The death penalty is the ultimate punishment, often shrouded in secrecy. In 2007, at least 1,252 people were executed in 24 countries, according to Amnesty International. Nearly 90 percent of these recorded executions -- believed to be just a fraction of the true number -- were in five countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States. In 2007, three countries, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, violated international law by executing people for crimes committed when they were younger than 18, according to Amnesty. Up to 27,500 are estimated to be awaiting execution on death row around the world.

Barack Obama would like to offer John McCain a job if he becomes president, in what his allies says is an attempt to end the bitter partisan rancour that engulfed the White House race last week.

Both presidential rivals are working behind the scenes to calm the increasingly incendiary atmosphere on the campaign trail, which erupted with lurid claims about Mr Obama's links with the former terrorist Bill Ayres and a lynch mob atmosphere at McCain rallies.

Two Democratic sources with knowledge of the thinking in the Obama camp say that forming a partnership with Mr McCain would prove that Mr Obama will reach across the aisle and also help rehabilitate Mr McCain, who many Democrats believe has been pushed by hardline advisers into making increasingly desperate attacks on his rival.

By his own admission, the Republican candidate "took the gloves off" last week , unleashing adverts and soundbites attacking Mr Obama's character and judgment as polls showed him on course for a landslide election victory.

One well-connected Democrat, who spoke to Mr Obama last week, told The Sunday Telegraph: "John McCain is a good man. There's no question about it. I think we'll see Barack Obama reach out to him and say: let's work together."

WASHINGTON -- They huddled in a quiet corner at the US Airways lounge at Ronald Reagan National Airport, sipping bottomless cups of coffee as they plotted to turn America's missile defense program into a personal cash machine.

Michael Cantrell's photograph of himself with three congressmen and others at a missile testing center in Buffalo, which Congress financed despite the objections of the Pentagon.

Michael Cantrell, an engineer at the Army Space and Missile Defense Command headquarters in Huntsville, Ala., along with his deputy, Doug Ennis, had lined up millions of dollars from Congress for defense companies. Now, Mr. Cantrell decided, it was time to take a cut.

"The contractors are making a killing," Mr. Cantrell recalled thinking at the meeting, in 2000. "The lobbyists are getting their fees, and the contractors and lobbyists are writing out campaign checks to the politicians. Everybody is making money here -- except us."

Within months, Mr. Cantrell began getting personal checks from contractors and later returned to the airport with Mr. Ennis to pick up a briefcase stuffed with $75,000. The two men eventually collected more than $1.6 million in kickbacks, through 2007, prompting them to plead guilty this year to corruption charges.

Mr. Cantrell readily acknowledges concocting the crime. But what has drawn little scrutiny are his activities leading up to it. Thanks to important allies in Congress, he extracted nearly $350 million for projects the Pentagon did not want, wasting taxpayer money on what would become dead-end ventures.

TORONTO -- The seemingly benign decision to stick a Liberal Party lawn sign in her front yard has brought a new ritual to Marla Waltman Daschko's morning routine. Ms. Waltman Daschko walks around her Volkswagen Passat station wagon and peers underneath the chassis, searching for potentially deadly sabotage.

She is not alone, at least in parts of Toronto, when it comes to kneeling and peering at underbellies of cars usually seen only by mechanics. Last weekend, more than 30 Toronto residents awoke to find the brake lines on their cars severed, their telephone and cable television lines cut and political graffiti gouged into automobile paint and scrawled on their homes. The sole link among victims: a lawn sign promoting a Liberal candidate in the current federal election campaign.

The sabotage occurred in two leafy, upper-middle-class residential neighborhoods, where raccoons raiding garbage pails are normally a bigger concern than crime. The episodes have provoked bafflement, anger and defiance. They have also brought a tinge of nastiness to an election campaign short on drama.

Ms. Waltman Daschko briefly removed her lawn sign on Oct. 4 at the suggestion of the police after the first attacks, which occurred overnight on Oct. 3. But she put it back up before going to bed, she said, partly after considering the history of her Jewish ancestors.

"Perhaps because it's the High Holidays but I thought of my parents and my grandparents and what they went through to assert their faith," she said. "It's shocking that in Canada, in Toronto and in the 21st century that this could happen when all we're doing is supporting a very mainstream political party."

In 2004, Democrats watched as any chance of defeating President Bush slipped away in a wave of Republican turnout that exceeded even the goal-beating numbers that their own side had produced.

Four years later, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign intends to avoid a repeat by building an organization modeled in part on what Karl Rove used to engineer Bush's victory: a heavy reliance on local volunteers to pitch to their own neighbors, micro-targeting techniques to identify persuadable independents and Republicans using consumer data, and a focus on exurban and rural areas.

But in scale and ambition, the Obama organization goes beyond even what Rove built. The campaign has used its record-breaking fundraising to open more than 700 offices in more than a dozen battleground states, pay several thousand organizers and manage tens of thousands more volunteers.

In many states, the Democratic candidate is hewing more closely to the Rove organizational model than is rival Sen. John McCain, whose emphasis on ground operations has been less intensive and clinical than that of his Republican predecessor.

"They've invested in a civic infrastructure on a scale that has never happened," said Marshall Ganz, a labor organizer who worked with César Chávez's farmworker movement and has led training sessions for Obama staff members and volunteers. "It's been an investment in the development of thousands of young people equipped with the skills and leadership ability to mobilize people and in the development of leadership at the local level. It's profound."