WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton on Friday defended her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for defending her on the campaign trail in Iowa.

With Hillary Clinton's campaign having hit a rough patch lately based on a rocky performance at a October 30 debate with her rivals, the Clinton camp sent Bill Clinton out to Iowa to try to rally support for her in the early voting state.

The former president took on the task with gusto. In one speech, he cited a survey by a Canadian pollster that said many people in France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Canada preferred Hillary Clinton to be the next U.S. president.

"In every country, without question, if you take out the undecided, she had the absolute majority," Clinton said, according to Politico.com. "They like her, they respect her."

The statement was quickly pounced on by the Republican National Committee, which said it sounded similar to a comment in 2004 by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who said some foreign leaders wanted him to defeat George W. Bush.

"It is deja vu all over again," said RNC spokesman Danny Diaz. "First the Kerrys, now the Clintons."

Then Clinton defended his wife over perennial Republican criticism of her role, when she was first lady, in the failed 1993 attempt to overhaul the U.S. health care system.

"She has taken the rap for some of the problems we had with health care last time that were far more my fault than hers," said Bill.

New York Sen. Clinton was asked about her husband in a conference call with reporters on Friday arranged to announce that she had received the endorsement of Ohio Gov. Ted Stickland, an important development in a critical battleground state in the November 2008 election.

Was she comfortable with Bill's role in the campaign? she was asked.

"Absolutely," Clinton said. "I am so happy to have his help in this campaign. He obviously counsels and advises me every single day."

THRILLED BY HIS SUPPORT

"I'm thrilled to have his support and look forward to being able to call at him in every capacity I can imagine," she said.

Arianna Huffington, editor of the liberal blog, Huffingtonpost.com, was not impressed by the former president's efforts recently.

"He's becoming a liability," she told MSNBC. "Send him to Africa."

Iowa on January 3 holds the first of the state-by-state battles to choose the Democratic and Republican candidates who will vie for the U.S. presidential election on November 4, 2008.

A win in Iowa can generate momentum for the next state contest in New Hampshire, and beyond, and Clinton is locked in a three-way battle with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

(Additional reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — Dr. James B. Peake, a retired Army lieutenant general who is a thoracic surgeon, was selected by President Bush today to head the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“He will be the first physician and the first general to serve as secretary,” Mr. Bush said at the White House with Dr. Peake beside him. Dr. Peake, a member of the West Point class of 1966 who served in Vietnam as an infantry officer, was awarded a Silver Star, Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

“As a medical officer and combat vet who was wounded in action, Dr. Peake understands the view from both sides of the hospital bed, the doctor’s and the patient’s,” the president said, saying he was confident that, once confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Peake “will insist on the highest level of care for every American veteran.”

Dr. Peake spend 40 years in Army medicine. “Fundamentally, I’m a soldier,” he said. “I’ve been taking care of soldiers essentially all of my adult life.” He said it was “a high honor indeed” to be asked to do so now.

Dr. Peake entered Cornell University Medical School after his Vietnam service and was awarded a medical doctorate in 1972. He was the Army’s surgeon general for four years and retired from the military in 2004. He is now the chief medical director and chief operating officer at QTC Management, which provides disability-examination testing and other medical services.

If confirmed, Dr. Peake would succeed Jim Nicholson, another Vietnam veteran, who resigned effective Oct. 1. The department’s deputy secretary, Gordon H. Mansfield, has been serving as acting secretary. The Department of Veterans Affairs is an enormous bureaucracy of nearly a quarter-million people. It is in charge of hundreds of medical centers, clinics, nursing homes, benefits offices and national cemeteries.

The agency has had its troubles in recent months, including criticism over the care of wounded veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2006, the computer data on millions of veterans was potentially compromised by the theft of a laptop computer from the home of a department employee. The department spent millions of dollars trying to repair the damage from the breach.

Democrats have accused the president of being too slow to name a permanent replacement for Mr. Nicholson.

“With the military and V.A. increasingly stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is long past time that the President put in place a new Secretary of Veterans Affairs,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said today. “I look forward to the Veterans Affairs Committee carefully reviewing General Peake’s nomination.”

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The decline in mortality seen in the U.S. population over the past four decades has not extended to patients with rheumatoid arthritis, despite innovations in rheumatoid arthritis treatment, according to a report in the current issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism.

Rheumatoid arthritis is known to be associated with excess mortality, the authors explain, but whether survival in rheumatoid arthritis patients has improved over time has been unclear.

Dr. Sherine E. Gabriel and colleagues from the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota evaluated trends in mortality in a population-based group of patients in whom rheumatoid arthritis was first diagnosed between 1955 and 2000 and who were followed until 2007. They compared these data with the expected mortality in the general population of individuals of the same age and sex.

Overall mortality among rheumatoid arthritis patients was 35 percent higher than that of the general population, the authors report, and excess mortality was even more evident among female rheumatoid arthritis patients (49 percent higher mortality) than among male rheumatoid arthritis patients (12 percent).

Throughout the five time periods examined, the mortality remained relatively constant for both female rheumatoid arthritis patients (2.4 per 100 people per year) and male patients (2.5 per 100 people per year).

In contrast, over the same period, the mortality in the general population declined from 1.0 deaths per 100 women and 1.2 per 100 men in 1965, to 0.2 deaths per 100 women and 0.3 per 100 men in 2000.

"Our findings indicate that rheumatoid arthritis patients have not experienced the same improvements in survival as the general population, and therefore the mortality gap between rheumatoid arthritis patients and individuals without rheumatoid arthritis has widened," the authors maintain.

"Although the reasons for the widening mortality gap are unclear, cardiovascular deaths constitute at least half of the deaths in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, and it is possible that the cardiovascular interventions that improved life expectancy in the general population may not have had the same beneficial effects in patients with rheumatoid arthritis," the researchers speculate.

There is an "urgent need" to fully understand the reasons for and implications of this trend so that appropriate strategies can be taken to close "the widening mortality gap that increasingly separates rheumatoid arthritis patients from the rest of the general population," Gabriel and colleagues conclude.

SOURCE: Arthritis & Rheumatism, November 2007.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's problems with the International Space Station's solar power wings multiplied on Tuesday after one panel ripped, threatening the structural integrity of the orbital outpost.

The 2.5-foot (75-cm) tear reduced the wings' energy output by just a fraction but until NASA can anchor the panels, managers will not proceed with plans to launch Europe's long-delayed Columbus laboratory on December 6, space station program manager Mike Suffredini said.

The problem surfaced at the end of an otherwise successful spacewalk by two shuttle Discovery astronauts to move a pair of the station's solar wing panels to the outermost end of the station's frame.

To help stabilize the station, NASA locked the wings in place to prevent them from automatically tracking the sun for energy.

"I don't want to do any more damage to the array than what's already been done," Suffredini told reporters.

Managers previously deactivated automated operation of a second wing rotator after astronauts discovered metal shavings inside the joint.

Engineers were assessing which side of the station's troubled power system to attack first. NASA already canceled plans for a spacewalk to test a shuttle heat shield repair technique so astronauts could instead inspect the joint where metal shavings were found on Sunday.

That work might now be postponed in favor of fixing the tear in one of the left-side solar panels.

"It's not a situation where anybody is particularly panicked," said Suffredini, adding that the fix might not be pretty.

"All we need is power. It doesn't have to look good," he said.

SCHEDULE SQUEEZE

Video relayed from television cameras on the space station and shuttle Discovery showed a flap of the golden wing folded up and the panel's lower frame buckling.

Station commander Peggy Whitson said the damage likely occurred as the folded-up blanket was being pulled out of its storage box.

"We didn't abort because we didn't see the tear," Whitson radioed to ground controllers, explaining that the view was obstructed by sun glint and the station's robot arm.

"Hey, no worries Peggy," replied astronaut Kevin Ford from Mission Control in Houston. "We had good video, too, and we were keeping our eye on it, so that's just the way it goes."

NASA already faced a tight deadline to launch shuttle Atlantis between December 6 and 13 when sun angles were acceptable for the shuttle to berth at the orbital outpost. When managers decided to inspect the solar array joint during Thursday's spacewalk they added a day to what previously had been a 10-day visit at the station.

That left NASA only five days in December for launching Columbus. And since station crew members must complete a lengthy list of tasks after Discovery leaves but before the next ship arrives, the new problem squeezes the schedule for Columbus' flight even more.

"I wouldn't want to do anything, relative to (Columbus' launch) until we sort this out further," Suffredini said.

NASA is trying to finish the space station, which is a project of 15 nations, by 2010 when the space shuttle fleet is scheduled for retirement.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The AIDS virus invaded the United States in about 1969 from Haiti, carried most likely by a single infected immigrant who set the stage for it to sweep the world in a tragic epidemic, scientists said on Monday.

Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona evolutionary biologist, said the 1969 U.S. entry date is earlier than some experts had believed.

The timeline laid out in the study led by Worobey indicates that HIV infections were occurring in the United States for roughly 12 years before AIDS was first recognized by scientists as a disease in 1981. Many people had died by that point.

"It is somehow chilling to know it was probably circulating for so long under our noses," Worobey said in a telephone interview.

The researchers conducted a genetic analysis of stored blood samples from early AIDS patients to determine when the human immunodeficiency virus first entered the United States.

They found that HIV was brought to Haiti by an infected person from central Africa in about 1966, which matches earlier estimates, and then came to the United States in about 1969.

The researchers think an unknown single infected Haitian immigrant arrived in a large city like Miami or New York, and the virus circulated for years -- first in the U.S. population and then to other nations.

It can take several years after infection for a person to develop AIDS, a disease that ravages the immune system.

DISEASE MULTIPLIES

"That one infection would have become two, and then it doubles again and the two becomes four," Worobey said. "So you have a period -- probably a fair number of years -- where you're dealing with probably fewer than a hundred people who are infected.

"And then, as with epidemic expansion, at some point the hundred becomes 200, you start getting into thousands, tens of thousands. And then quite rapidly you can be up into the hundreds of thousands of infections that were probably already there before AIDS was recognized in the early 1980s."

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The path the virus traveled as it jumped from nation to nation has long been debated by scientists.

The University of Miami's Dr. Arthur Pitchenik, a co-author of the study, had seen Haitian immigrants in Miami as early as 1979 with a mystery illness that turned out to be AIDS. He knew the government long had stored some of their blood samples.

The researchers analyzed samples from five of these Haitian immigrants dating from 1982 and 1983. They also looked at genetic data from 117 more early AIDS patients from around the world.

This genetic analysis allowed the scientists to calibrate the molecular clock of the strain of HIV that has spread most widely, and calculated when it arrived first in Haiti from Africa and then in the United States.

The researchers virtually ruled out the possibility that HIV had come directly to the United States from Africa, setting a 99.8 percent probability that Haiti was the steppingstone.

"I think that it gives us more clear insight into the history of it (the AIDS epidemic) and what path the virus took -- and hard objective evidence, not just armchair thinking," Pitchenik said in a telephone interview.

Studies suggest the virus first entered the human population in about 1930 in central Africa, probably when people slaughtered infected chimpanzees for meat. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people and about 40 million others are infected with HIV.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A boy playing with matches has confessed to starting a wildfire that destroyed 63 structures near Los Angeles, officials said on Tuesday.

The unidentified youngster, believed to be a preteen, was questioned by Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department investigators on October 22, a day after the Buckweed fire started rampaging across 38,000 acres in the Santa Clarita area, 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.

The boy "admitted that he had been playing with matches," said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore.

It was initially believed that downed power lines had started the fire.

The boy was sent home after confessing, and the District Attorney's office will consider whether to press charges.

The Buckweed fire was one of about two-dozen conflagrations that ravaged southern California last week, destroying 2,300 buildings, according to the California Office of Emergency Services. The fires have been responsible for 12 deaths and 78 injuries.

Arson is being blamed for a blaze that has destroyed 15 homes in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, and a reward of $250,000 has been offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever started the fire.

SIRNAK, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkish Cobra helicopters pounded Kurdish rebel positions near the Iraqi border on Tuesday and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan reaffirmed his readiness to send troops over the frontier despite U.S. opposition.

Plumes of smoke could be seen rising from the mountains in Sirnak province after the helicopters flew over rebel positions, witnesses said. A further round of bombing occurred later in the afternoon.

A convoy of up to 40 army vehicles headed east towards the border in brilliant sunshine. Troops scoured the hillsides for landmines, a favored weapon of the guerrillas.

Three Turkish soldiers have been killed in the past 24 hours in the border area. A fourth died on Monday in Tunceli province hundreds of kilometers to the north in a landmine explosion.

Turkey has massed up to 100,000 troops, backed by tanks, artillery, warplanes and combat helicopters along the Iraqi border in preparation for a possible cross-border incursion into northern Iraq where 3,000 rebels are believed to be hiding.

"Turkey has to take military action against terrorism. Our security forces are continuing their operations without interruption," Erdogan told members of his ruling centre-right AK Party in parliament in Ankara.

"We are at the stage of making a decision and we will make the decision on our own ... We are employing all our resources to get results in the shortest time," he said.

The United States and Iraq have urged Turkey to avoid a major military incursion, fearing this would destabilize the wider region. Washington and Baghdad have shown no appetite for tackling the PKK in Iraq despite repeated appeals from Ankara.

U.S.-TURKISH EFFORTS

The White House said President George W. Bush will discuss "joint efforts to counter the PKK" when he meets Erdogan in Washington next week.

"We have a joint desire, a joint need to make sure that the PKK is eradicated, that they are stopped," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Erdogan said he would tell Bush Turkey expected "urgent, concrete steps" from the United States against the PKK. He would also seek an explanation of why PKK rebels are using U.S.-made weapons in their fight with Turkish forces.

Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani told Tuesday's Milliyet newspaper he wanted the PKK to lay down its weapons but he also criticized Turkey for refusing to discuss the issue directly with his autonomous Kurdish administration in northern Iraq.

"Barzani's attitude is clear. He is sheltering a terrorist organization in that region. That is what is happening and that is against international law," Erdogan later told reporters at a reception at the presidential palace in Ankara.

President Abdullah Gul added: "Barzani has to choose one side."

Ankara insists on speaking only with the central government in Baghdad and suspects Barzani of planning an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq. It fears this could stoke separatism among Turkey's own large Kurdish population.

"We are not Turkey's enemy. We extend the hand of friendship but we cannot accept persecution," Barzani told a news conference in his capital Arbil, broadcast live on Turkish TV.

"It is our natural right to defend ourselves," he added in comments dubbed into Turkish, reiterating previous statements that Iraqi Kurdish fighters would fight if Turkey invaded.

Turkey's cabinet is due to approve economic sanctions on Wednesday against groups deemed to be providing support to the PKK, a move widely viewed as targeting Barzani's administration.

The measures could include restricting border traffic and reducing electricity exports to northern Iraq.

Turkey's civil aviation authority has denied Istanbul-based charter airline Tarhan Tower permission to fly two of its three weekly flights to Arbil this week, airline officials told Reuters on Tuesday, in an apparent sign of new restrictions.

Ankara blames the PKK for the deaths of more than 30,000 people since the group launched its armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey in 1984. The United States and the European Union, like Turkey, brand the PKK as a terrorist group.

U.S., Turkish and Iraqi officials will make fresh diplomatic efforts to avert a major military operation when they attend a conference of Iraq's neighbors in Istanbul this weekend.

(Additional reporting by Paul de Bendern and Evren Mesci in Ankara and Tabassum Zakaria and Matt Spetalnick in Washington)