 50, who had fled with her family to Dzhava, a village near the border with Russia. “It’s impossible to count them now. There is hardly a single building left undamaged.”

The fighting broke out as much of the world’s attention was focused on the start of the Olympic Games and many leaders, including Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Bush, were in Beijing.

The timing suggested Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili may have been counting on surprise to fulfill his longtime pledge to wrest back control of South Ossetia — a key to his hold on power. The rebels seek to unite with North Ossetia, which is part of Russia.

Saakashvili agreed the timing was not coincidental, but accused Russia of being the aggressor. “Most decision makers have gone for the holidays,” he told CNN. “Brilliant moment to attack a small country.”

Seeking to prevent an all-out war, diplomats issued a flurry of statements calling on both sides to halt the fighting. The U.N. Security Council held two tense emergency sessions 12 hours apart with both sides using the forum to launch accusations. As the meeting recessed, officials promised a third council session Saturday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged Russia to halt aircraft and missile attacks and withdraw combat forces from Georgian territory. Rice said in a statement the United States wants Russia to respect Georgian sovereignty and agree to international mediation.

The leader of South Ossetia’s rebel government, Eduard Kokoity, said about 1,400 people were killed in the onslaught, the Interfax news agency reported. The toll could not be independently confirmed.

As night fell, there were conflicting claims as to who held the battlefield advantage.

Saakashvili said “Georgian military forces completely control all the territory of South Ossetia” except for a northern section adjacent to Russia. But Russian news agencies cited a Russian military official as saying heavy fighting was under way on the outskirts of the regional capital.

It was unclear what might persuade either side to stop shooting. Both claim the battle started after the other side violated a cease-fire that had been declared just hours earlier after a week of sporadic clashes.

The United States was sending in its top Caucasus envoy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza, to try to end the bloodshed.

It was the worst outbreak of hostilities since the province won de facto independence in a war against Georgia that ended in 1992. Russian troops went in as peacekeepers but Georgia alleges they now back the separatists.

Russia, which has granted citizenship to most of the region’s residents, appeared to lay much of the responsibility for ending the fighting on Washington.

In a telephone conversation with Rice, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Georgia must be convinced to withdraw its forces, according to a ministry statement.

Georgia, which borders the Black Sea between Turkey and Russia, was ruled by Moscow for most of the two centuries preceding the breakup of the Soviet Union. Georgia has angered Russia by seeking NATO membership — a bid Moscow regards as part of a Western effort to weaken its influence in the region.

Saakashvili long has pledged to restore Tbilisi’s rule over South Ossetia and another breakaway province, Abkhazia. Both regions have run their own affairs without international recognition since splitting from Georgia in the early 1990s and have built up ties with Moscow.

Georgia has about 2,000 troops in Iraq, making it the third-largest contributor to coalition forces after the U.S. and Britain. But Saakashvili told CNN the troops would be called home Saturday in the face of the South Ossetia fighting.

A senior U.S. defense official said Georgian authorities have asked the United States for help getting their troops out of Iraq. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions have been private, said no formal decision has been made on whether to support the departure, but said it is likely the U.S. will do so.

Also, Pentagon officials said Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has reached out to his counterparts in Russia and Georgia, but has not yet connected with them.

Early Saturday, Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said the Vaziani military base on the outskirts of the Georgian capital was bombed by warplanes during the night and that bombs fell in the area of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. He also said two other Georgian military bases were hit and that warplanes bombed the Black Sea port city of Poti, which has a sizable oil shipment facility.

Utiashvili said there apparently were significant casualties and damage in the attacks, but that further details would not be known until the morning.

Earlier, Georgia’s Foreign Ministry accused Russian aircraft of bombing two military air bases, inflicting some casualties and destroying several military aircraft. Rustavi 2 television said four people were killed and five wounded at the Marneuli air base.

Twelve Russian troops were killed and 30 wounded in the fighting, said Russian Ground Forces spokesman Col. Igor Konashenkov.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it was sending in reinforcements for its troops in the province, and Russian state television and Georgian officials reported a convoy of tanks had crossed the border. The convoy was expected to reach the provincial capital, Tskhinvali, by evening, Channel One television said.

“We are facing Russian aggression,” said Georgia’s Security Council chief Kakha Lomaya. “They have sent in their troops and weapons and they are bombing our towns.”

Putin warned in the early stages of the conflict that the Georgian attack would draw retaliation and the Defense Ministry pledged to protect South Ossetians, most of whom have Russian citizenship.

Chairing a session of his Security Council in the Kremlin, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev also vowed that Moscow will protect Russian citizens.

“In accordance with the constitution and federal law, I, as president of Russia, am obliged to protect lives and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they are located,” Medvedev said. “We won’t allow the death of our compatriots go unpunished.”

On Friday, an AP reporter saw tanks and other heavy weapons concentrating on the Russian side of the border with South Ossetia — supporting the reports of an incursion. Some villagers were fleeing into Russia.

The Georgian state minister for reintegration, Temur Yakobashvili, said Georgian forces had shot down four Russian combat planes over Georgian territory but gave no details. Russia’s Defense Ministry denied an earlier Georgia report about one Russian plane downed and had no immediate comment on the latest claim.

Yakobashvili said one Russian plane had dropped a bomb on the Vaziani military base near the Georgian capital, but no one was hurt. More than 1,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers were at the base last month to teach combat skills to Georgian troops.

South Ossetia officials said Georgia attacked with aircraft, armor and heavy artillery. Georgian troops fired missiles at Tskhinvali, an official said, and many buildings were on fire.

Georgia’s president said Russian aircraft bombed several Georgian villages and other civilian facilities.

A senior Russian diplomat in charge of the South Ossetian conflict, Yuri Popov, dismissed the Georgian claims of Russian bombings as misinformation, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported.

The Georgian attack came just hours after Saakashvili announced a unilateral cease-fire in a television broadcast late Thursday in which he also urged South Ossetian separatist leaders to enter talks on resolving the conflict.

Georgian officials later blamed South Ossetian separatists for thwarting the cease-fire by shelling Georgian villages in the area.

A judge ordered Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to jail Thursday for violating the terms of his bond in his perjury case by making a city business trip to Canada and not informing the court.

The mayor, who is accused of lying under oath in a civil case and faces eight felony counts, made the trip last month without telling the court in advance, leading the county prosecutor’s office to request Kilpatrick be punished.

Only minutes earlier, the mayor offered an apology to the court, telling District Court Judge Ronald Giles that for seven months, “I’ve been living in an incredible state of pressure and scrutiny.”

But Giles sent the mayor to jail anyway, telling him he would have given any defendant the same treatment.

“What matters to me though is how the court overall is perceived and how if it was not Kwame Kilpatrick sitting in that seat, if it was John Six-Pack sitting in that seat, what would I do? And that answer is simple,” he said.

Circuit Court Judge Thomas E. Jackson said he wouldn’t hear an appeal by Kilpatrick’s lawyers until 9 a.m. Friday, meaning the mayor was to spend the night in jail.

The mayor’s chief of staff, Kandia Milton, will run the city while Kilpatrick is in jail, mayoral spokeswoman Denise Tolliver said.

Earlier Thursday, Kilpatrick waived his right to a preliminary hearing and will head to trial on perjury and other criminal charges that could land him in prison for up to 15 years.

Lawyers for the mayor and ex-Chief of Staff Christine Beatty asked Giles to waive next month’s preliminary examination. The criminal case now heads to Wayne County Circuit Court for trial.

Kilpatrick and Beatty are charged with perjury, misconduct and obstruction of justice. They are accused of lying about having an intimate relationship and their roles in the firing of a police official.

Both deny the charges.

Kilpatrick and Beatty denied under oath during a civil trial last year that they had a romantic relationship in 2002 and 2003.

But excerpts of sexually explicit text messages recovered from Beatty’s city-issued pager and first published in January by the Free Press contradicted their testimony.

Giles asked the defendants during Thursday morning’s hearing if they freely agreed to waive their rights to a preliminary exam and both said they did.

The judge then set a circuit court arraignment date of Aug. 14.

The preliminary exam — a hearing where a judge determines whether there’s probable cause to hold a trial — had been set for Sept. 22.

After the issue of the preliminary examination was concluded, Assistant Wayne County’s Prosecutor Robert Moran then asked Giles to punish Kilpatrick over the trip to Canada.

The mayor went across the border last month to push the sale of the city’s half of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.

Kilpatrick was required to alert the court of all travel plans.

Moran asked Giles to modify Kilpatrick’s bond because of what he called a “flagrant” violation.

After a short recess, Kilpatrick stood and apologized to Giles, saying it wouldn’t happen again.

The judge then ordered a recess and came back with his decision. Kilpatrick stared directly at the judge with his hands clasped near his face as Giles announced his decision.

“I think it’s the most extreme measure he can take. I don’t agree with him,” defense lawyer James Thomas said.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy charged Kilpatrick and Beatty less than two months after the Free Press published excerpts of the text messages. Fingerprinted with their booking photos broadcast across the country, the pair were accused of lying under oath about their relationship and about their roles in the firing of a police official.

More text messages released in April revealed the evolution of flirty and sexually explicit exchanges to professions of love and promises of marriage.

Kilpatrick and his high-priced team of attorneys have questioned the authenticity of those and other text messages, while fighting battles on several legal and political fronts.

A split city council voted in February to ask Kilpatrick to step down. The nine-member group later asked Gov. Jennifer Granholm to remove the mayor for misconduct and plans to hold forfeiture of office proceedings against him.

Through it all Kilpatrick has remained defiant.

Tropical Storm Edouard took aim at the coasts of Texas and Louisiana on Monday, threatening to pick up strength from warm Gulf waters and gain near-hurricane speeds over the next 24 hours.

Emergency teams were activated as Gulf residents prepared for a second strong storm in less than a month, although Edouard is forecast to hit a different stretch of the Texas coast or Louisiana than Hurricane Dolly did last month.

Some of the Gulf’s offshore oil and natural gas drilling platforms sit in the storm’s path. But Edouard is not likely to disrupt production, according to one financial firm that specializes in the energy industry.

“He’ll just be (a) little tropical storm tike compared to big mamma’s that rip things up and spike gas prices,” the Houston-based securities firm Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. said in a note to investors Monday.

Shell Oil Co. said Monday morning it had begun evacuating about 40 workers from some of its operations in the western Gulf. The company said no further evacuations were planned based on the current forecast and that it expected no impact on production.

ExxonMobil Corp. had not evacuated any workers or cut production by Sunday evening, but the company was preparing its platforms for heavy wind and rain and considering whether to evacuate some workers, spokeswoman Margaret Ross said in an e-mail statement.

Rudy Guidry of Grand Isle, on the Louisiana coast south of New Orleans, was on his father’s houseboat Monday morning making it a bit more secure than usual. “We’re on the water right now. Just putting on extra lines in case it comes up,” he said.

Edouard was expected to make landfall somewhere in Texas or southwest Louisiana on Tuesday morning. It was moving west near 8 mph, and forecasters said the warm waters of the Gulf provided the right conditions for the storm to intensify and approach hurricane strength with winds of 75 mph or more.

A tropical storm warning was in effect from the mouth of the Mississippi River westward to Port O’Connor in Texas. A hurricane watch was in effect from west of Intracoastal City, La. to Port O’Connor.

At 11 a.m. EDT, Edouard had maximum sustained winds near 45 mph, with higher gusts. The storm’s center was located about 160 miles south-southeast of Lafayette, La., and 265 miles east-southeast of Galveston, Texas.

Edouard was expected to turn toward the west-northwest later Monday, which would bring the center near the coast on either side of the Texas-Louisiana border by Tuesday morning.

Connie Porter, owner of Avenue O Bed and Breakfast in Galveston, said she planned to watch the progression of the storm on Monday, but she wasn’t worried about it. She said a storm like the one being described might mean some debris and that people should take care of patio furniture, but she didn’t anticipate much more.

“It’s not going to be a huge issue for anybody in this area,” Porter said.

Krista Piferrer, a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, said Sunday that state emergency management officials were getting updates through conference calls with the National Weather Service.

Texas began activating a number of emergency teams Sunday afternoon, including calling up 1,200 Texas military forces and six UH-60 helicopters, the State Operations Center said. The Texas Forest Service and the Texas Engineering and Extension Service activated response teams.

Isolated tornadoes were possible over parts of southern Louisiana and the upper Texas coast later Monday, according to the hurricane center. Rainfall of 3 to 5 inches was expected in coastal Louisiana and southeast Texas, with isolated amounts up to 10 inches in Texas. Tides of 2 to 4 feet above normal levels were expected in parts of the warning area.

In Louisiana’s Cameron Parish, Clifton Hebert of the emergency preparedness office said they are monitoring Edouard on a 24-hour basis and will be sending regular releases to the public.

“Right now, we want residents in travel trailers to have a more permanent residence to go to if necessary,” Hebert said.