BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — A report of a possible gunman at Virginia Tech on Thursday set off the longest, most extensive lockdown and search on campus since the bloodbath four years ago that led the university to overhaul its emergency procedures.

No gunman was found, and the school gave the all-clear just before 3 p.m., about five hours after sirens began wailing and students and staff members started receiving warnings by phone, email and text message to lock themselves indoors. Alerts were also posted on the university's website and Twitter accounts.

Maddie Potter, a 19-year-old from Virginia Beach, holed up inside a campus wood shop, where she had been working on a class project. Staff members locked the doors and turned off the lights.

"I was pretty anxious. We had family friends who were up here when the shooting took place in 2007, so it was kind of surreal," she said. "I had my phone with me and I called both my parents."

The emergency was triggered by three teens who were attending a summer program on campus and told police they saw a man walking quickly across the grounds with what might have been a handgun covered by a cloth, authorities said.

Police searched some 150 buildings on the square-mile campus and issued a composite sketch of a baby-faced man who was said to be wearing shorts and sandals, but they found no sign of him. They continued to patrol the grounds as a precaution even after the lockdown was lifted.

"We're in a new era. Obviously this campus experienced something pretty terrible four years ago," said Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker. He added: "Regardless of what your intuition and your experience as a public safety officer tells you, you are really forced to issue an alert."

It was the first time that the entire campus was locked down since the shooting rampage in 2007 that left 33 people dead, and the second major test of Virginia Tech's improved emergency alert system, which was revamped to add the use of text messages and other means besides email of warning students.

The system was also put to the test in 2008, when an exploding nail gun cartridge was mistaken for gunfire. But only one dorm was locked down during that emergency, and it reopened two hours later.

Earlier this year, federal authorities fined Virginia Tech $55,000 for waiting too long to notify staff and students after two students were shot to death at a dorm during the 2007 rampage. An email alert went out more than two hours later that day, about the time student Seung-Hui Cho was chaining the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more people and himself. It was the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

This time, several thousand students and the school's 6,500 employees were on campus for summer classes, officials said. Most of Virginia Tech's 30,000 students are on summer break and won't return until the fall semester, which begins Aug. 22.

Michael Backus, a 20-year-old from Abingdon, was studying in the student center when a staff member told him and a friend to move away from the window because someone with a gun had been spotted. During the lockdown, they watched TV, studied and called and texted friends and family.

"Everyone was kind of doing their own business as if nothing was going on. People were doing homework, calling people. It wasn't mass hysteria like people might imagine," he said.

Backus' girlfriend, 22-year-old Rachel Larson of Winchester, got a text message alert at her off-campus apartment. She became worried when she realized her boyfriend was on campus, but she soon calmed down.

"Virginia Tech — ever since 4/16 — we've been so paranoid. We hear about everything that goes on on campus, which is good, but sometimes people freak out when it's a false alarm," she said.

More than 45,000 subscribers to the university's emergency alert program received the text and phone messages, school spokesman Mark Owczarski said.

In 2009, a woman was decapitated while having coffee with a fellow student in a cafe on campus. But police seized the suspect within minutes of being called, and the campus was not locked down.

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SAN ANTONIO (AP) — The drought that has turned Texas and parts of the Plains into a parched moonscape of cracked earth could persist into next year, prolonging the misery of farmers and ranchers who have endured a dry spell that is now expected to be the state's worst since the 1950s.

The U.S. Climate Prediction Center said Thursday that the La Nina weather phenomenon blamed for the crippling lack of rain might be back soon, just two months after the last La Nina ended. If that happens, the drought would almost certainly extend into 2012.

The extreme dry conditions have been made worse by week after week of triple-digit temperatures, which have caused reservoirs to evaporate, crops to wither and animals and fish to die off by the thousands.

"The suffering and desperate need for relief grows with the rising temperatures and record-breaking heat that continue to scorch Texas with each passing day," state Agricultural Commissioner Todd Staples said.

Even the state's feral hogs are hiding from the heat, postponing a new reality TV show about Texans gunning them down from helicopters.

Texas saw less than an inch of rain statewide in July, and more than 90 percent of the state is already in the two most extreme stages of drought.

"Anything below 2 to 3 inches of rainfall would be a fly-on-the-windshield type thing as far as improvement," said Victor Murphy, a climate expert with the National Weather Service. "It wouldn't reverse this continued death spiral we're on."

Also Thursday, the state climatologist declared this the most severe one-year drought on record in Texas. Officials expected to declare soon that it has become the worst drought since the 1950s.

A newly updated weather map showed the drought holding firm — if not intensifying — through at least October.

In Dallas, county officials say at least 13 people have died from the heat this summer. The high temperature Thursday was expected to hit 109 degrees, which would be a record for the date.

Statewide demand for power was expected to approach the maximum Thursday for a fourth straight day. Some large industrial plants were forced off the overburdened electric grid, requiring them to shut down or rely on their own power reserves.

And for the first time this summer, utilities warned residential customers of the potential for rolling outages.

Beleaguered farms and dead pastures have been hurt the most. The agriculture industry, which accounts for nearly 9 percent of the Texas economy, may be headed for the biggest single-year losses ever — potentially as high as $8 billion, according to the Texas AgriLife Extension Service.

The La Nina watch issued by the Climate Prediction Center warned that the phenomenon marked by a cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean could soon redevelop. La Nina typically results in less rain for southern states, and it's blamed for drought conditions in Oklahoma and New Mexico, too.

A La Nina watch means conditions are favorable for La Nina to return within the next six months. But Texas will probably know as early as October or November, said Mike Halpert, a deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center.

By that time, the driest places could be out of water.

In the town of Robert Lee, a rural farming community of about 1,000 in the middle of West Texas, people are worried that Lake E.V. Spence could dry up by winter and leave the town without any water.

Some residents wonder if the National Guard can haul in water. Making matters worse, a pipe that was probably busted by the dry, shifting ground began gushing water the town cannot spare. City workers scrambled Thursday to fix it.

Closer to Austin, the Llano River trickled at a rate about 95 percent slower than normal. The city of Llano already has contacted bottled water distributors about supplying residents with bottles for cooking and drinking if the river flow stops entirely, which could happen in a matter of weeks.

"It's amazing we're still getting what water we are," City Manager Finley deGraffenried said. "We're running 107 degrees yesterday and the day before. It's unbearable."

Texas received no significant rain in April or May, which are typically the state's wettest months. Lake levels are so low that earlier this week, a massive chunk of the space shuttle Columbia that broke apart over Texas in 2003 was found poking out of the receded waters of Lake Nacogdoches.

About 70 percent of Texas rangeland and pastures are classified as being in very poor condition, which means there has been complete or near-complete crop failure or there's no food for grazing livestock.

One of the most memorable droughts occurred in the 1950s, when a decade of below-average rainfall and long dry spells actually changed the state's demographics, with many families fleeing parched farms for cities. Experts say the current drought is nowhere near so severe, but if it continues, the scarcity of water will be painful.

In the mid-1950s, Texas had a population of 7 million.

"We got a state with 25 million now. You can see the impact would be significantly greater if we had a drought that the 1950s had," said Travis Miller, a member of the state's Drought Preparedness Council and AgriLife Extension Service leader.

One upside is that second La Ninas are historically weaker than the first, Halpert said.

The formation of La Nina also doesn't guarantee there won't be significant rain. The pattern often makes for a more active hurricane season, which could lash Texas with a soaking storm. Forecasters said Thursday they still see a busy hurricane season ahead, calling for 14 to 19 tropical storms.

"If I was in Texas, this is not great news," Halpert said. "But it's not the end of the world."

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon got nearly everything it asked for during a decade of two wars shadowed by the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the rise of al-Qaida. No more.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen acknowledged that reality Thursday, saying the military is resigned to budget cuts of around $350 billion over a decade to meet the public clamor for reducing the nation's debt. But they quickly warned that more than doubling those cuts along the lines of the "doomsday mechanism" spelled out in the new debt-limit law would undermine the military.

"If it happened — and, God willing, that would not be the case — but if it did happen, it would result in a further round of very dangerous cuts across the board, defense cuts that I believe would do real damage to our security, our troops and their families, and our military's ability to protect the nation," Panetta told reporters at his first Pentagon news conference.

Mullen, who has said repeatedly that the debt is the greatest national security threat, said any cut on that order "jeopardizes our ability to deal with the other very real and very serious threats we face around the world."

Reflecting the widespread demand for fiscal austerity, the compromise debt deal struck by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders this week will slice $350 billion from projected military spending over the next 10 years, and it leaves open the possibility of more than $500 billion in additional reductions.

Defense spending, which has nearly doubled in the last decade, is no longer untouchable in Washington.

Tea partyers and fierce fiscal conservatives in Congress are more willing to include Pentagon dollars in their mix of budget cuts despite opposition from veteran defense hawks. The death of Osama bin Laden, the diminished role of al-Qaida and the winding down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have prompted some lawmakers to question the need for such robust military spending.

Among the things that could be on the block: A troubled new jet fighter, expensive plans to modernize the nation's nuclear arsenal and perhaps some of the gold-plated benefits now guaranteed to military retirees.

"I think programs that can't meet schedule, that can't meet cost ... requirements are very much in jeopardy and will be very much under scrutiny," Mullen said.

The prospect of nearly $1 trillion in cuts unnerves military leaders, troubles lawmakers protective of the Pentagon and has touched off a scramble in the defense industry as contractors look to spare their multibillion-dollar weapons programs.

In sounding an alarm, Panetta is pressuring Democrats and Republicans to consider making concessions on their core priorities — entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security defended by Democrats, and increases in taxes resisted by Republicans — before taking a sharper knife to defense. The former Democratic congressman and budget chief in the Clinton administration delivered a clear message to leaders of both parties.

"You cannot deal with the size deficits that this country is confronting by simply cutting the discretionary side of the budget," said Panetta. "If you're going to deal with those size deficits, you've got to look at the mandatory side of the budget, which is two-thirds of the federal budget, and you also have to look at revenues as part of that answer."

Just back from a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, Mullen faced repeated questions from troops worried that their pay and benefits would be cut.

"Our men and women downrange have enough to worry about just getting the job done," Mullen said Thursday. "They shouldn't also be concerned about whether or not they will be paid to do that job, or whether or not their families will continue to get the support they need during long absences."

Sitting side-by-side with Panetta at the Pentagon, Mullen pointed out that the military has a crowded must-do list: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, support for the NATO-led operation in Libya, disaster relief missions in Haiti and Japan and defense of national interests.

Clearly reflecting the frustration building around the Pentagon and across the military, the defense leaders made it clear that while they will find the nearly $400 billion in initial savings required, that's where they draw the line. Military leaders think they are already carrying their fair share of the cost-cutting burden while still being asked to respond to terrorist threats, nuclear-armed rogue nations and other conflicts.

Defense budgets, not including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have jumped since 9/11, from just over $370 billion in the late 1990s to around $550 billion today. In the political clamor to slash the deficit, Obama this past spring called for $400 billion in defense cuts over 12 years and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates launched a comprehensive review of the military's strategy and capabilities.

That review could be completed by the end of the summer.

Setting the agenda now is the debt-limit deal to cut more than $2 trillion from federal spending over a decade.

In the initial phase, all security spending — money for defense, homeland security, veterans, foreign aid and intelligence — would be cut from the current level of $687 billion this year to $683 billion in next year's budget. Defense would take a share of that $4 billion reduction.

The next step is the unknown that Panetta fears: A 12-member, House-Senate committee must propose up to $1.5 trillion more in government-wide cuts over a decade and do so by Nov. 23. If the committee deadlocks or if Congress rejects its recommendations, the Obama administration would be required to impose automatic, across-the-board spending cuts of up to $1.2 trillion, with half coming from defense.

The budget proposals provide no specifics, but several programs are often mentioned as possible targets.

Ten years in, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a multibillion-dollar aircraft, has been plagued by cost overruns and delays. The cost of buying more than 2,400 of the next-generation aircraft for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps has jumped from $233 billion to $385 billion. Recent estimates say the entire program could exceed $1 trillion over 50 years.

Another potential target is the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), a multinational missile defense program with Italy and Germany. The Pentagon said earlier this year it would not implement the program, though research will continue for another two years at a cost of more than $800 million. Among the other targets are the numbers of ships and submarines the Pentagon buys.

One of the most costly programs for the Defense Department is its health care coverage for some 10 million active duty personnel, retirees, reservists and their families. The cost has jumped from $19 billion in 2001 to $53 billion.

Obama proposed increasing the fees for working-age retirees in the decades-old health program, known as TRICARE, but has encountered resistance from lawmakers and various associations for military retirees.

Debt-limit negotiators looked at changes in the program for possible savings, and the special bipartisan committee is likely to consider the program in its calculations.

Mullen noted that while the Army and Marine Corp have grown over the past 10 years, those numbers will be reduced in the next several years. The Army already is on pace to drop from 570,000 to about 520,000, and the Marines will cut about 15,000 from their current total of about 202,000.

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SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) — As a prophet of his polygamist sect, Warren Jeffs documented everything he did, keeping track of every marriage he performed, every young woman he wed, and even recording his intimate moments.

It was those meticulous records — including an audiotape of what prosecutors said was him sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl he'd taken as a bride — that helped authorities secure two child sex assault convictions against the 55-year-old ecclesiastical head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Now, prosecutors hope those same records will help bring a life prison sentence to a man regarded by his followers as God's spokesman on Earth. The West Texas jurors who convicted Jeffs will begin determining his appropriate punishment on Friday, and they'll hear evidence about scores of alleged crimes not mentioned during his trial.

For starters, Jeffs had 78 wives in addition to his legal spouse, and 24 of them were under age 17, said Eric Nichols, lead prosecutor for the Texas Attorney General's office, which is handling the case. Nichols also said he would show that Jeffs committed six other sexual assaults and either witnessed or performed more than 500 polygamist marriages, as well as 67 other sect marriages involving underage girls.

Jeffs spent years evading arrest, crisscrossing the country as a fugitive who eventually made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list before his capture in 2006. He excommunicated 60 church members he saw as a threat to his leadership, breaking up 300 families while stripping them of property and "reassigning" wives and children, Nichols said.

All of that is separate from the criminal charges on which he was convicted Thursday. Jurors deliberated for 3½ hours before finding Jeffs guilty of sexually assaulting two girls, ages 12 and 15, whom he'd wed during what his sect considers "spiritual marriages."

Prosecutors used DNA evidence to show Jeffs fathered a child with the older victim and played an audio recording of what they said was him sexually assaulting the younger girl. They played other tapes in which Jeffs was heard instructing as many as a dozen of his young wives on how to please him sexually — and thus, he told them, please God.

"You might have asked yourselves ... a lot of people may ask, why would someone record sex?" Nichols told jurors during closing arguments. "This individual considers himself to be the prophet. Everything he did, hour after hour, he was required to keep a record of that."

Jeffs' sect has more than 10,000 members nationwide who believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven.

Both victims entered into unions with Jeffs willingly, and did not participate in the trial against him. But Nichols said in his closing statement that the crimes were so egregious that under Texas law, convictions did not require the victim to bring charges.

Jeffs burned through seven lawyers in six months, then insisted on representing himself after jury selection last week — turning a high-profile case into what felt at times like a surreal religious revival.

He quoted God as threatening all involved with a Biblical scourge if the case wasn't halted immediately, then later filed an unsuccessful motion to remove state District Judge Barbara Walther from the case, saying the Lord visited him in his jail cell and said Walther was afflicted from a crippling disease that would soon kill her. The judge suffered polio as a child and walks with a limp.

Jeffs stood almost completely mute during his closing argument, staring at the floor for all but a few seconds of the half hour he was allotted. He finally turned and looked toward prosecutors and the jury, most of whom avoided direct eye contact with him. "I am at peace" he mumbled, then said no more. The only noise in the courtroom was the creaking of wooden benches brimming with spectators.

Jeffs had claimed his religious rights were being trampled after police raided his sect's remote Texas compound, called Yearning For Zion, in April 2008. They found women wearing frontier-style dresses and hairdos from the 19th century and saw underage girls who were clearly pregnant.

The call to an abuse hotline that spurred the raid turned out to be a hoax, and more than 400 children who had been placed in protective custody were eventually returned to their families. But authorities found a small mountain of documents, including hundreds and hundreds of pages of Jeffs' personal journals, which he called his "Priesthood record."

That helped bring sexual assault and bigamy charges against a dozen men from the sect. All seven of those who were prosecuted before Jeffs were convicted, and they received prison sentences of between six and 75 years.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday accused the Syrian government of killing more than 2,000 of its own citizens during its ongoing brutal crackdown against opposition protesters as the Obama administration moved to further isolate President Bashar Assad and his inner circle.

The administration is unhappy with Assad's actions in trying to quell the five-month-old uprising.

"We think, to date, the government is responsible for the deaths of more than 2,000 people of all ages," Clinton said, repeating the administration's position that "Assad has lost his legitimacy to govern the Syrian people."

She said the U.S. would "continue to support the Syrians themselves in their efforts to begin a peaceful and orderly transition to democracy" and renewed calls for the international community to unify behind steps to isolate Assad and his regime.

Clinton's comments, made at a news conference with visiting Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, came just hours after White House press secretary Jay Carney said Assad is "on his way out" and the administration hit a prominent pro-regime businessman and his firm with sanctions.

"The actions that he has taken ... are reprehensible and appalling," Carney told reporters. "And we believe that country will be better off without him."

Earlier, the Treasury Department announced that it had slapped sanctions on Assad family confidante Muhammad Hamsho and his firm, Hamsho International Group, that freeze any assets they may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar Americans from doing business with them.

The penalties did not target Syria's energy sector, something administration officials had repeatedly suggested was coming. Officials said those sanctions, which are expected to hit state-owned and state-affiliated oil and gas companies that are a leading revenue source for the government, are still in the works and could be unveiled in coming days.

Treasury Undersecretary David S. Cohen said Hamsho, who is also a member of Syria's parliament, had become wealthy through his connections to Assad and his brother, Mahir, and other members of the regime who have ordered the crackdown on the five-month-old uprising.

"Muhammad Hamsho earned his fortune through his connections to regime insiders, and during the current unrest, he has cast his lot with Bashar al-Asad, Mahir al-Asad and others responsible for the Syrian government's violence and intimidation against the Syrian people," Cohen said. "The sanctions we are applying today to Hamsho and his company are the direct consequence of his actions."

Hamsho's holding company has about 20 subsidiaries ranging from construction, civil engineering, telecommunications and hotels to carpets sales, horse trading and ice cream production.

In a statement, Treasury took several other shots at Hamsho, saying his commercial success was due to his regime connections "rather than his business acumen" and that he had "paid large sums of money to secure his seat" in parliament.

In May, the administration imposed sanctions on Assad and several senior Syrian officials to protest the deadly violence being used to quell demonstrations. But calls for additional steps have been growing since Sunday when the regime ordered troops into the restive city of Hama, where they have shelled buildings and shot indiscriminately at residents.

Rights groups say more than 100 people have been killed since the siege of Hama started on the eve of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The European Union imposed additional sanctions on Syria this week and on Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council condemned the violence. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have been demanding that the administration broaden its approach by slapping penalties on more regime members and target the energy sector.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Thursday's announcement should not be seen as a one-time-only action and that further steps are coming.

"We're looking at ways to increase both political and financial pressure on Assad, and look at ways to put a squeeze on them, on his regime if you will, to constrain their revenue and to make it harder for them to carry out these kind of assaults," he told reporters. "What's important is that we continue to build the pressure."

Toner also said U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford was leaving on Thursday to return to Damascus. Ford had been in Washington since Sunday for consultations and to testify before Congress. Some lawmakers had urged the administration to recall Ford permanently as a further show of displeasure with the Assad regime. Italy this week recalled its ambassador and urged others to do the same. But Toner said the administration believes Ford should return.

"It's very important for him to get back on the ground where he can go back to his vital work to outreach to the Syrian opposition, as well as continue to press our concerns with the Syrian government," he said.

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