Typhoon Saomai punched into Cangnan county, where Lin's village is located in the eastern province of Zhejiang, on Thursday after authorities had moved hundreds of thousands in the densely populated commercial province to safety.

The official death toll stood at 105 on Saturday with at least 190 missing. The authorities mobilized 10,000 troops, paramilitary police and rescue workers in Zhejiang alone to help with a massive clean-up operation, state television reported.

Bulldozers started clearing the wreckage of more than 50,000 homes flattened by the storm as relief workers handed out bottles of water, rice and cooking oil. A dozen psychiatrists arrived to counsel survivors, Xinhua news agency said.

Some residents of the remote, mountainous region said they suspect the death toll could be much higher.

"I heard hundreds died. The government has shut off villages where the death toll is really high to stop news getting out," said a fashionably dressed youth who declined to be identified.

The Communist government, determined to maintain stability at all costs, has a habit of covering up bad news, although disaster death tolls are no longer supposed to be state secrets.

Mistrust of the government is common in Zhejiang, which is far from the capital and where a strong entrepreneurial spirit has bred a flourishing private sector.

Numerous mutually incomprehensible dialects add to a sense of independence and wariness of authority.

STINKING FLOOD WATERS

In Cangnan town itself, knee-deep floodwater, fetid and mixed with silt, sewage and motor oil, lapped at pedestrians' feet and flowed into shops on the main street.

More than a day after the storm had passed, rubbish sat stewing in the more than 30 degree Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) heat.

"The quality of people isn't very good here. Nobody wants to clear up," said resident Chen Shaohe, holding his daughter's hand and surveying the damage from a dry spot. "The reaction of the government has been slow, but what do you expect?"

Further down the road, Zhang Shiqiu looked forlornly at the remains of her red-brick, black-tiled house, crying quietly. "Gone, all gone," she whispered, rocking slowly backwards and forwards from a perch on the rubble.

In the fishing village of Xiaguan -- where Saomai hit with winds of 216 km (134 mph) per hour, more powerful than a 1956 typhoon that killed more than 3,000 -- one house appeared to have exploded outwards, blasting bricks into the street.

Workers offloaded blocks of ice, to help preserve bodies, for the two-hour drive up a narrow road clogged by fallen trees and rocks that runs so high it passes through cloud, toward the worst-hit villages in Cangnan county.

At least 41 villagers, including eight children, were killed when a house collapsed in the town of Jinxiang, an hour's drive from where the typhoon made landfall, a local official said.

In Lanping village, Lin sat in his candle-lit kitchen and pondered rebuilding his own damaged house. He was philosophical. "I saw the great typhoon of 1956. This one was only so-so compared to that," he said.

Two men suffered minor injuries fighting the fire that started in the engine room and were transported by helicopter to West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero.

"One fellow has some smoke inhalation and the other guy had a few lacerations," Blake said Saturday. "Neither one looked serious."

The names of the men were not available.

The rest of the crew was taken from the 175-foot Odyssey Voyager, located 10 miles off the coast, to Fourchon.

The Coast Guard planned to investigate the cause of the blaze.

It was not immediately known what type of research the crew was conducting.

"This could be an indication that a hazardous explosion may very imminent due to the flow of pyroclastic materials on Saturday," he said as rain and dark clouds covered the mountain, hiding the summit.

Last week, Phivolcs scientists warned that the 2,462-meter (8,077 foot) Mayon, the country's most active volcano, could explode any time, raising the alert level to 4 and forcing more than 40,000 people to move from an 8-km danger zone on Mayon's southeast flank.

A major hazardous eruption had been expected Wednesday night due to the possible gravitational pull of a full moon, but the volcano calmed for the next three days.

A full moon coincided with at least three of Mayon's nearly 50 explosions over the last 400 years, including the two most recent in 2000 and 2001.

On Saturday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo toured some school buildings and public parks serving as temporary shelter areas for people who have fled their homes and farms since the volcano started acting up last month.

Arroyo, who initially gave disaster officials about 250 million pesos ($4.8 million), promised more relief goods to feed displaced people and ordered the provision of permanent structures and sanitation facilities to prevent an outbreak of diseases.

"It felt pretty strong," state news agency Antara quoted one villager as saying. "The whole family and our neighbors ran out from our house, but there was not a massive panic."

Officials on Sumatra were not available for comment early Saturday. There were no immediate reports of damage.

Sumatra was hardest hit by a powerful December 2004 earthquake and tsunami. More than 216,000 people in Indian Ocean nations were killed or missing in the disaster.

The region is rocked by many earthquakes, including a magnitude 8.7 quake in March last year that killed about 900 people on an outlying island.

Local governments have allocated funds to help residents fight the drought by tapping ground water and improving water conservation facilities, Xinhua said.

The searing heat meant 14 million people in Chongqing and three million in Sichuan lack clean drinking water, the media said.

State television showed pictures of trucks transporting water to the worst-hit areas and villagers digging wells.

The water level in the Chongqing section of the Yangtze river -- China's longest river -- hit 3.5 metres (11.5 feet), its lowest in 100 years, the online edition of state broadcaster CCTV said.

Talk is tough on both sides of the 100 mile-wide Taiwan Strait separating the island and the mainland. But as with Korea, Asia's other unfinished civil war, this one reflects a complex set of priorities that range from domestic politics to international economics, regional rivalries to global strategic interests.

China and Taiwan split in 1949, and since then Beijing has never abandoned its position that the island is part of its territory, to be recovered by force if necessary.

The stakes involved in the Taiwan-China standoff are incalculable. Both sides are workshops of the consumer world. The seas around them are heavily traveled by ships carrying their vast output of consumer goods to the West. Chinese purchases of American debt, which sustain the value of the U.S. dollar, would almost certainly evaporate if the U.S. sided with Taiwan in a confrontation over the island. And a war would severely rattle Japan, which harbors its own suspicions of China's rising might.

Beijing has an estimated 800 missiles pointed at Taiwan, and has warned repeatedly it will go to war if the Maryland-sized island declares independence.

"We will do our utmost with all sincerity to strive for the prospect of peaceful reunification," said Chinese President
Hu Jintao at a White House appearance with
President Bush in April. "This being said, we will by no means allow Taiwan independence."

An outsider would be hard-pressed to define what's not "independent" about Taiwan. It may look like China, but it elects its own president, makes its own laws, issues its own passports and currency, and treasures its vibrant democracy.

But in fact, both sides have shared one pillar of ideology since the split of 1949 - that there is one China and it should someday be reunited. As long as Taiwanese governments stuck to that mantra, China could live with the division. But with the passage of 57 years, the 23 million Taiwanese have grown apart from the mainland, and their democracy has given them a president who came to office as an outright opponent of unification, and is doing everything he can to prevent it.

Washington adheres to the one-China doctrine and has recognized Beijing as its government since 1979. But it has always maintained an intimate connection to Taiwan, providing it with the means to defend itself, and warning Beijing against mounting an attack.

Backing up the warning are 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan, concentrated in Okinawa, 400 miles from here. In 1996, when China was dropping missiles off the Taiwan coast out of displeasure at a perceived drift toward independence,
President Clinton sent in the Seventh Fleet to deter it.

In 2002 Bush pledged to "help Taiwan defend itself if provoked."

But U.S. support for Taiwan is hardly open-ended.

Earlier this year it complained when President Chen Shui-bian scrapped the government body charged with overseeing eventual union with the mainland. The U.S. feared Beijing would read it as a downgrading of the emphasis on the one-China doctrine and take it as an excuse to attack.

Now in his seventh year in power, Chen advocates incrementally pushing the envelope on independence with measures designed to foster separateness, such as making schools teach Taiwanese history first, Chinese history second.

Washington's criticisms of Chen's actions symbolize the fine line it must tread between supporting separateness without letting it become permanent.

Some influential Americans fault the U.S. position; they see democratic Taiwan as a bulwark against communist China fully deserving of independent status. But the official view is much more circumspect.

"We want to be supportive of Taiwan, while we're not encouraging those that try to move toward independence," Deputy Secretary of State
Robert Zoellick told a congressional hearing. "Because let me be very clear: Independence means war."

Underlying Zoellick's caution is concern about China's modernizing military, and the difficulties America would presumably have fighting two wars simultaneously - one in
Iraq, the other in the Pacific.

Over the past 10 years Beijing has enhanced its ability to stand up to the U.S. military, improved its intercontinental ballistic missiles, and armed itself with sophisticated Russian equipment. Its 2.5 million-strong military outnumbers Taiwan's more than eight to one.

"There is a growing reluctance among American military planners to engage China in a conflict because of the improvement in its armed forces and its ability to strike U.S. targets with nuclear weapons," said Wendell Minnick of Washington-based Defense News.

Beijing's rapid buildup is also an issue in Japan, Washington's most important Pacific ally.

Much to the Taiwanese government's delight, Tokyo is taking an increasingly vocal stand against China's growing power. Some Japanese politicians have even suggested Japan strengthen its security alliance with the United States to bolster Taiwan's capacity to withstand a Chinese attack.

But Japan's 20th century militarism is still a sore point in Asia, especially in China which was invaded by Japan in the 1930s, and the Koreas which were a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. That makes a deployment of Japanese troops in the Taiwan Strait unlikely.

"For Japan to engage in military operations over Taiwan would break with constitutional prohibitions against Japanese belligerency," said Robert Dujarric of the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo. "Helping the United States logistically in a Taiwan conflict is one thing, but getting involved in the fighting is another."

Beijing's reaction to Japan's perceived pro-Taiwanese position is implacably hostile, and fits in neatly with its drumbeat of pro-unification rhetoric.

But recently it has begun showing a willingness to let others help its cause, rather than confront Taiwan directly. In the case of the unification body, for example, it left the scolding to the United States.

David Zweig, director of the Hong Kong-based Center on China's Transnational Relations, thinks this reflects China's concern that it too has much to lose in a war.

"They do not want confrontation because of economic development," he says. "It's of critical importance to them."

Another factor, Zweig says, is China's belief that Taiwanese politics are working in its favor because the favorite in Taiwan's 2008 presidential election, Ma Ying-jeou, is presumed to support unification.

"With Ma waiting in the wings, they feel they are winning the Taiwan battle on the ground," Zweig says. "They think he will be much more flexible to deal with than Chen Shui-bian."

But like some presidents before him, Ma adheres to another of the mantras that govern Taiwan's policy toward China: that unification can only be considered when China sheds communism and becomes democratic.

That's a distant prospect, and meanwhile, Taiwan's military is taking no chances.

At Ilan beach, the war games arena 40 miles southeast of the capital, Taipei, a quartet of F-16s roars over the dun colored sand and two Knox-class frigates train their guns on a flotilla of simulated Chinese invaders among the rolling waves.

According to U.S.-Taiwan defense doctrine, the Taiwanese military would have to fight an invasion alone for at least four days until American naval forces arrive.

But China could also go with a so-called decapitation strategy - coordinated commando attacks and pinpoint bombing of the island's leaders and key institutions to paralyze the island before American reinforcements can arrive.

"An invasion is always possible," said Taiwanese army Col. Yu Chung-ji, shielding his eyes from the sun as a Cobra helicopter whirred by. "But personally, I think it is more likely they will choose the decapitation option."

Sri Lankan war planes pounded Tamil rebel gun positions at Pooneryn near the Jaffna peninsula in the country's north with heavy shelling reported throughout the night, the defence ministry said.

Fighter planes also bombed rebel positions in Trincomalee in the northeast, sending hundreds of civilians fleeing to schools and churches while troops and rebels traded artillery fire for an hour, officials and residents said.

The fierce fighting Saturday in the north and northeast from the bombing and the clashes left at least 100 Tigers and 27 security personnel dead and another 280 on both sides wounded, military spokesman Athula Jayawardena said.

"We estimate at least 100 to 150 Tigers were killed and 200 to 250 were wounded," Jayawardena said.

"We had our share of casualties too with three officers and 22 other rankers (non-commissioned soldiers) and two sailors killed. Eight officers and 72 other rankers were wounded. They have all been evacuated for treatment."

Sri Lanka's key foreign aid donors expressed serious concern over a growing humanitarian crisis stemming from the worsening ethnic conflict and called for an immediate halt to hostilities.

The United States, Japan, the
European Union and Norway said they were "deeply concerned" by the continued violence which they feared was "seriously unraveling" the 2002 ceasefire agreement.

The Tigers and the Sri Lankan government have blamed each other for the upsurge in violence, which has claimed over 1,200 lives by official count since December, despite the February 2002 truce arranged by peacebroker Norway.

The bombings ended a brief lull in fighting between the two sides which have been pounding each other since July 26 with artillery and mortars in a bitter battle for a waterway in Trincomalee district.

International relief agencies have urged the government to allow them access to deliver aid to people most affected by the latest fighting.

The Tigers said 42,000 people have been displaced in areas under their control on top of 30,000 people who in the past two weeks had moved away from troubled areas in the northeast and sought shelter in government-held towns.

Saturday's fighting in the north lasted nearly 10 hours as the guerrillas fired heavy artillery towards military bunkers as well as the main airfield in the northern edge of the Jaffna peninsula, Jayawardena said.

An airforce Bell 212 helicopter as well as other equipment were damaged, he said. He dismissed a report on the pro-rebel tamilnet.com website that the guerrillas used an aircraft to attack the Palaly airbase on the peninsula.

"We didn't see even a kite of the Tigers," he said, adding that the military repulsed the guerrilla offensive and carried out aerial attacks against Tiger gun positions in the north.

The guerrillas also used boats to land their fighters at Kayts near Jaffna, but army commandos attacked them, Jayawardena told reporters.

The Tiger rebels blamed the military for starting the fighting on Friday and keeping up the attacks till Saturday.

An estimated 60,000 people have been killed since the Tamil insurgency began around three decades ago.

For more than two weeks leftists, often accompanied by Lopez Obrador, have been protesting the election result by camping out in the giant Zocalo square, the symbolic center of power in Mexico since the country was ruled by the Aztecs.

The tent city spills from the Zocalo onto a long section of Mexico's historic Reforma Avenue and has frozen the center of the city, slashing hotel occupancy rates in the popular tourist zone.

The electoral court must declare a new president by September 6. It is not legally possible to appeal the ruling.

Calderon, favored by the Mexican and international business community in Mexico for his free-market policies, says the election was fair and expects to be declared president-elect.

"It seems to us they are trying to ... impose themselves as authorities without the backing of the majority of citizens," said German Martinez, who represents Calderon's National Action party, PAN, at the electoral institute. "The PAN challenges them to accept once and for all that they have lost the presidency."

Lopez Obrador suggested his supporters protest outside the offices where Calderon would be declared president if the court does not accept claims of major irregularities at polling centers throughout the country during and since the July vote.

Attendance at Sunday's rally, estimated at about 20,000 people, was much lower than at similar meetings held most weekends since the election.

Some protesters pushed into a mass in the cathedral that looms over the Zocalo, shouting demands that Cardinal Norberto Rivera stay out of politics. Security guards ejected the leftists, Reforma newspaper reported.

Many on the left accuse the Catholic Church of backing Calderon, whose party has opposed some forms of contraception.

Lopez Obrador called for a major rally in September to decide the future political role of his resistance movement, which this week blocked Mexico's stock exchange, foreign banks and government offices.

"Calderon is not going to be president, he would be an usurper of the presidency," said lawyer Ludivina Hernandez, standing among food stalls at the rally.

Lopez Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City, has promised to end two decades of free-market reforms and help the country's millions of poor with welfare programs and infrastructure spending.

A partial vote recount at 9 percent of polling stations ordered by the court last week is due to be ready on Sunday.

Lopez Obrador says the recount shows that more than 100,000 votes were wrongly tallied initially and wants the electoral court to annul the results at thousands of polling stations and declare him the winner.

He is also calling for a vote by vote recount at every polling station in the country.

Calderon won by about 244,000 votes, or 0.58 of a percentage point, and his ruling party says the recounts show only minor changes in the results. European Union electoral observers say they detected no major problems in the election.